Showpiece is a platform that enables collectors to own a piece of extremely rare and expensive items. It launched with the 1c Magenta, the rarest and most expensive stamp in the world, worth £8.3m. It went on to offer a rare coin, a Banksy artwork and a 1st edition copy of Charles Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’.

After a year of operation, Showpiece had a small but engaged userbase and the parent company were keen for it to grow. 90% of our users at this point were white men above the age of 40, mostly with an interest in philately (stamps) and numismatics (coins), with disposable income.

There were a number of conflicting ideas about which direction to go. Primarily a platform for ‘collectors’, some customers and stakeholders wanted to make the platform about investing, leaning into the idea of a indexes and a marketplace. This would require getting verified by the FCA.

Some were extremely against it, wanting to double down on stamps & coins and specialise. Others wanted to open up the platform to a wide range of collecting categories.

Each idea represented a large amount of resources. So how were we to prioritise? How could we cut through the noise to find a signal for product market fit?

To test this, we went through a round of proposition testing, getting in depth feedback from several existing customers and several people from other demographics. Using the likert scale above, we showed users several ‘proposition cards’ and got feedback on what they thought about each one. The two biggest contenders that embodied the idea of ‘collecting’ and the idea of ‘investing’ are shown below.

We wanted to know if our existing customer base was simply an effect of our current assets on the platform. To test this, we showed different asset classes to each person and asked them to rank them based on how interested they were. Hopefully this would shed light on our assumptions and help form a strategy of where we should place our bets.

Lastly, we showed 12 feature cards and asked them to apply the likert scale again and comment on each one. This helped control feature creep and keep us informed about what direction to go in, while reducing risk in our feature roadmap.

The results of the prop testing really helped clear up our assumptions. There was some nuance in the scale between collecting and investing; People wanted to see the price changes over time, but not necessarily in an investing interface. While the story of the items was really important, especially to our existing collectors, they also needed to clearly see how the price would track over time. It couldn’t be solely about collecting.

People wanted to invest in items they were passionate about; they wanted to learn and read up and get informed. But it was less about investing a la stocks and more about passion investing over longer timeframes.

Most importantly, we could safely discard several other propositions that were taking up a lot of time and energy of stakeholders. The time and resource saved by being able to discard these early is why prototyping and testing is so important.

Our current demographic were all white men above the age of 45 because our first assets, stamps and coins, appeal to an older demographics. While this was our best guess, with hindsight this seems obvious. Having the data to back it up really helped align decision making. The above showed that we could cater to a wider range of demographics by introducing new asset classes that appealed to a wider range of ages.

There was an interesting link between collecting and investing. The further back you could show price data and ownership data, the more trustworthy the asset became. People wanted both, not one or the other.

The conclusion of the research was that Showpiece needed to lean into long-term investing as a core part of it’s proposition to find fit with the market. It couldn’t get away with being solely for collectors. And that would mean getting approval from the FCA, an expensive but necessary process.

As part of the pivot we mocked up for the client what ‘Showpiece Invest’ could be about, and I’ve included two sections from the homepage below for reference.

I believe this process of testing propositions to be incredibly powerful. It points you in the right direction for product market fit and growth by getting feedback on lots of different ideas very quickly. The most valuable aspect is learning what NOT to do.

We finished our work with Showpiece shortly after and as I understand it the Showpiece Invest project was undergoing build and unfortunately paused due to a change of leadership and direction for the teams involved.