About Linchat

Linchat is an online platform for Chinese startups to expand teams, meet investors and build up networks.
Starting in winter 2017 at Shenzhen, Linchat has built close relationships with Chinese universities and powerful investor. According to the appraisement from the Shenzhen government and Sinovation Ventures, Linchat now values over 1,000,000 dollars.

Mission

I lead the research team, design team, develop team, and marketing team to build up the whole web app. For an individual user, it has networking functions such as ‘share my moment’ and ‘invite to be friends’, as well as business functions such as ‘build my resume’ and ‘apply to be co-founders’. For startups, it offers a labor market, an inner management system, funding application, and incubator service. Other functions i.e. hashtag topics, messaging system, and team-to-team collaborations are also included.

Overall, Linchat is a platform for individuals, startups, and investors to connect. It is different from Hiring agencies, investment websites or networking social media like LinkedIn not only because it’s designed for small and new business, but also because it doesn’t ‘cost’ money. Everything is paid by equities and people join not as an employee, but as a co-founder.

Design and Develop

Young, dynamic, refreshing and interactive are the four principals in design. To offer the best user experience, the research team went to 5 universities to conduct surveys that covered over 200 interviews and 1,000 questionnaires. Equipped with the data, the design group came up with 4 personas and created flowcharts and user experience maps based on the personas. I led the research team and the design team to create the first set of low-fidelity wireframes.

I adopted the Agile Software Development Model considering my teams are very talented, self-disciplined and highly-organized. Also, we don’t have a very long developing time. After 12 cycles of user testing and wireframe improvements, we finally turned the sketches into high-fidelity wireframes and started prototyping. I led meetings for design team and develop team to discuss front-end frameworks, back-end data structures, and possible interaction effect. Working with an international group consisting of talented designers and developers from U.S. and China, I tracked the progress, assigned tasks, coordinated between groups and finally produced a beta version in one month.

Current Progress

Linchat is still in development and is attracting more and more investments. In March 2018, I presented the prototype to a group of investors from Shenzhen and received 300,000 dollars’ funding offer from 2 individual investors and 2 investment agencies. After the co-founders meeting, we decided to accept the 200,000 offered by Shenzhen Government.

Now instead of expanding the user group and marketing for impacts, we are optimizing the website, developing a ‘backstage’ for startup teams to arrange tasks, track progress, generate financial reports, manage shared files, etc.

A sample prototype of ‘backstage’ 

Next Steps

Empowered by the funding, we’ll be able to devote to the mobile app development. The current website is designed only for a basic screen size- 1280px * 720px. We’re going to make it responsive — adaptive to bigger screens and smaller screens following columns and grids.

Capabilities involved

Product management, Communication, Leadership, Presentations, Marketing

Front-end development, UX research, UI/UX design, Adobe Creative Suite( AdobeXD), Prototype,