leru

LeRu is a new startup which is trying bring Chinese tourist to Russia with its unique local resources and services.I participated in the early stage of the product definition and planning, helped to set up the team and developed a full digital platform product plan.

The challenge

LeRu has some unique tourism resources and governmental relationship in the Russian market, and it wants to dominate the China-to-Russia travel business in the next couple of years. To do so, it wants to build an online platform which sells high-quality, unique Russian tourism products.

From the business point of view, it’s always charming to have a self-hosted e-commerce platform to reach customers directly. With your own platform you have ownership of all user data, the analytics, and no additional channel costs.

However on the other hand, unless you have enough cash to burn, it is extremely difficult to get organic traffic for a new platform. The challenge for us was that, how can we — from the product point of view — provide some unique values for the potential customers to get their attention?

Creating the contents

In order to eventually sell products directly on our own platform, we decided to, surprisingly, not selling products on the platform we are building.
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There were lots of considerations behind the decision. The principles were that, it takes time to build a full e-commerce solution, and it takes cash to get initial users onto the platform.

While we were still building the backend solutions, we started to create contents for the frontend first. With the useful, unique guidance provided by a group of experts who had spent years studying or living in Russia, we believed it could immediately differentiate LeRu with any other small agencies doing Chinese-Russian travel business.

Getting traffic

We planned a few different stages for getting traffics free or paid. For the first group of customers who’ve already bought out products from 3rd-party platforms, we directed them onto our platform for things like itinerary checking, E-ticked receiving, and customer service.

It is a seamless connection between buying a service and then consume it, but from the users’ point of view, if they have to visit a new website or install a new app, it still could be too heavy and we might lose our conversions here. So we chose to build a WeChat app as our first touch point with our customers.

WeChat is a perfect choice not only because it requires lowest acquisition cost, but also we can keep the relationship with them after the sale. With the WeChat ID authorization, we can also mapping the 3rd-party customers onto our own database in the future.

Early conversions

The next step was about to test our minimized platform with these first group of users.

We extended the WeChat app to provide users related information and products during their trip. For example restaurant reservations, translation services, etc. The goal was not about selling products, but more about increasing customer satisfaction so that they would follow our subscription accounts, spread the word-of-mouth, and we can learn from this and use them as guidance for our future developments.

Shaping the full picture

While we were taking small steps of execution and adjust the plan accordingly, we also spent time developed the whole picture of the future plaftorm — a fully adaptive online travel agency platform with a clean and clear design language.