1. Context
2. Why Staylab
3. Problems
4. Challenges:
+ Hard decisions
+ UX/Product
+ Stakeholder & Team mgmt
5. Outcomes
6. Reflection
Muaban.net
How I led a full UX revamp for Vietnam's No. 2 classifieds platform, through lockdown, without ideal research
Maintained by Muaban → Highlighted metrics in Oct 2025:
1. Context
Muaban is a Vietnamese classifieds company founded in 1998, building its reputation entirely in print. At its peak, the daily newspaper expanded from 16 pages to over 100 pages of ads, distributed across a network of 300+ newsstands and 4,000 sales agents nationwide; and would sell out before 11AM everyday.
By 2021, they made the decision to shut down print entirely and commit fully to their digital platform.
That decision, however, exposed a critical challenge: Their website, Muaban.net, had never been treated as a real product. It existed as a digital extension of the newspaper, which meant the UX debt showed in 2 signals: high churn rates with users arriving but not returning, and MAU far below what the traffic volume suggested was possible. Due to an NDA, I can't share the specific numbers, but the gap between visits and meaningful engagement was significant enough that it forced them to take user experience seriously for the first time in the platform's history.
2. Why Staylab
What they needed was a first partner who could both revamp the product and help them build a UX/Product team from the inside out. That's where Staylab came in.
My team won the year-long contract on three things:
Shortly after we signed, Vietnam entered a four-month lockdown. The project moved fully online from day one and we adapted.
3. Problem framing:
1. On the business side, Muaban was losing ground to ChoTot.com, a direct competitor backed by Carousell of Singapore, with a traffic gap that had widened to nearly 5x according to Similarweb. The goal was never to overtake them, but to hold second place in a market where that position was genuinely hard to defend.
Rather than competing head-on in general classifieds, Muaban made a strategic bet to double down on real estate, a vertical where they still had credibility and where dedicated platforms like Muabannhadat.vn hadn't yet locked up the market. Growing MAU in that vertical became the core business objective this project was built around.
2. On the product side, the churn rate pointed to a UX problem. Users who arrived weren't finding what they needed fast enough, and weren't coming back. That reframing mattered because it turned the UX reinvention into a direct business intervention, not visual polish.