NextPay is a Y-combinator funded fintech platform that is based in the Philippines
To increase the overall value of NextPay as a platform that provides all-in one banking solution to MSMEs in the Philippines, a plan to include a virtual debit card offering was being heavily considered.
To add, no Philippine entity as of date (Feb 5, 2022) is offering a virtual card from a B2B perspective, so there is ample opportunity to explore.
After having found out that offering a full scale virtual debit card entails a significant sum of money (to the tune of at least $100,000), partnering with third parties for integration capabilities, learning the ins and outs of necessary legal compliance, and development resource allocation, it seemed that the risk was too high to launch a product that has yet to be validated.
To de-risk offering a product that may not even be what our users would want, I steered the initial direction of launching a full scale virtual card and conducted a painted door experiment instead.
Painted door experiment involved a lot of manual processes initially, but offered a quick and inexpensive way to validate the need for virtual debit cards.
I limited the involvement of resources for this experiment to just me taking on the roles of product manager, UI/UX and QA all-in-one and just one front end engineer. To limit exposure, and prevent running into compliance issues, we limited the test experiment to just within the ecosystem and conducted the actual experiment of card issuing to a smaller sub-set of users.
Under the hood, we were not really offering our own virtual debit cards, but was utilizing our own subscribed virtual debit card from a third party (from SG) and issuing cards under our own account to all those that are part of the product experiment.
Within 5 months of running the product experiment, we were able to garner a total of $100,000 GTV (gross transaction value) from only a subset of 4-5 users while saving the company at least 2-3 months worth of development time, and avoiding fees up to $100,000 upfront.
Total number of people who wanted to participate in the product experiment was around n=75 users before taking off the banner (that features the form that would indicate interest to participate).