Growth Designs for Toast Capital
OVERVIEW
Toast finance product Capital provides restaurants with access to flexible funding to help them grow their business. This product-led growth project boosted Toast monthly revenue by $440k, Capital loan application by 9%, with NPS over 50.
What are the opportunities?
How might we surface the Toast Capital loan offers in a way that improves discovery, drives engagement, and increases conversion without overwhelming customers.
Role: Lead product designer
Team: 1 Product designer, 1 Product manager, 1 Engineer, 1 Data Scientist
Status: GA in Q2, Q3 2024 (Ongoing iterative development)
Monthly revenue
+$440k
Capital application
+9%
NPS
>50
NPS > 50 is considered excellent in the industry
Final deliverables
Fixed fee drop alert
Landing page for Capital new customers
Capital new widgets on homepage
Challenges/Opportunities
HMW surface the Toast Capital loan offers in a way that improves discovery, drives engagement, and increases conversion without overwhelming customers.
Even though customers who use Toast Capital are highly satisfied, many restaurants either didn’t know about it, or didn’t complete their applications. We saw three key gaps based on data and weekly customer interview sessions.
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Low discovery: Most traffic came from a single homepage card.
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Low engagement: Users didn’t understand how the product worked or how it could help them.
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Drop-off during application: Especially among new users, concern about pricing and lack of information and trust.
Original user flow
Discovery on Toast homepage
Gap 1
Choose offer amount and timeline
Start application
Application Submitted
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fill out business info
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fill out ownership
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...
Gap 2
Gap 3
When and Why eligible customers drop-off?
The drop-offs mainly happen during the first two gaps
We saw three key gaps based on data and weekly customer interview sessions.
-
Low discovery – Most traffic came from a single homepage card.
-
Low engagement – Users didn’t understand how the product worked or how it could help them.
-
Drop-off during application – Especially among new users, due to concern about pricing and lack of information and trust.
“The trust level and perceived value are not high enough to justify the high fixed fee.”
— Summary of customer interviews
Growth Design Approach
Prioritizing speed and fast iterations
With those challenges in mind: low discovery, limited understanding, and drop-off during applications, it became clear that we needed to move fast, learn quickly, and adapt based on real user behavior.
Instead of upfront user research or usability testing, I collaborated closely with my PM, engineers, and data scientists to run lightweight, in-product experiments.
"In growth work, speed and iteration is the key. Testing with real users in production gives us the most reliable signal for the next step. and design decisions."
— Growth design approach
Customer goals
For customer goals, we weren’t just optimizing for numbers. I want customers to:
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Know that they’re eligible for financing
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Understand how Toast Capital works (and why it’s different)
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Feel confident this is a good fit for their restaurant
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Make a decision
Business goals
On the business side, we focused on increasing qualified applications without sacrificing user trust.
Design experiment 1: Improve discoverability
The first experiment focused on solving our biggest gap: low discovery.
With the idea of being relatable and familiar, I redesigned the homepage Toast Capital card to be more contextual and personalized. The card designs are based on either the user’s city, restaurant type, new restaurant, use case.
For example, a New York restaurant will see an illustration of a city landscape.
The idea was to surface the loan offer at a moment of high traffic and high familiarity, and build trust from here.
Engagement
+ 153%
Capital application submissions
+ 63%
Toast homepage
Restaurant type
Use case
Cities
New restaurant
illustrations in collab with marketing team
Cities
Following the success, I proposed that we do more illustrations for this experiment to cover 16 major U.S. cities.
I worked with the marketing team to create custom illustrations for each.
City illustrations
Design experiment 2: Capital value landing page
The second experiment focused on a landing page for net new customers, who are unfamiliar with how Toast Capital works and the value prop of it. I designed the landing page in one week from lofi to hifi.
For the design I used the storytelling approach to show net new customers:
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What Toast Capital is
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Why trust you?
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Why it’s different from traditional lending
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What can I achieve with this? Use cases and customer testimonials based on the customers restaurant type/locations
Average time on page
12 second
Capital application submissions
No impact
Because of this additional step between discovery and choosing offer amount pages, we did see about a 10% drop in click-through to the application, but the users who come to this step would also be more qualified and had higher intent.
Design experiment 3: Fixed fee drop (for low-risk customers)
The third experiment addressed a consistent theme from user feedback: customers felt the fixed fees were too high. But lowering the price across the board wasn’t an option based on legal constraints. Instead we picked a subset of low-risk, high-performing customers to test targeted price-drop messaging.
The design challenge was how we framed the message: how do we communicate a lower price without cheapening the product?
My solution was to frame it as a reward instead of a discount: "Because your business is doing well, your fixed fee has been reduced."
Monthly revenue
+ $440k
Engagement
+ 18%
Learnings
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Collaboration of PLG moments designs across the company: I reached out to other teams who were doing growth designs to get more ideas and framework for future planning.
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Learnings: Getting familiar with the scrappy iteration for growth design
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Close and frequent collaboration with legal and compliance