Introduction
Noon Plus is a subscription service offered by Noon Academy for up to K-12 students.
Noon functioned via groups: a group is analogous to a classroom, it consists of the teacher and students who are interested in the subject being taught. A group's typical lifecycle lasts 3-6 months or a semester in a school year.
There are two types of groups: Free and Paid, students have to pay for a group to access its content (live classes, VoDs and quizzes), though they would have access to the content after its lifecycle.
Problem
Access to the best teachers in the current model was forced to be purchased group by group. Students and their parents felt buying each paid group individually was both expensive and hard to manage. A single school year would contain 6-8 paid groups (one group per subject).
Product Redesign
The clear solution on the horizon to give better paid experience to the students: a subscription-based paid model. Paid groups could no longer be individually purchased, they would be bundled into a subscription which corresponds to a goal.
For example: All class 9 paid groups are bundled in a single subscription or an IIT subscription which has class 11 and 12 Maths, Physics and Chemistry paid groups.
Metrics showing how Plus students studied more and had better access to content is shown to non-Plus students to incentivise subscriptions.
Challenges
Initially we explored differed subscription managers to integrate into Noon's system to iterate quicker.
We looked at Recurly, Chargify, ChargeBee, Stripe and others. Each of them came with their own set of shortcomings. Noon's requirements were as follows:
1. Support all the countries Noon operated then: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Jordan and India.
2. Support right to left text, as most of the above mentioned countries spoke Arabic.
3. Support local payment methods in each country: India has UPI, Egypt has Fawry, Pakistan has Over the Counter (OTC) payments.
Shortcomings:
1. All the countries were cash heavy economies (except India); above mentioned players supported a combination of card based payments or bank transfer, which left out a huge paying audience. Digital payment support was essential for a long-term recurring subscription relationship with the student.
2. Most of them didn't support right to left text, invoicing needed to support right to left text as lot of the subscriptions were named in Arabic.
Solution
1. A complete in-house solution written in Java was developed to manage subscriptions.
2. This new subscription service would interface with Noon's internal payment manager which integrated with above mentioned local payment methods.
3. Initially only monthly subscriptions were supported, expanding to quarterly and half-yearly on subsequent releases.
4. Each subscription would house any number of paid groups, as long as they are relevant to the subscription's goal.
5. Groups could be added or removed during a subscription's tenure, though price would remain same for students.
6. Students who subscribed later in the lifecycle of a subscription wouldn't get access to a removed group's content, thereby encouraging them to subscribe as early as possible in a school year.
7. Subscription service handled student access to a subscription, it also remembered the groups that a student was part of. Even if a student doesn't renew a subscription immediately and comes back couple of tenures later; the student was added to all of the old groups they were part of.
8. Payment manager handled payments using local payment methods, accommodating for subscriptions now.
HLD: Simplified
Impact
Revenue increase in the next half-year by 17%.