ivygo: Unlocking Monetisation, Reducing Risk & Enhancing Trust

Highlight Overview

ivygo connects EV drivers with charging stations hosted by small hospitality businesses — wineries, regional cafes, boutique B&Bs. Bookings and payments work smoothly, but most hosts leave chargers on “Free” or unmanaged. Through 17 in-depth interviews, I found hosts weren’t held back by the technology — they were held back by technical anxiety, admin dread, and fear of looking greedy to guests, a pattern I named the “Passive Plateau.” I led research and product strategy to move hosts from hesitation to confidence, defining three feature pillars and a phased 12-month roadmap for the ivygo founder and CEO.

Impact

17 in-depth host and driver interviews
12 weeks from brief to strategy handoff
3 feature pillars across a phased roadmap

The Challenge

Australians are adopting EVs fast, and road-trippers actively seek out wineries, cafes, and boutique stays where they can charge. Hosts see this as a marketing opportunity, but running a charger feels like an unpredictable technical chore. Most default to giving power away free rather than deal with the admin and risk — a missed revenue stream hiding in plain sight. ivygo needed to know exactly what would move hosts from avoidance to confident monetisation.

My Role & Method

Role: UX/UI Specialist & Product Strategy Lead

Tools used: Miro, Gemini AI, Google Docs, Zoom

This was a research- and strategy-led engagement — defining what the product needed to do and in what order, not producing high-fidelity UI. I ran a three-stage process:

Discover — remote interviews with small business hosts and regional EV drivers, fitting around limited availability
Synthesise — pooled findings with a wider research cohort in Miro, clustering pain points to separate individual noise from shared market patterns
Product Strategy — mapped the emotional journey hosts go through and translated sticking points into concrete features, security controls, and a release schedule for engineering

Interview recruitment shifted to Askable and my professional network after research launched during a major holiday travel rush, protecting data quality without adding to hosts’ already stretched schedules.

What I Found

The founder interview pointed to five priorities:

real-time charger status and two-way communication so staff can respond fast;
reliability with minimal day-to-day management;
reduced risk around theft, misuse and unexpected costs;
charging as a draw for guests and a boost to the sustainability offering;
and simple, transparent pricing paired with accessible, non-technical troubleshooting.

Host interviews surfaced three consistent, quoted anxieties:

Fear of appearing greedy — hosts worried monetising charging would clash with the hands-off, “luxurious” experience they wanted guests to have
No appetite for admin — hosts wanted charging to stay hands-off, with no extra spreadsheets or tracking
Real financial risk aversion — hosts couldn’t absorb an unexpected high electricity bill