Matheus Donangelo

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Validating an M&A Platform’s Value

In 2022, the innovation and M&A team of a large company approached weme, a consulting firm where I worked, to validate a promising idea: build a platform that would help startups and small and medium-sized businesses sell their companies or find investors.

The goal was to develop a reliable marketplace that connects businesses and investors, using the data collected over the years on a large scale, facilitating acquisitions and sales.

My role

Product Designer.

Responsabilities

Define the design process.

User interviews.

Prototyping.

Facilitating workshops.

Consolidating results.

Year

Q2 2022

Team

Luiza Daher, Design Manager.

Matheus Donangelo, Product Designer.

Project roadmap

01 Main Goals

  1. 1Get a deep understanding of the marketplace audiences, including investors and different types of companies.
  2. 2Develop a action plan based on the initial hypothesis.

Our main challange

How can we prototype and test the value proposition of a platform focused on buying and selling companies and startups, generating value for the business and providing confidence to investors?

02 Design Process

Benchmark

For the project, it was crucial to understand the problem space we were entering. We analyzed over 10 market players to understand the buying and investment journeys, pricing, and communication with the user on platforms like Captable, Negócios Brasil, Gust, and so on.

Building a solid test

Using the client's materials, aligning hypotheses, and understanding the market scenario, we built a hypothetical, integrated, and ideal user journey. This allowed us to identify which concepts we could prototype and which questions we would like to clarify in the interviews.

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03 Final Results

Main results

  • We invalidated the initial hypothesis to build a marketplace that would address startups, companies, and investors.
  • We obtained more than 30 insights throughout 15 qualitative and semi-structured interviews, involving 4 startups, 3 small businesses, and 8 VCs.
  • We generated a detailed risk analysis, highlighting the evidence that led to the platform's invalidation and identifying opportunities to improve the user relationship.
  • We developed a roadmap for the company to refine new hypotheses.

Insight generation

For insight generation, we follow the standard affinity clustering method. After clustering, we formulate the insights and insert them into macro-themes, linking them to users and initial hypotheses.

04 Key Learnings

  1. 1

    Understanding the complexity in validating a marketplace

    Building a marketplace requires a precise alignment between supply and demand, in order to generate value for both sides simultaneously. During the interviews, we noticed that this synchrony could generate conflicting values for both sides.

  2. 2

    The network power to enable interviews

    Throughout the project, we faced difficulties in finding the right users in a short period of time. We were able to complete the project on time thanks to the power of our network of contacts, which mainly connected us with investors.

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