How I managed to launch a building insurance MVP in a quarter with no dev ressources
By: Alexandre De La Morinerie
Tags: Product, Insurance, Test And Learn, Lean Startup

Launching new products is probably one of the biggest challenge that every company faces, especially when it comes to set up a fully digital product in a very old fashioned industry. The projects are most of the time very time consuming, expensive and not flexible enough to take into account the first user feedbacks that are essential in defining the famous learning curve. Which unfortunately often leads to projects failure.

However a great deal of new tools starts to rise and provides some welcome help to develop applications and websites in a very short timeframe and without requiring specific technical skills.

In 3 months, I have launched two successive versions of a digital product in a sector where paper and phone are the norm and with no dev ressources. Time for us to share our experience.

Context

Luko provides a bunch of services that aims at protecting your nest : smart meters, housing insurance, full diagnosis of the state of your place, etc. Housing insurance was launched in 2018 and is for sure the core product of Luko with more than 150,000 insureds to date. Still a lot of challenges remain: simplifying and accelerating the way claims are solved, bringing some transparency and trust in a broken relationship between the insured and his insurer, simplifying your administrative tasks and contracts. Which leads us to launch a bunch of new products, including building insurance.

🤔 Why building insurance ? This aims at tackling several issues that us and our users faced :

First of all, remove intermediaries inside the same building : brokers, agents, claims agents…

…So that we simplify and fasten the way housing claims are solved ;

Digitalize the sector and simplify the subscription and contract handling. Taken into account that no actor with such a value proposition has ever existed ;

Bring some transparency and pedagogy ;

Provide the best customer experience, the same that Luko brought as it first entered the insurance world back in 2018.

Our constraints/challenges

This came with great challenges. At Luko you need to take care of guidelines and best practices so that the launch is the success. This included :

Go step by step and follow our learning curve

Test the product market-fit

Handle Luko tech ressources carefully

Grow agile and flexible

At the cheapest price and with high standard of customer experience delivered

And most of all: accept that you can fail but learn from it and go ahead.

The back and forth of the very first moments

This led us to a complex equation that I needed to solve : how to build a fully digital product from scratch in a sector that remains in the 19th century with a tight budget?

I had several options :

Develop it by our tech team. But there was a risk of defocusing them from our core products and engage them in a long journey with no visibility on the return of investment. So I decided not to go for it ; Hire a freelance. But I had no clear visibility on the tools I would use. It is also very expensive and would have costed us a lot on the assumption that the project would last 2 months (ideation, creation, testings and first maintenance). So I decided not go for it as well. Do it by ourselves. Which was of course the cheaper solution and for sure the most interesting as it would enable us to benchmark, test the tools, learn and scale across the company. So I decided to take up the challenge.

From GoogleSheet and Typeform…

Starting from a blank page is not easy, especially when nothing identical has ever been achieved in the company.

I had no clear idea of what were the tools available on the market, nor where to start with. So I started with the basics and what I already knew. Building our product walks in 5 different steps :

Collecting data from the user (to assess the risk) Retrieving the price associated to this risk and offering users the ability to shape their contract on their own Processing the down payment and launch the subscription plan for the future cashflows Signing the contract online Creating the customer account where the user can find all his documents and access every Luko services

Collect user data

Typeform is a really useful tool to collect easily and nicely data from users. It also has a lot of options available so that your form sticks to your brand. At Luko I like asking questions in a very simple way, with pictograms as choices so that users don’t think before answering it. So Typeform came as the best opportunity, with little effort I was able to copy paste the way Luko onboards his leads.