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Axios Pro
Every day things are happening in the world of Deals & Dealmakers, and there’s never enough time to keep up with the company, transaction, announcement, or whatever. It’s just exhausting. With that in mind Axios launched Axios Pro with the aim to bring users tailor-made insights like never before. With Axios Pro, we are diving deeper into the industries that matters the most to our users.
Discovery
We conducted a survey to assess product market fit as well as engage with customers and understand their needs. I also conducted a competitive analysis to research major competitors and gain insight into their products, sales, and marketing tactics, and a competitors heuristic evaluation, a method used to find the usability problems in a user interface design so that they can be attended to as part of our design process.
Go deeper and check the research ↗
57%
of our readers said that the best way to make Axios more valuable would be to have a deeper industry sector coverage.
84%
when asked about the best way to receive deeper readers said Email Newsletters, same way as our current free offer.
58%
of readers would prefer receiving deeper analysis on Fintech field. Other industries mentioned: consumer and enterprise.
Testing
In partnership with the Marketing team, we created a few quick and dirty prototypes and put it in front of users. We learned enough to be able to iterate and move forward with the MVP. Here are some of our learnings:
1. It was not clear how the product differs from Axios current free newsletters offer.
2. It was not clear for the user that we had different offerings (individual vertical vs all verticals). I worked with the Growth team in order to iterate the copy and make this more clear.
3. We wanted to make sure users are getting the feeling of a premium product, and based on the answers, it felt like we were on track. When asked to describe the design, users utilized words like exclusive, elegant, clean, direct.
4. Lots of answers reinforced the clean and focused experience, and appreciation for the product and Axios in general.
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges of this project was balancing business and users' needs. A lot of stakeholders were involved in this project, and as it was expected, every single one of them had a lot of opinions on how we should drive it. We had to find a balance that meet users' needs, but also the business needs while still prioritizing the user experience. What helped a lot was the usability testing we were able to do.
MVP
We decided to reuse everything that we could and that meant newsletter templates, pre built components, etc. That way we can launch ASAP and learn as we go. Our MVP was composed by a Daily Newsletter, that a user could read through their email, but also the Axios app.
Outcome
First week (January, 2022):
3 newsletters launched
552 individual users
Over $150K revenue
By July, 2022
5 newsletters launched
2981 individual users
Over $930,947 YTD revenue
Learnings
1. Test early and often: our usability test was key to identify pain points, and iterate and improve on whilst also validating design decisions in learning what worked well for Axios’ readers.
2. Have a source of truth: this project was moving so fast, that often times engineers would end up building archived designs. My solution: have a source of truth within our Figma files. Only approved screens would go there.
3. Accessibility is priority and it always will be: this project also showed us how the Axios Design System needed an update to meet accessibility criteria and with that, build a better experience for Axios’ readers.
4. Visual Quality Assurance is key: it was proved during our VQA that our paywall experience was not accessible enough. With cross collaboration we were able to iterate and quickly improve the experience as whole.