The beauty of launching apps in Facebook and other social platforms is that you get real-time results: the good and the bad.

“You and Me?” shot up to 7,000 users within three days, but it’s growth has waned and plateaued; “Happy Pills”, strangely enough, has continued to gain ground and is now ranked # 166 (up 20 positions over last week) out of 11,300 apps.

You and Me is a real-time match-making service where it facilitates the meeting of interested-people through three simple buttons: Yes or No or Maybe. If a user says “yes” or “maybe” to someone and that someone says “yes” or “maybe” back then it’s a match. Happy Pills is a very simple application where you send “happy pills” to friends - and strangers - to cheer them up. The algorithms that drive You and Me are much more complex than Happy Pills’.
We’ve changed You and Me’s algorithms for user recruitment and imagery on the first page, and made a number of other changes which resulted in real-time results and information in helping us make rational decisions. What have we learned? Match-making may be the wrong position in Facebook. Saying “YES” to someone - I think - is more about feeding someone’s vanity than it is about match-making. Why? We mocked up a really HOT girl’s profile and she said “YES” to a number of guys. About ~20% of the guys said “YES” back. We’ve also noticed that there have been over 10,000 matches made but slightly less than 3,000 messages have been exchanged between the matching parties. What does this mean?
The data is telling me that match-making may not be the ideal position in Facebook, it’s a good position - but not a great one. We’re aiming for 100,000 daily active users - not just 8,000 daily active users. Don’t get me wrong, 8,000 daily active users is an incredible feat to achieve within a week but we’re aiming higher than that. We want over 100,000 daily active users.

What’s next for You and Me? Vanity. We’re going to make some changes and see what happens. It may work, or it won’t. That’s the beauty of creating apps in social platforms you get immediate results, sometimes within hours and at most within a day or two.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 6:41 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.