Triple Shot Saturday - Edition 7
Three of the highest signal-to-noise ratio snippets from the startup/tech podcasts for founders/operators.
Hi there,
Here are my favorite three snippets from the podcasts I read this week.
#1)
hosted Prashanth Sachan, co-founder, Apps for Bharat on his podcast - The Startup Operator. Apps for Bharat is the maker of the widely popular SriMandir app.Prashanth shares incredible advice from their experience launching the SriMandir app. As an early mover in the category, they didn’t know what features/hooks would engage users more, what/how much they’d pay for, and whether they’d come back to the app. So, instead of going all-in on growth, they spent considerable time understanding the engagement patterns of early user cohort.
So we realized that we have limited set of people, and growth was not the first objective. The first objective was, can we find a usage that people will relate with? What is that usage story? What is it that will people relate with? They'll keep using it and so on. So the question for us was, what should we build, which people will appreciate?
So hence we said, we'll forget the part around growth and we'll offset that growth part to, let's say, a basic performance marketing, where we'll get users with a certain proposition, and then we would want to evolve the user journey and just keep going deeper on the user journey and see where it takes us and whatnot. So the first 10,000 installs were mostly paid. What we also started seeing was people who were loving the platform. They were actually inviting more people. So we started seeing it's high with 20, 30% people inviting more people. And that number grew over time. 40 45% of the installs became organic without us doing anything. It was a function of user feedback, user love, people sharing the app with other people, saying, you should try it and whatnot.
But what we essentially focused on was, when people come on the platform, what was that acquisition story? Which is, what did I tell them? I told them, there's a content platform where you can get Darshan literature, music, bunch of things I told them. And then with that story, which is broad, I wanted to see what does the activation story look like. So when people come on this, does the acquisition story and activation story match? What do people relate with? What do they try?
And when that activation story plays out? By activation, I would mean that some of the key hooks that we thought might have worked, how do people engage with those key hooks? And once they do that, I wanted to understand, what does the initial engagement look like? My initial engagement would be why would they open that the second time, third time, fourth time, and then mid scale engagement, I would say, which is why would they open the app the 7th day, 10th day, 15th day, what's that reason?
And just that particular funnel we kept solving why we should install the app. Okay, fair. You installed the app, now you come on the platform. How do you engage with my key hooks? And my key hooks were you come and engage with digital temple or read some literature, panchang, or engage with content? And whatnot that was my key hooks. And then I wanted to figure out enough reasons where you should keep coming back. And I would say that was the part that we were extremely, extremely obsessed about. And because we knew if we were able to solve that, what we'll have is this rich information and data that will actually help us take this company forward.
#2)
hosted Nikita Bier, co-founder of viral apps like Gas (acquired by Discord) and TBH (acquired by Facebook) on his podcast to talk about all the ways in which apps can go viral. Nikita double-clicked on the importance of targeting teens as the core user cohort to build viral apps and how they test apps built for teens before scaling them.There's actually an interesting study, like many years ago that, like some academics in Spain did, I think it was in Spain. And they looked at how many people you text, you know, per year of your life, and it goes up, like very quickly. From 14 to 18, it peaks around 21. So it's growing. The number of people you text is growing up until about 21, and then it just falls, it collapses, and then it comes back up at end of life. And there's a few reasons all this happens, but basically, once you exit college, you kind of reduce the number of contacts you have, your daily contacts. Once you get married, it's even fewer. And then as you get older, your kids start having kids and you become a grandparent. You start texting again more or you join a retirement home. But if you're building a product with network effects, that's a communication tool. You want to be on that upward curve of adding connections to your social graph, because then the urgency to connect is higher. So if you really want to actually innovate at the edges of communication products, you really have to target that cohort that has the highest urgency to communicate, and that's teens."
For every social app I've ever built, the number of invitations sent per user drops 20% for every additional year of age, from 13 to 18. So if you build for adults, expect to acquire every user with ads. And if you're targeting older cohorts like adults, you're going to have to raise a huge amount of venture capital to finance that user acquisition pipeline. And it's going to be extraordinarily expensive as a seed stage startup, it's going to be basically impossible to grow that user base, especially to get density. If you need actual network effects among users, basically, you're building this, help me decide who to vote for.
So we basically need to saturate an area with every kind of marketing you can. So we ran ads targeted at a particular school to when we were seeding and testing these apps. And we also followed people, creating a dedicated Instagram account that went to that school, because we learned that high schoolers identify their school in their bio, so it says RHS on their bio. And so that was how we tried to get the entire school to adopt synchronously. We'd follow them and then accept the follow backs. A big misunderstanding, though. And I get this DM a lot, and people are like, I'm trying to replicate your strategy. We've just done it at 15 schools, and it's not working anymore. This is not the way we grew the app. This is how we tested apps. And there's, it's really, it's a little bit nuanced there. That's an important nuance, because you need to get enough intensity of adoption and density for a social network to start to get the flywheel spinning. But the app should grow by itself after that.
And people think, we just went from school to school, following every kid on it. That's totally unrealistic. But for the first hundred users, yes, that's how we got them. And that allowed us to know whether the product was working or not.
#3) Jeremy Foster, VP Product at Twitch appeared on the Product Podcast where he spoke about how Twitch is revamping their mobile experience and how it’s inherently different from how TikTok approaches it’s mobile app though both are doing shortform video content.
I think for many years Twitch has been a predominantly kind of website, pc based platform, and that's primarily because we're very heavy on interaction, we're very heavy on long form sessions and therefore it actually makes sense that, like web, is one of the best places to consume Twitch content, because it's very easy to chat and it's very easy to watch for multiple hours. Um, but you know, we have obviously, as many people have seen, more of a shift towards mobile and it's now becoming, you know, uh, while it's not where the majority of consumption comes from, it is where the majority of viewers are. So, um, well, we've always had mobile apps. It's like we've never had mobile apps. We're really invested in trying to make those experiences better. So we recently launched a feed product and we're kind of we're redesigning the app to make that the default experience.
Our feed is a little bit different from, you know, tiktok's feed, our feed, the purpose of our feed is not to. It's not to get people just consuming the feed and just swiping forever. Our feed is really meant to help viewers find a stream that they want to watch for a long session. Uh, part of the reason for this is because, um, there's, you know, discovering live content is hard. There's a lot of friction in that experience and that traditionally has been a lot of friction in that you have to in order to actually understand, like you know this, this thing that's happening right now, that's live, and do I want to watch it? You really have to consume, you really have to actually start watching it. To answer that question, there might be some indicators that say I don't, I'm not interested in this one. Maybe a streamer you like is playing a game, you don't. But for most cases you really have to go into the stream and consume a little bit of it to understand is this stream for me? Does this vibe kind of fit what I want? Does this match my? You know what I'm here to watch? So, from the feed, we're really making it easy to consume and try out a bunch of live streams before deciding which one you want to watch."
Hope you find this useful.
See you next week.
Rohit