About Yooga Technology
Yooga is a Brazilian foodtech that offers a complete management platform for bars, restaurants, and foodservice businesses. Focused on micro and small entrepreneurs, Yooga simplifies operations like sales, inventory, delivery, finances, and customer service — all in one accessible and easy-to-use system.
In October 2023, Yooga raised $2.3 million in a seed round led by SaaSholic, with participation from Gilgamesh Ventures, Apex Partners, and Backfuture, reaching an estimated valuation of $20 million. Source: Tech Crunch.
The challenge
Over the last three months, the COO noticed an increase in churn: from 3% to 5%. The highest churn rates were among users on the Essential plan (46%) and the Complete plan (32%), particularly those with a monthly revenue between R$30K and R$60K. Also, NPS detractors also increased. Most cancellations were happening within the first 4 months of usage.
Our main goal was to understand why users were churning early.
Task: After reviewing the quantitative data, I proposed starting with qualitative research, taking responsibility for conducting interviews, documenting user needs and pain points through personas, mapping user journeys, and creating a Service Blueprint to identify gaps. Afterwards, I would develop a prototype aimed at achieving the desired outcomes.
User Research steps 🔍
This stage involved:
- Defining the research plan with participant profile, interview script and hypothesis.
- PO had recruiting users;
- Interview and analyze data;
- Synthesizing it into a Persona Document; and presenting the results visually to the team.
Research Results:
👉 21 users wanted to cancel because they thought Yooga lacked certain features — but the platform already had them.
👉 22 users feel lost during onboarding
Action: let’s create a "What's New" page to increase upsell and Gamification in onboarding to boost retention
I led a focus group to validate our assumptions.
We gathered 6 users — 3 from the Essential plan and 3 from the Complete plan, all of whom had been with us for 4 months. The feedback was positive overall, and the gamification features stood out the most.
Results of What’s New Page:
In 3 months, upsell grew 25%, adding R$ 56.850.
Gamification: One month after the feature launch,
churn dropped from 5% to 4.5%.
Key Learnings:
Initially, the team was unfamiliar with the concept of Personas and their value to the company. To ensure research was prioritized, I presented to the product team explaining its purpose and benefits.
Storing research data in repositories like Jira or Dovetail is not enough, as the team often does not access them. A strong UX and Research culture is needed, and a first step can be UX sharing presentations and knowledge bites to engage the rest of the team.
We realized that building a new onboarding from scratch would take around 5 months, while the “What's New” page had a shorter timeline of just 2 months. So we decided to prioritize the release of the “What’s New” page with gamification first.