Project: You and Me

Launched on December 6th, at 4:30PM (PST), our first match-making application. The application now has over 19,000 users and is - as of this morning - averaging 300 new users per hour (up 100 users from 200 - just yesterday), which is accelerating - on average - about 20% to 50% per hour, day over day. Our target goal is 30,000 users by close of Saturday which we appear to be on track to make and exceed. The app has over 6,000 daily active users, which represents over 30% of our total install base - not bad, but could be better. We are working on adding some additional “messaging” capabilities, such as, “compliments” and a dating widget. These new features should increase the utility of the app and drive time-in-the-app by up to 5%; consequently, increasing our new user attrition by another 5 to 7% based upon our previous experiences. About 20% of all new users unregister the app because they are probably not “single” or interested in a dating. By the end of next week, we suspect this application will break into the top 250 out of 11,000 - the top 2%.

However, it’s still inconclusive as to whether or not this app will continue to grow at this pace. There are many players entering this seemingly-already crowded space. For the most part, the first-movers have been the ones to have captured the greatest market share. If we apply the power law in the applications space then we can infer that the top 2% of the apps will capture 80% of all users and the other 98% will struggle in vain, quit or continue to waste their time and energy.
Project: Happy Pills

Launched on November 20th 2007 at 5:30PM (PST), who knew this app would resonate in the minds of the user? I sure the hell didn’t think it would - but it has. It now has over 130,000 users and over 21,000 are daily active users. The application really speaks to people in England, Canada, and Indonesia where an over whelming proportion of activity comes from. This is what I would consider our first successful application. We’ve launched over 5 others which failed, on retrospect, to live up to expectations. From Happy Pills we learned what worked and what didn’t work as well. We learned (these are generalities - not absolutes): (1) people have a very short attention span, (2) people want simple applications that do not require them to think - much, (3) people want instant gratification, (4) people want to stay on one page - the home page, (5) people want to see what they’re friends are up to, (6) people like to compete, and (7) it’s all about “you.” That’s what I learned.

Summary: DATING(SEX - for many - eventually an outcome) and DRUGS sell.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.