launching mixer: what worked, what didn't
Post on 14-Jul-2015
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We wanted to build a service that would help us better connect with the people around us.
Introduction
Wednesday, 9 January 13
Theoretical Foundations
• Recognizing the important concept of shared identity in communities
• Providing opportunities for individuals to interact with one another around a common theme: location
• Understanding communities require a dynamic where each person is able to communicate with all others in the group (George Homans; 1950)
Wednesday, 9 January 13
Approaching the press• Focus on an influencer
• Meet them whilst out networking and have a conversation
• Pre-brief them by giving a heads up
• Negotiate
• We’ll launch when you’re ready
• Get to the point
• Have a story
• Send images in web ready format
• Details about competitors
Wednesday, 9 January 13
Marketing is really important
• People often wrongly assume apps will market themselves.
• Other apps we’ve built have done well with no marketing, we assumed Mixer would be the same.
• TechCrunch got us 500 installs on the first day but not core users who didn’t stick around.
• Marketing strategy is as important as the app itself!
Wednesday, 9 January 13
Monitor everything
• Growth and user acquisition most important.
• Identify why some users stick around and why others don’t.
• App Store analytics and rankings.
• Listen to feedback.
• Be prepared to iterate.
Wednesday, 9 January 13
App Store challenges
• Know what matters (App name, Developer Name, Keywords, Title of in-app purchases)
• Get in top 100 = organic downloads
• Easier to rank in some categories over others.
• Pick the right keywords.
• Localize app store listing.
Wednesday, 9 January 13
What did we learn?
• Focus on the things your app does differently to others
• Narrative is important
• Needed a new way to distribute
• Profiles were weak
• Need for niche focus
• Needed to encourage more engagement
Wednesday, 9 January 13
You can always build on an MVP
• Focus on one key feature
• Well built
• Well designed
• Don’t build ‘nice to have’ features until users demand them
• Must be compelling
Wednesday, 9 January 13
[PFFacebookUtils logInWithPermissions:permissions block:^(PFUser *user, NSError *error) { if (!user) { NSLog(@"Uh oh. The user cancelled the Facebook login."); } else if (user.isNew) { NSLog(@"User just signed up through Facebook!"); } else { NSLog(@"User logged in through Facebook!"); }}];
Wednesday, 9 January 13
Use the rights tools
• We used Parse (Parse.com) as our backend to increase simplicity and decrease development time. (it’s practically free!)
Wednesday, 9 January 13
Use the rights tools• Problem: we needed to identify mutual
Facebook friends and interests (Likes).
https://graph.facebook.com/me/mutualfriends/?user=USER_ID
SELECT page_id, name, pic_big FROM page WHERE page_id IN (SELECT page_id FROM page_fan WHERE uid = USER_ID)
Mutual Friends (Graph):
Mutual Interests (FQL):
Wednesday, 9 January 13
RTFM (or “read the docs”)
• Problem: we needed users to spread the word about Mixer; share out your Mixer posts to Facebook and Twitter.
• We already had a easy way for Facebook access (and fetching Twitter credentials is easy enough since iOS 5).
• For Facebook, Open Graph was perfect, but read carefully to really see what Facebook’s API can offer.
Wednesday, 9 January 13
Keep up to date
• Mixer development started before iOS 6 and before Facebook iOS SDK 3.
• Over 40 Parse SDK updates since 1st July 2012.
• Keeping up to date is key - permissions and sessions changed dramatically in v3 (and then again in v3.1) which we could have planned for.
Wednesday, 9 January 13
Consider your edge cases early on
• We found large milestones easy to accomplish.
• But we did not account for our edge cases.
• What if users invalidate sessions?
• What if users change their profile picture?
• Consider solving these problems early on.
Wednesday, 9 January 13
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