Event, Funnel & Content Management Tools
Mastermind
My Title
Lead Designer
Product Type
Web App
Industry
Event & Content Management Tools
Timeline
8 months
Tools
Project Background
After the successful launch of the Mindmint beta, the DG team quickly moved to build out a suite of tools on the platform and make it a competitor in the event planning, funnel building & learning management marketplace. A large part of this effort stemmed from a collaboration with the Tony Robbins team to make it a joint company effort. The collaboration included a webinar to announce the new software that would also be accompanied by a series of courses led by Tony Robbins.
Problem
The Mindmint software was successful at doing a few things really well—creating an event from scratch and building an agenda and to-dos for leading up to the event. However, it was missing many critical pieces for managing the more complex parts, such as building marketing pages, managing custom domains, creating email campaigns and several other key features.
Solution
We completed a series of interviews with early beta users of the Mindmint app to help determine feature enhancements and what jobs the current application was not accomplishing in order to determine feature set for the go-to-market launch of the Mastermind software. This included a robust set of features that allowed business owners to create & manage events and content and charge their clientele for it.
My Part
After brokering the contract and setting the development terms and timeline, I structured the engineering team and worked as the lead designer in charge of researching and creating all design elements and prototypes. I also collaborated closely with the Mastermind stakeholders as a thought partner during both the discovery and build phases.
Outcomes
Tony Robbins and the Mastermind team launched the software at a worldwide webinar that had an attendance of over 300k potential buyers. From that event they sold 15,000 Mastermind software licenses and grossed roughly $30m in profit in the first two weeks. The software has become a major competitor in the event management landscape and has helped facilitate hundreds of events.
Ideation
I found many issues while researching the requested feature set, so I boiled it down to the main issues that needed to be solved and worked through them one at a time. This helped be stay focused on fully completing each one without getting overwhelmed by the amount of design needs required.
Page Icons
Funnel Management System
Once the grapesJS web builder was converted to the Mastermind experience I collaborated with their team on building workflows for creating, managing and organizing the various pieces of the funnel management system. One of our biggest breakthrough ideas was the idea of a "funnel bundle." Instead of needing to create each page from scratch a user would be able to select between various pre-built bundles that included templatized pages. This decision was based on the finding that most of our users had never creating their own marketing pages before and were unaware and intimidated by the amount of work to complete and go live with their marketing pages. We still provided users with the option of creating pages from scratch if they desired.
Workflow Options
Navigation Bar
Inspector Panels
Preview
Attendee Management
During the beta stage when users where on the mindmint software, almost all of them complained about the lack of insight they had into the attendees. We didn't have any mechanisms for filtering through attendees and taking actions on that specific group. We also were missing ways of know if attendees were signed up for multiple events, how the attendees were found, and several other important insights. Working with the team I was able to create a simple yet robust CRM for working with event Attendees.
Web Builder User Stories
Prior to making decisions around how/what to build we first mapped out the jobs to be done and turned them into user stories. From this we were able to make a more informed decision around what type of page builder this should be.
Event Insights
One of the key take aways from the Mindmint beta testing was the need for validation. Most users stated they wanted insights into how their events were performing on an individual as well as an aggregate level.
Domain Management
Originally we had embedded the domain management piece inside the events themselves. However, in early testing user complained about 1) not being able to find where to management their domains, and 2) wanting the ability to assign a domain to various events. So we pulled the domain management up in hierarchy to a main tab.
Payment Processing
In the early days of Mindmint we had the ability to connect one Stripe account to one event. Most users had trouble with this task as they had never dealt with managing keys, tokens, etc. Also, it was a tedious endeavor as they would have to re-enter their payment processor information for each event. So for Mastermind we pulled the payments system up to the main tabs and built a guild for users to help them more easily connect their accounts. As a result we had a 78% increase in the number of accounts connected to an event.
Results
Although it was a challenge to complete all the features by the launch date, we were able to complete all of our goals and successfully launch the software as a companion to the Tony Robbins event building courses. To date, there have been tens of thousands of sales of the software and hundreds of events launched with the help of the Mastermind software.
Team Structure - planning for success
One of the biggest challenges we faced with the initial Mindmint project was balancing stakeholder requirements with project constraints, namely what is feasibly to build within the time & resources allotted. Oftentimes, there were communication disconnects between the our team and the DG team and on occasion expectations and production were not aligned. To solve this problem we first helped the client build an in-house tech team, starting with a PM, lead engineer and a product owner/key stakeholder that would facilitate communication to the executive team. We also ended up bringing in a second agency to augment our development efforts.
How might we...
1. Manage stakeholder expectations & priorities and successfully achieve project goals?
2. Build features for both core users (event team) and secondary users (attendees) and support both groups in their jobs to be done?
3. Create an engaging page builder that competes with market alternatives?
Discovery & Priority Setting
To kickoff the project we started by surveying/interviewing all the internal DG team users as well as a handful of external users that agreed to use the Mindmint software and provide feedback. This evaluative research consisted of interviewing the users for what the liked/didn't like, what jobs they wished the software would do and what were their highest priority items. From this we affinity mapped the requests into buckets of features and started to prioritize them based on the constraints of the project, namely hitting the eight month launch deadline within the budget and resource allocations provided. Atop the list were the following:
-
No-code, drag-n-drop website builder
-
Ability to connect payment processors (Stripe & Paypal)
-
Zapier integration to connect attendees from a CRM
-
Analytics Page
-
Connecting custom domains
Features that were moved to future iterations were:
-
Learning management features allowing experts to store, manage and sell their content in a course format
-
Automated email marketing system
-
Dedicated admin dashboard for co-building webpages
-
Ability to connect affiliates to events/courses
-
Community builder
-
Membership sites
-
Coaching programs
Core & Secondary User Personas
The Mastermind experience had the added complexity of touch points that reached the audience level, creating B2B2C interactions. This meant we had to iterate around what the workflows looked like for these channels of communication and figure out what the attendee experience would be.
Website Builder Discovery
Building and testing out a fully functional drag and drop website builder in eight months was the biggest challenge of this project. We spent lots of time doing market research and weighing different options against each other, from building it from scratch to buying out a competitor. In the end we decided that the most feasible option would be to use an open source service (Grapes JS) and wrap it in Mindmint designs and place limitations on the functionality. Out of this discovery work the primary epics were:
-
Determining 3rd party or custom solution to implement
-
Wrapping the solution in Mastermind styling
-
Creating a funnel management system
-
Designing a series of custom templates for quick landing page launches
-
Connecting payments & domains
GrapesJS Web Builder Framework
We considered several third-part options, but eventually landed on using GrapesJS as we could host it on our servers and control the experience without having to send users outside of Mastermind.
"GrapesJS is a free and open source Web Builder Framework which helps building HTML templates, faster and easily, to be delivered in sites, newsletters or mobile apps. Mainly, GrapesJS was designed to be used inside a CMS to speed up the creation of dynamic templates."
Web Builder Wrapper
To create a seamless experience of building pages in the Mastermind web app the product team worked together to determine what features to include/not include, what ancillary services were needed for managing the pages and what would be the most enjoyable experience for our specific user groups. Some of the groundwork that went into crafting these tools were:
Workshops around what features to include in our experience
Research other site builders for common workflows / elements (Webflow, Editor X, etc.)
Apply Mastermind design styling to grapesJS elements
User interviews to capture what features are the most critical to their workflows
Page Elements
Interactive Page
Artboards
Zeplin Handoff
Funnel Templates
