Business goals

Phase 1

‍Prove product-market fit in Thailand to unlock revenue stream in Thailand market

Phase 2

‍Expand Zaapi beyond Thailand into Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia

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User personas

Customer service manager (main persona)

• Role & Responsibilities: Manage chats, team and satisfy customers
• Goals:
  
  • Never miss a customer chat
  • Keep SLAs up-to-standard
  • Automate routine relies and customer service tasks to free up my team

Marketing manager

• Role & Responsibilities: Set ads, broadcast, setup channels and marketing automations, and use data to set ads

Business owner

• Role & Responsibilities: Oversee business overview and overall customer experience

Chat agent

• Role & Responsibilities: Handle customer inquiries across all integrated channels–providing product information, updating stock, order status, resolving issues, and handling customer's frustrations.

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User pain points

Phase 1

• As an online seller, I have many channels connecting with my customers and I have many marketplace stores, so that in a day my customer contacts me from many places, its a pain to check each platforms and it is easily to miss those chats.
• As a cs manager/online seller, I cannot afford to let the customer chats missed as my store(s) will get penalized by the ecommerce platforms if I dont meet their SLAs.
• Cannot measure customer service team success. Don’t know how impactful chat agents perform. However, as a cs manager, I need to incentive them fairly and manage the workload of the team.
  
  • Opportunity: There is no centralized analytic tools. It is measurable from the native platforms and the performance are not measured the same way.
• As an chat agent, I need to know about the customer orders, cheer up products, provide product information that are all over places and not organized, sometimes I cannot find the info and it takes time to find the all informations in order to answer customer enquiries accurately and with good service quality.

Phase 2 (opportunities)

• We don’t have any users yet but based on the market research some countries in SEA use the same and have some overlaps in chat channels and marketplaces platforms like Singapore, Philipines, Malaysia, etc. We have all the channels they use plus we are about the have WhatsApp integration in the product and it will be a strong value proposition that we have all channels you need as an online sellers in those countries TH and SEA.
• The international market in this unified chat platforms are still fragmented, that there is no market leader that we can have a market share

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Success metrics

Phase 1

Prove product market fit by increase in ARR and MRR, retention rate, daily active users and number of messages sent within Zaapi

Phase 2

• Capture new market proven by new paying international customers from SEA (SG, PH & MY)
• Increase in new subscribers after website and brand refresh

Design process

Research methodologies

• Surveys
• User interviews (online and on-site)
• User journey mapping
• Fake door mockups
• User insights from sales team (subscribers and churn reasons)
• Analytics deep-dive (behavioral analytics - Hotjar, data analytics - Amptitude and User impersonation)
• Competitor analysis

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Key insights

• Fragmented channels lead to missed messages: Sellers juggling WhatsApp, Facebook/Instagram DMs, marketplace inboxes, etc., routinely drop chats simply by switching apps—creating frustrated customers and lost revenue.
• SLA compliance is non-negotiable: CS managers live in fear of platform penalties. Without real-time SLA visibility and automated alerts, even one missed message can hurt store ratings and incur fines.
• Performance is invisible (and un-rewarded): When each channel reports stats differently, managers can’t fairly measure or incentivize their agents. A single analytics dashboard with normalized KPIs is essential to drive team accountability.
• Context is scattered, slowing down agents: Having to hunt across order-management, product catalogs, and loyalty systems wastes agents’ time (and makes them guess). Embedding a customer-360 view directly into the chat cuts resolution time and boosts service quality.
• The users are easily to churn out if we don’t have sticky features to stick them to our platforms

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Feature prioritization

Phase 1: Product Market Fit

Capture all most used integrations for online sellers in Thailand

Before have only FB/IG/LINE/Shopee/Laz. Integrate with Tiktok shop (TH) and WhatsApp (international)

Build strong core chat functionalities

• Easy to update customer info, Global search, support message types
• Agent Collaboration & Routing: Internal tagging (mention) and multiple notes, auto, manual and bulk chat assignments

Build sticky functionalities

• Smart Automation & Bots: Rule-based
• AI Agentic chatbot
• Analytics & report

Phase 2: Expand regionally

Website and branding revamp

Wireframes & Validation

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Interfaces

Chat Interfaces

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Analytics Dashboard

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Automations

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AI Agent

Updating the send button from icon-only to an outlined icon + label drove a 200% jump in AI feature clicks in a single day.

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Mobile App

From local looking app, big and slow to international vibe, lite app

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Website revamp and brand refresh

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Handover to developers

Make sure we have a clear idea of these questions:

• Why are we building this feature?
• Who are the users of this feature?
• What are the flows and use cases?
• How are we building it? (discuss scope, priotirization, limitation and implementation)

Working at a startup has never been this exciting! Building something from scratch with our own hands and diving into the work is what makes the journey so rewarding. Even with our diverse cultural backgrounds, we share the same goal—moving quickly, collaborating as a tight-knit team, and creating something truly impactful.

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What I learned

Adopt a “Just Do It!” mindset

This approach is the secret sauce for staying resilient and thriving in a fast-paced startup environment.

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Empathy is key

Everyone is juggling responsibilities. Stay focused, do your best, and remember that not everyone will always agree with you—and that’s okay.

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Leverage AI

With limited resources, AI has been a game-changer, improving productivity and outcomes faster than I could’ve imagined. It’s one reason I’ve been able to thrive as a solo designer in the company!

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Take Ownership

Responsibility is the foundation for growth. Blame less, do more, and focus on what’s within your control. When you take ownership, you feel more productive and empowered, letting go of what you can’t control.

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