: The Rise and Fall

BarCampHouston 3Saturday, August 9, 2008

Rakesh Agrawal / twitter: RakeshAgrawalSnapStream Media

Background• 2005: SnapStream = Consumer DVR software– Sloooow growth, lots of reasons– Doomed to never cross the chasm?• Requires a TV tuner card on your PC• Requires home PC and TV to be co-located

– Microsoft Media Center Edition

What next?• Something not “early-adopter-only”• Apply the things we’re good at– developing and testing software– usability– bonus: expertise in consumer TV

• Considered bunch of different things• Conclusion: TV social networking– Enable people to connect with one another around their

favorite TV shows– 1st phase: simple TV listings & search– 2nd phase: social networking– (note: this was all pre-facebook app platform)

Building it• Vision: First, simple TV listings and search

– Most TV-related websites (tv.com, zap2it.com, tvguide.com) had overly complex layouts, weren’t clean, or well-designed

– While TV grids were highest-traffic on these sites, they were slow and awkward to browse around

– The search functions on TV sites was poor: slow and awkward results formatting.

• We storyboarded the site flow• Quickly built a functional prototype• Iterated a lot – first with developers then with developer +

designer• Scaling was NOT an afterthought – part of the design from

the beginning (but scaling, for Couchville, was easy too)

Naming it• TubeZoo • TubeGuru • WhatOn • Watson • TVTribes • WaterCooler • TheAwesome • Columbus • TheGoodParts • SnapStream Guide• SnapStream.Net 2• Tubevana

• ILoveTV • IHateTV • TheSmallScreen • FastForward • What2Watch • SofaControl • Live4TV • Sofa Society • Couchtastic • Couchville • TubeTown

Logos

Color Comps

Final product

Final product

Final product

The Launch

• Friday, March 2, 2007: Couchville “soft” launch (no publicity, link to it from snapstream.com)

• Sunday, March 4, 2007, 10pm: I send a pitch e-mail to Michael Arrington @ TechCrunch

• Monday, March 5, 2007, 1am: TechCrunch: “Doing One Thing Right: Couchville”

• Monday, March 5, 2007, 8/9am: Kevin Rose submits to Digg and it rises to “Top in All Topics”

• Lots of follow-on coverage:

Launch Traffic

Bounce Rate: 33%, Avg Time: 2:08

Bounce Rate: 39%, Avg Time: 2:57

Bounce Rate: 29%, Avg Time: 1:29

Bounce Rate: 30%, Avg Time: 2:24

Bounce Rate: 33%, Avg Time: 2:33

More traffic

Site Shutdown

Site Shutdown

• Why?– Standalone TV listings: useful and neat, but only

temporarily (winner: TV listings + TV content available in most DVRs)

– A patent holder wanted big royalties per visitor per month for program guide

– We decided to focus our business on something else (television search)

What we learned

• Stick to a narrowly focused mission (our was “simple TV listings & search”) and you’ll get noticed without too much extra effort.

• Getting written up on TechCrunch or posted to Digg is NOT any kind of golden ticket – must focus on building your product, building traffic.

• Monetizing with advertising, at least for a consumer TV website = very hard – need lots of scale and, in turn, to really be successful, your own ad sales team.

• Trying new things is good – how else do you figure out what you want to be?

Q&A