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.