Giving brokers a reason to come back

01

The problem

Most of Truva's buyers come through brokers. When I joined, those brokers were a scattered outside sales force, run on phone calls and WhatsApp. There was no platform for them at all.

Every site visit went through Truva's channel-partner team. A broker asked them for a visit, and they arranged it by hand. The team was drowning in coordination. By my estimate, almost half of their day went on it instead of signing up new brokers.

And brokers did not stay. Only 20% were still active three months after they joined. They tried Truva once and did not come back.

02

Who the users were and what I learned

There were two groups: the brokers, and Truva's own channel-partner team who worked with them.

I rode along with brokers on their visits and shadowed 3-4 people on the broker team. Two things came up again and again:

• Brokers wanted sale prices. They asked for recent sale-price data for the societies they work in.
• Brokers trusted app stores, not links. An app that did not come from an app store did not feel safe to them.

Inside a broker firm there were also two kinds of user, the owner and the employees, and they needed to see different things.

03

Options considered

How to ship it: a web link or a native app. I started with a web app (a PWA) that brokers opened from a link. It was faster to build and easy to share. But brokers did not trust it, because it had not come from an app store. So I moved to a native app. The technically easier choice had lost to user trust.

What would bring brokers back. Three features went in:

1. Local sale-price data for their societies, taken from Truva's pricing engine. Brokers asked for it on the ride-alongs.
2. Live lead and commission tracking, so brokers could follow every lead and their commission on it.
3. An on-demand marketing tool that made creatives with the broker's own branding. It gave brokers a reason to open the app every day.

Owners and employees. Owners could change the firm's brand name and logo, and see the firm's total commissions and GMV. Employees saw only the commission on their own converted leads. Most other screens were the same for both.

04

What shipped

• A native broker app with sale-price data, lead and commission tracking, and the branded marketing tool.
• Self-serve visit booking. Brokers book site visits themselves, so the channel team no longer arranges them by hand.
• A broker discovery tool. Active agents post their listings and phone numbers publicly so that people will call them. The tool collected those, removed anyone already in the CRM, and gave the channel team a tracked calling list.
• Mixpanel events across the app, with automated reports sent to Slack.

05

Result

• 3-month broker retention rose from 20% to 50%+.
• Monthly active brokers grew 30% after the move to a native app.
• Manually arranged visits fell from 100% to under 3%, freeing 30% of the channel team's capacity.
• 70+ brokers joined at zero acquisition cost through the discovery tool.
• The app grew to 600+ brokers, ~300 of them active each week, and carries 60% of all of Truva's transactions (₹210Cr pipeline).

06

What I'd do differently

I would ask brokers how they install apps before building anything. I found out about the trust problem only after shipping the web version, and the switch to native could have been the first version instead.