Case study
Groupado
A platform where anyone with a skill can teach it
Groupado lets people turn what they know into experiences others can join, online or in person. I joined the startup as they opened their first Tunis office and spent eight months building out the main product (a website and a mobile application), with the homepage designed around search visibility from the start.
Joining Groupado
I joined the startup Groupado after they opened their first office in Tunisia, with a second one following from Dubai. Over eight months we built several websites and a mobile application. The main product was Groupado itself: a website and app where users become creators, build experiences both online and local, and where other users join those experiences. The whole thing is about learning, teaching and doing activities together.
The problem
How do you create a platform for people with talent, knowledge or skills to teach others, and at the same time let users find the right activities to do, or the right subjects and skills to learn, whether that happens online or outdoors?
The solution
1 screen
Groupado gives users the ability to create and publish their own classes, workshops and learning experiences, and the tools to promote and sell them. The homepage was designed around search: rather than a generic hero, we built the slider around places and locations, weighting the keywords tied to the product and to the destinations that already ranked well and were most trusted. SEO drove the structure of the page rather than being retrofitted onto it.
Three problems a marketplace like this has to solve
The first is quality. A platform where anyone can teach is only as good as its worst class, so teachers meet criteria before they can publish: a level of experience or demonstrable expertise in the subject they intend to teach. The second is discovery. If people cannot find the workshop they would have loved, the supply might as well not exist, so discovery is a combination of search, browse-by-category and personalised recommendation rather than any one of those alone. The third is trust in the plumbing: people are handing over personal and financial information, which means encryption and fraud prevention are a design constraint, not an engineering afterthought.
The outcome
2 screens
Eight months at Groupado, from February to September 2021. I redesigned the website and worked on a second product I am not able to show.
What is here is the marketplace loop: discovering an experience, understanding what it involves, choosing between online and local, and messaging the person running it. The rest of what I did there sits under an agreement, which is the honest reason this case study is shorter than the time I spent on it.
Groupado is still going. It now runs training across Tunisia, Dubai and Côte d’Ivoire, and lists GIZ and Poulina Group among its partners.