Category Archives: Products

Rethinking Facebook Connect

As startups we need to continuously experiment and question the status quo; and for now we experimented with the Facebook Connect implementation. We started by removing it as default option to sign-in on Wishberg. As expected we got multiple forgot password requests (we built this feature in anticipation of same).

Many folks questioned about this on Twitter, and I also had conversations with other startups founders who suggested this could be a bad move. So far we are happy with the results. We may / may not revert back (its still not clear) – but since many people asked me why we even thought of experimenting – here are the reasons.

a. Facebook is no longer a powerful distribution platform

Let me sum up Facebook as a distribution platform for you:
Early days -> 1 + 1 = 11
Later -> 1 + 1 = 2
Now -> 1 + 1 = 1.1
Next -> 1 + 1 = 1.01

Face this, it is true. Facebook is no longer a powerful distribution platform or user acquisition channel for application developers. If the expectation is one user registration through Facebook connect will lead to at least one more., its not happening.

Zynga achieved its distribution on Facebook through News Feeds; Branchout through notifications and others like Pinterest / Spotify through Open Graph. When more and more applications tried to ‘abuse’ each of these mechanisms Facebook put more restrictions & controls in place (which is correct since Facebook wants to maintain a clean experience for its users). Open Graph is currently the only way to get some effective distribution, Facebook has replaced few custom actions and asked developers to use built-in actions for Like & Follow, they are also merged in Open Graph. It also placed restrictions for applications that abused few actions like ‘read a article’ & ‘viewed a video’ with more controls / validations in place.

Personally I am against spam and to build a clean product we do not aim to spam our users through Facebook (even in name of user acquisition). Also because of the fact that few applications have abused Facebook to acquire users, users are smart and know how to differentiate between a possible spam and genuine link. Good for consumers and bad for developers, Facebook has made it ‘ridiculously easy’ for users to get rid of applications; so if your are spamming – do that at your own risk!

b. Facebook engagement principles – P2P v/s A2P

You must have read this in news over and again – Facebook is trying hard to appeal to the current youth generation (as the earlier one has grown up!). While Facebook is trying to appeal to younger generation, it is also trying to improve engagement of its current user base. Current reports suggests that a Facebook update reaches approximately (just) 12% of your friends.

If people stops engaging with other people on Facebook, it will be dead. While Facebook connect is a good way to keep social interactions that happen outside of Facebook discoverable through feeds on Facebook – its natural that Facebook will always be more inclined to have P2P (People to People) interactions featured over A2P (Application to People).

On a personal note – I don’t think Facebook will have anything great to announce for some time ahead that will excite the developers. For now, FB will focus on improving user-to-user engagement, appeal to youth and its monetization products. So I don’t see the situation improving for developers.

c. Inconsistent Discovery Experience for feeds

Facebook is not Twitter. Unlike the experience where every tweet is visible to your followers, every feed / status update is not visible to your friends. Its complex and depends on multiple factors – whom you interact with most, which group of friends are you a part of, has the feed gone viral to be showcased to more people outside that network and so on. If P2P feeds are discovered by only 12% of friends, chances for discovery of application feeds will be even lower.

And then there are innumerable pages that a user has liked, there are updates from them which also ask for a mind-share of user in his activity stream. One of Facebook’s monetization product that allows pages (and users) to pay and increase reach of their posts will also work against discovery of application feeds.

Facebook recently announced a new newsfeed which is rolled out to few users but not to all. It has also did a nice little revamp on Timeline view of profile putting all updates on the right side block – and also bringing up user’s likes and interests upfront and pushing open graph updates further down to an blind spot.

Don’t get me wrong here, I am supporting Facebook here as most of these changes are done to improve user experience and engagement for its own users. But in that attempt – the discovery of feeds for applications has got bit inconsistent. There is no science here – and most of the times for application developers it will mean shooting in the dark.

d. Every user has his/her own identity on every platform

Each user has a different identity on every platform – Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Foursquare, LinkedIn and so on. Its incorrect to assume that the way a user behaves on Facebook will be essentially the way he will on your product or that he wants his friends to know he is using a particular product or service.

There is also a trend that users do not want to register on a product because it only allows only Facebook Sign-up. We did that with Wishberg earlier, but now have opened up email registrations; key here is – ‘Be valuable first, social later.’

The ideal way is to allow users to register and let them connect their Facebook account as a option – which they will if your product is valuable to them. You can prompt users to connect their Facebook account, but not force them to do so!

e. Psychology of Forced Distribution

As a developer once you implement Facebook Connect, unconsciously you get thinking and start relying completely on Facebook for distribution. You want every action that has happened on your product to be ‘forced shared’ on Facebook – even though a user would want it or not. Its time to stop that as the sharing economy has changed.

Since Facebook distribution is not controlled by you, it gets increasingly frustrating when your product does not go as viral as you thought it would. Instead build some sort of distribution / discovery mechanism on your own product which you control completely – we built couple of them on Wishberg and they have worked remarkably better. Remember – a small number of highly engaged users are much better than a large user base with zero or near zero engagement.

f. Sharing economy has changed

The sharing economy on Facebook as changed over years. It is no more driven by features or applications, its completely user driven. Users have got smart enough to know what has to be shared and with whom.

Don’t build applications / features that will trick users to forcefully share something on their wall without their consent or knowledge. Focus on your product – users will figure out what they have to share and what they don’t have to. Users are now smarter than most developers think!

g. Breaking changes that break your plans

While doing a startup / building your product – the one thing you don’t want to lose is time. Startups operate with small teams and any deviations from the product roadmap costs them dear.

And while they are on to it – Facebook wants you to constantly be updated with its latest ‘breaking changes‘ and there is no option but to comply. It sucks out time / bandwidth big time and knowing the diminishing returns from Facebook – it gets frustrating here!

Concluding Notes:

Most product managers integrate with Facebook Platform for three reasons – 1. One-click sign-in 2. Social Graph. 3. Distribution (Viral acquisition of users).

It is possible to achieve that without Facebook too.

One Click Sign-in: Create a perpetual logged-in experience for users till he explicitly logs out!
Social Graph: Most successful products like Quora, Twitter, Instagram, etc have build their own network / graph. Remember that same user will have a different identity on every different network.
Distribution: 1 + 1 = 2 is no longer true. Think of discovery and distribution on your own product, you have complete control there.

The aim of this post is not to put negative remarks against Facebook, but to make fellow entrepreneurs know of this when they are building on top of Facebook platform and so that they set right expectations for growth. Happy building!

Building that 1-Click magic in your Product

15 Steps towards Building a Great Product!

Before you start with Growth Hacking

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Note: This post is extension to my recent tweet on Product Management.

Building a product startup is exciting. Most startups look to raise capital early and investors look no other measure but traction to take their bets. This need for traction puts immense pressure on the founding team to grow their startup. That leads to implementing multiple tips and tricks to improve the key product metrics – most importantly to show traction to investors. Founders get into the so called ‘growth hacking’ mode.

Growth hacking is the new buzzword in the startup town. There is nothing wrong with ‘hacking growth’ – most of the tricks attempted in this phase end up being short-term techniques. They might work for a while, bring traction for a while (which might lead you to raise investments) but these techniques don’t help in long term and the growth is not sustainable and quickly falls off.

Startups tend to neglect the simplest rules of product management before starting with growth hacking. According to me, here are the 5 Basic Rules of Product Management:

User Engagement > Growth Hacking
Retention > Acquisition
Context > Activity
Own growth channels > External channels
Being Valuable > Being Social

A. User Engagement > Growth Hacking
Remember startups like BranchOut, Glassdoor, Viddy, Socialcam – that famously hacked growth through Facebook Dialog Feeds? Though they showed amazing growth curve initially, it soon fell off. Most users dropped off the product as quickly as they signed up never to return again. Reason – zero engagement on the product. Ensure that there are enough engagement loops on the product before you do any sort of ‘growth hacking’.

B. Retention > Acquisition
Acquiring users is the simplest thing to do, retaining them is the key. Any user acquisition technique should retain a good percentage of acquired users. Not just that., over a period of time the users who dropped off should be reactivated – there should be enough methods to pull them back – emailers / network effects / and so on. If the product has strong engagement features, retention is a easy task.

C. Context > Activity
Most products undermine the importance of context. In today’s world – anything that is not context is considered spam. The finest examples of a context driven product is Quora that lets you follow topics of your interest and helps you discover relevant content. Also important are products like Twitter (that lets you follow users) and Pinterest (that lets you follow boards) to build a information stream in context thats relevant to you. Think of context when you build features.

D. Own Channels > External Channels
Many startups focus on external channels for growth. Branchout was focussed on Facebook Dialog Feeds, Zynga was focused on Facebook Activity Wall, Viddy was focussed on Facebook Open Graph. Perfectly fine – if there are enough engagement loops and good retention strategy. However depending on external channels might not be sustainable – many startups hacked the Facebook Open Graph to get significant users – this led to users complaining about to the noise on Facebook wall, Facebook in return built many approvals / controls to prevent applications from spamming the users and giving users ease to block spam applications.

Large startups like Facebook, Dropbox, WhatsApp were completely focussed on driving growth through channels owned by self and had very little or no external dependence for growth. Don’t depend too much on external platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google (SEO) for growth – build our own channels. Facebook’s journey of growth hacking is well documented. Also Dropbox as mentioned in next point.

E. Being Valuable > Being Social
There are also startups that focus on building ‘too-many’ social sharing features, expecting users to share almost everything and anything on to their social profiles (Facebook, Twitter, etc). Users are smart – they don’t fall in this trap and founders keep wondering why no social sharing happens. Instead of trying to be forceful on social, focus on being valuable.

Example – Dropbox, it was a very valuable product that had super methods to hack growth – by connecting FB or Twitter account with Dropbox and providing users additional storage space by asking them to spread a message to their social circle or invite email contacts.

Concluding Notes:
Can you hack growth first and implement these rules later? No. There are startups that hacked user acquisition and raised initial investment on traction., and later things did not go according to the plan. Not just startups, that leaves even investors wondering what went wrong after the initial impressive growth metrics.

Startups are about growth, no doubt. Getting Techcrunche’d (PR release), top position on Hacker News or Video that goes viral might bring one-time traffic boost / user sign-ups. You can get good amount of traffic by integrating with Facebook Open Graph, optimizing site for Google (SEO) or even paid user acquisition – but make sure that the product has enough engagement, retention loops, value and context to sustain the users you are acquiring!

You may hack growth., but you can’t hack success. Building the next billion dollar company is a big deal!

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) trap!

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Before your read this post, I suggest you go over to Hacker Street India and glance through this thread – How much time it took for the first version (MVP) of your product!

If you don’t know much about MVP, glimpse quickly through the Wikipedia post on – Minimum Viable Product. The definition: “The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”

There is much ambiguity in this definition. Lot of judgement is required by the startup founders to define what exactly is MVP version for their product since there are no bullet points to clearly define that. That exactly is a MVP trap!

If you were to build a Social Networking site today, the benchmark for minimum viable product is Facebook. A user will expect all existing features of Facebook to be in your product! For a email service the benchmark is Gmail. For a mobile phone messaging app it is WhatsApp. For a social QnA product it is Quora. For a crowd-funding platform it is Kickstarter. For a phone operating system it is Android / iOS. For search it is Google. For a tablet device it is the Apple iPad.

Early adopters loved the first version of Gmail because it was so much better (and fast) than existing products – Yahoo / Hotmail. They loved the first version of iPhone because it was much better (and usable) than Nokia or Blackberry or Palm then available. On other hand, Bing did not see a great adoption because it was another search engine with no compelling reason for users to switch from Google. Similarly, early adopters saw Microsoft Windows Phone as a different OS for mobile which did all that a Android / iOS phone did differently (different but not better).

If the idea of MVP is showing the product to early adopters and collecting quick feedback, most of that consumer feedback will be based on their comparisons with other products they use on an ongoing basis. To create a wow factor and a compelling reason for users to switch to your product, the minimum viable product you roll out should basically not just exceed current market standards but should also be much better than current offerings.

Otherwise MVP is a trap. Getting a so called minimum viable product (defined by yourself) out in 30 days makes no sense. Every product is different. No product was successful cause its minimum viable product was out in 30 days. You can boast about how quickly you rolled it out, collect feedback from users / customers (most of this feedback is predictable and chances are you would already know about it) and keep building features. Define MVP as not something you can roll out fast, but something that is more valuable than existing product. MVP should not mean Minimum Viable Product. MVP = More Valuable product! (suggested by Nischal)

This is also true for service companies. If you are building a ecommerce company today in India, customers would expect not just similar online transaction experience but also the same level of reliability in logistics or customer support as provided by Flipkart or HomeShop18..

Is there a way out of this? Yes – build really innovating products that don’t have existing benchmarks so you can define one yourself and for others to follow. Or build products in a domain were market leaders are yet to be established.

To succeed, you have to build a better product than one available in the market or innovate and build something that does not exists already! Post that stage you can – Build. Ship. Market. Learn. Build. Let the cycle go on.

Remember, the bar for Minimum Viable Product / Service is very high!

img credit: waltimo on flickr

Why LinkedIn should acquire AngelList

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Had predicted earlier that LinkedIn shall acquire SlideShare; Two years back I wrote that Quora should be acquired by LinkedIn, though that has not happened yet, I strongly feel its imminent to happen. Adding to that list, I strongly feel AngelList will be acquired by LinkedIn.

While LinkedIn continues to grow (it recently crossed 200 Mn users), Naval & Nivi’s efforts on AngelList have been spectacular. Over 100,000+ companies/startups listed, 2% of them are hiring (through AngelList) and over 200,000+ early adopters (which includes people who matter) on the platform. And there is speculation that AngelList is raising investments at a valuation of over $150 Mn USD.

Among few user trends I am noticing with regards to AngelList – People from startup community on Twitter are replacing LinkedIn profile links with AngelList.

Here is why I feel LinkedIn should acquire AngelList -

LinkedIn appeals to larger audience across multiple sectors, but startups is where the action is. For startups, AngelList is more valuable than LinkedIn.
Startups (or companies) are present and more active on AngelList than on LinkedIn.
While LinkedIn is professional resume, business connections, AngelList is business in action for Startups. Take a business vertical and be immensely valuable to them, AngelList is perfect example for this.
AngelList is not just beneficial to startups, but also to the entire community of startup ecosystem. Its API now handles over 3 Million requests per day.
AngelList is rolling out features at a much faster pace than LinkedIn… Introductions, Hiring through AL, Investing directly in startups, showcasing marquee customers for companies, service providers and so on.
It will be very difficult (next to impossible) for LinkedIn to replicate such products for a particular vertical like startups. But it might be easier for AngelList to move beyond the tech startup community.
Technology is shaping every domain. As startups are established in multiple business verticals, it will attract talent and early adopters from every segment on to AngelList… to a point that in future AngelList might be a threat to LinkedIn.

When Quora was small, its biggest challenge was to break beyond the startup community. I don’t foresee AngelList wanting to immediately expand beyond the startup community and its focus will continue to be startups for some time.

And yes these are the early trends. With that I include a possible acquisition of AngelList by LinkedIn to my list of Tech Predictions.

Forget coding. Startup founders should focus on Product & Design.

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Last year (2011) learning coding was hot, may be it still is. Sites like Code for America came up; startups like Codecademy, Learnstreet, Udacity, etc came up that were focusing on building products that enabled others to learn coding in an interactive way. Then it looked like a kind of movement, a revolution in making.

Being a startup founder some of those effects trickled down to India – that made me seriously consider coding. And there were some other reasons as well. We started Wishberg by outsourcing product development to another company. As deadlines were missed repeatedly, this whole ‘founders should be coders’ effect started growing on me.

During this phase I did two things a.) started hiring our own engineering team b.) learn coding inspired by this noise. I started learning very enthusiastically to an extent that my bio read that I was learning to code. Going through multiple forums, registering on these websites, taking lessons on LAMP stack and so on. A bit of background, being a engineering student (though Mechanical) – I had some basic coding background. Few years back, I even built some basic websites, did a bit of javascripts, etc.

As we started hiring engineering talent I asked myself two questions -

Will I ever come up to the level of proficiency that matches our engineering team?
No. I was no where close to them.. while I was doing ABC of coding, our team was super involved in deploying code, implementing Redis / Node.js, building scalable architecture, mobile infrastructure and so on. I didn’t want my team to tell me I suck on programming (which I knew I did anyway). More importantly, I wanted the team to focus on building our product and not spend timing teaching me code or correcting my code.
Will I ever hire anyone who has learned programming through online sites?
No

I also checked with few technical founders who raised investments; few agreed that being a tech founder was probably a added advantage while raising money. But many of them also mentioned that post investment they spent more time finding product-market fit, doing business, improving their product, user experience, managing investors (many a times!) and eventually spending lesser and lesser time on coding themselves.

Eventually all startup founders end up focusing only on consumption side of product (front end user experience, improving funnels and conversion metrics) than the one under the hood. This is when I gave up my decision to learn coding and started focusing on learning design (user design and user experience) which is as core to product as technology is. I started spending more time understanding design tools, design patterns and implementing them on Wishberg. I am no where saying underlying technology, architecture, speed, and scalabilty are not important.

For online businesses, there is no doubt scarcity of good engineering talent; but there is more scarcity of product designers and even much more scarcity of product managers. Startup founders knowingly / or unknowingly start getting into product management role.

I have been a product guy for about 7 years and now feel that I should have learned design long back. Our team not just gets product documentation from me, but also product designs including all scenarios and exceptions. There is a certain clarity of thought which engineers appreciate and exactly know what is to be built – which save lot of time while shipping code / features. Every month, we look at data, un-design by removing clutter, remove additional clicks and aim to improve conversions on every step.

Geek Example – The 2012 Formula 1 Season had 12 teams of which 4 had the winning Renault RS27-2012 engine on their cars. Yet there was only one winner – The Red Bull Racing team. The original Renault team (now Lotus Renault GP) which manufactured and supplied the RS27-2012 engine to Red Bull team stood fourth in overall 2012 championship. In fact Red Bull won the championship for last 3 seasons with the Renault engine. What really mattered – the product RB8 chassis. More importantly the people driving the product, its team – drivers Sebastian Vettel & Mark Webber, Team Principal and Chief Technical Officer.

Concluding Notes:
What engine you have under the hood (technology) matters. What car / chasis the engine drives (the product) matters more. But what matters most is who is driving / leading it. Don’t get over obsessed with technology, focus on product & design.

So all those who complimented us on Wishberg‘s product design & usability… need a hint on who was the person behind it? Yours truly.

Why Mobile First is not the Right Strategy!

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Startup events and Investor talks today have this catch phrase – ‘Mobile First’. Its actually started two years back when Fred Wilson wrote a post that says “Mobile First Web Second.”

I recently tweeted, “Can write a post why ‘Mobile First’ is not a right strategy!”. The response to that made me write this post.

Why I said that?
There are some brilliant mobile apps created by startups in recent years, the biggest challenge for all of them is discovery. Few startups are working in this problem too – helping users to discover your mobile apps. The problem is – these startups themselves are struggling in getting users to discover them first.

Google’s Android has over 700,000 apps in Play Store. Apple’s iOS App Store has over 700,000 apps. Assuming these were unique, as a entrepreneur, your startup has to fight with over 699,999 competitors on user’s smartphone, who on an average has only 65 apps installed. Another trend, many users regularly uninstall apps they do not use; once uninstalled – it is very unlikely they will install it again!

Building a successful startup requires two skills – building a product and marketing it. I tweeted that few days back – “Building a product is one thing. Marketing it is another. Remember that!”

Building the Product
Product development in startup is not easy. Everyday there are at least 3-5 updates to the live web application. Even before users realize, they are using on the latest version of web app.

On mobile this is tricky, its impossible to send 3-5 daily releases for your mobile app everyday. Its even more trickier to get your users to download and upgrade the latest version of mobile app every time.

Marketing the Product
Turn around and look at web – what are the ways you can get your start up discovered – Natural Search, Paid Search, Display Marketing (Advt based or Behavior based targeting), Social, Email Marketing and so on. Most of these is very flexible, you can do it all.

On mobile, there is only one mode of discovery that works – Mobile Advertising. Its still not a easy mode of advertising; far expensive; spray and pray approach as its not intent driven (remember – no one is asking for your app!) like Google Adwords and extremely less efficient since its end result is not landing page with one-click sign-up, but its downloading the app, registering the user and retaining him as well.

Btw, I am a believer in products that are driven by value to customers; and not through marketing.

So how does one get Mobile Strategy right?
Glance through the smartphone and check the apps you are most actively using. Its Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Evernote, Quora and so on. These are essentially web first, mobile later products.

Effective Mobile Strategy is simple – get your product right on the web, acquire initial users, iterate your product (fast), get it right quickly, ensure engagement is in place. Once you have users engaged on the web, they will see value in your product to download your app and stay connected.

Hint – Look at Quora. It was valuable to its initial set of users who were so engaged with the product that they were screaming for getting a mobile app. Quora launched iOS app in Sept 2011; Android App a full year later in Sept 2012.

As a product manager, know that driving adoption and driving engagement for a product are two different things. Don’t try to drive adoption of your product through mobile, its extremely challenging and next to impossible. Instead use mobile as a extension of your product to drive engagement.

Then what about WhatsApp, Instagram, FourSquare, Pulse, Angry Birds and others?
I don’t think anyone has defined this yet, so let me say what are truly mobile first verticals -

Communication – If core of your product is deep integration with phone address book. (Eg, WhatsApp)
Location – If core of your product starts with location awareness. (Eg. FourSquare)
Camera – If core of your product starts with ‘taking’ photos. (Eg. Instagram)
Free Time – If core of your product is being valuable to user on the move or leisure time. (Eg. Games, News aggregation services like Pulse). Again extremely difficult category – you compete with Facebook, Twitter and 1000s of apps in this segment.

Yes. These products are not exceptions – they are truly mobile first products.

Wait, will VCs invest in my startup if I dump Mobile First approach?
Next time anyone suggests you or advises you to go Mobile First, just ask them tips to hack app discovery and drive adoption.

The games of investing are simple. VCs will invest only if -

A proven team or experience entrepreneurs (at least 1X entrepreneurs)
If consumer startup – then traction; if enterprise startup – then revenue.

I don’t think any VC will invest in your startup just because you are Mobile first. Take any strategy – web first or mobile first; as long as you get the above two things right for your product – VCs will chase you!

Concluding Notes:
While I was drafting this post, two interesting posts related to this topic came up.

Fred Wilson wrote following in his post “What has changed“, – “Distribution is much harder on mobile than web and we see a lot of mobile first startups getting stuck in the transition from successful product to large user base. strong product market fit is no longer enough to get to a large user base. you need to master the “download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen” flow and that is a hard one to master.”

Cristina Cordova put up some interesting stats about User Retention in her post – “The Biggest Problem in Mobile: Retention.”

Restating it again as concluding remarks: “Mobile Strategy is simple. Get your product right on the web, acquire initial users, iterate your product, get it right, ensure engagement is in place. Once you have users engaged on the web, they will see value in your product to download your app to stay connected.”

Update: I received few notes from startup founders to also include a important note in this article which I missed – ‘Even when you build a web application, design your product as a responsive web design’. I completely agree.

Another good way to collect User Feedback

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As a product guy for many years I have used multiple methods / tools to collect user feedback. Some analytic tools that are under the hood like Google Analytics, Omniture, Kissmetrics, etc and others that are on the face of user like WebEngage, UserVoice, etc. If you love your product, any amount of feedback that you receive will be less.

For Wishberg, we wanted to hear more and so we introduced a feedback screen on the logout page. When any user logs out of his Wishberg account, its right there for users to share how their product experience was. Try out how this works on Wishberg, alternatively below is the screenshot of same.

The rational behind doing this is simple. If you have noticed, few years back when you logged out of web email services like Yahoo or others, they placed a huge banner advertisement on the subsequent page. Many of these advt banners had a CTR of 3% to 6% making it the most prime properties for advertisers. We replaced that advt spot with feedback.

Users have been very vocal in telling us what the love/hate about Wishberg and also pointing out what they want in the product. For a product owner it is probably the best way to collect feedback, equivalent to talking to your users. I hope to see many more product owners doing something similar to this.

being practical

syntax error.,, unpractical world