%203.png){kind=small}
C2C Platform
mingleee is a C2C platform where people from all over the world seeking global experiences can gather and interact (mingle)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
Hiroki Yamashita, founder of mingleee, has been involved in the overseas human resources business for many years in major recruitment agencies and HR startups, and currently works as a lecturer at a business school in the United States while operating a business based overseas. Using his own experience, he ran an international exchange community on a social network during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was the predecessor to mingleee.
As the number of community participants increased, and in response to requests from community participants, the development of a C2C platform that would allow participants to share their skills and experience with each other began.
Due to the nature of the product, mingleee expected that most of its users would be foreigners, so the UI/UX of the product needed to provide a natural user experience for foreigners, especially English-speaking users. In addition, as the product scaled, it was expected that the development team would be made up of foreign designers and engineers, so it was necessary to have the tools and documents necessary for development available in English from the early stages.
SAMI Japan, which has been carrying out projects with global members since the company's founding and can provide an abundant supply of engineers from a pool of advanced IT engineers in Eastern Europe even when the development organization expanded, was asked to carry out the development.
SAMI Japan was in charge of each process, from Mr. Yamashita's platform concept, to business model verification, competitive research, UX/UI design, requirement definition, and MVP development.
For Mr. Yamashita, who has experience launching services in major companies, this is his first startup. In addition to business model, service design, and product verification, there were a lot of things to do, such as verifying user needs, building a team, and fundraising. In this phase, which is bootstrap (self-funding) for Mr. Yamashita, it was necessary to decide how much to develop as an MVP within the budget and resource constraints.
In addition, mingleee envisioned that in the future, as a C2C platform, individuals would be able to provide various services (travel guides, cooking classes, language learning, fortune telling, etc.), but since the inbound ban was lifted after the end of COVID, we decided to focus on travel guide tours and proceed with development. On the other hand, as a future C2C platform, an important verification point was whether users would cross-use services within the platform.
SAMI Japan decided to first refine the development plan based on Mr. Yamashita's capital policy, specifically the next fundraising amount. At that time, SAMI Japan's representative Makino's perspective as an investor, which he has cultivated through startup support and venture investment, was very useful in drawing the line at "this is where development and verification are necessary".
In addition, considering the shortening of the time until the development budget was concluded and fundraising, we significantly shortened the development period by utilizing existing no-code and low-code tools as much as possible and linking them with APIs.
For the development method, we proposed agile development that is resistant to requirement changes. We devised a project execution plan that also took into account the expansion of functions after release. In order to achieve a quick launch of the service, we developed an MVP that provides a single service, travel guide tour reservations, while designing the architecture with the idea of allowing multiple services to be developed afterwards.
There are already travel guide tour reservation sites around the world that can be used as references, so there are no difficulties with the UI/UX of pure tour reservations. On the other hand, as a future C2C platform, cross-use of services within the platform was an important verification point. In order to verify cross-use of services, we devised measures such as providing dummy links to other services on the UI.
The web version was released as a travel guide tour booking service after a development period of 1.5 months. We developed a system that allows registered guides to easily upload their own guide experience and tour information they propose to the database.
The process from guide and tour registration to tour booking to payment is automated on the service, and a consistent user experience at low cost has been achieved for a single service. After the service launch, we also added an affiliate program function that allows external influencers to issue discount codes for first-time tour payments that can be used on mingleee, with the aim of expanding the number of service users.
SAMI Japan is still supporting the development of minor changes such as adding search tags with user convenience in mind, and is continuing to support the next round of fundraising and expansion of the development organization.
.png)
Webflow（Frontend、CMS、Membership）
.png)
Calendly（Tour booking）
.png)
AWS（Infra for payment system integration）
.png)
Airtable（Tours and users management）
.png)
Stripe（Payment system）
We're always on the lookout for exciting projects. If you have a product that can scale globally or an idea for a new international venture, we'd love to hear from you!