Steal this Product Idea #3: Get Together

While staying up all-night in your mom’s basement, battling magical orcs and pounding Cheetos sounds awesome to some people:


mmorpg gamer Steal this Product Idea #3: Get Together

most of us would rather meet up with friends and do fun stuff in the real-world.  Virtual worlds are dying.  Instead, we use status updates and check-ins to show off how awesome our first lives are:

Our yacht is incredible! Has its own pool, hot tub, movie theatre, recording studio, spa/massage room, gym, (cont) http://tl.gd/2jgpcsless than a minute ago via UberTwitter

Mobile, social, real-world games (like Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown) haven’t hit the mainstream because the “games” aren’t all that fun and the right incentives aren’t there.  In other words, a mayorship and 10% off my next slurpee ain’t gonna cut it.  I want a game with rewards like the NYC Key to the City project, which:

…invests regular New Yorkers or anyone else who happens by with the powers of magnanimity usually reserved for the city’s highest officeholder: to bestow a key to New York on a person of their choice, granting extraordinary access to generally off-limits parts of a no-entry-to-unauthorized-personnel kind of city….

The key… opens locks at two dozen locations in the five boroughs, from the baptistry at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan to a locker at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn to a very private and humble room (no spoilers) at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.

This is so awesome.  I imagine an augmented reality future where life is a game, the world is your board, and the points you accumulate for having fun can be redeemed for new experiences. I’m thinking a mobile web powered version of The Game.

Gaurav Mishra and I have recently been discussing these concepts and came up with an idea he coined as gttgthr.com (Get Togther).  He does a better job then I can of explaining it:

Step 1: You sign up using your Facebook ID and indicate your interest in joining different types of get-togethers: meet up for coffee, watch a movie, listen to live music, go shopping, learn how to dance etc.

Step 2: You browse through a list of awesome things to do in the city around your interests. Like Thrillist.

Step 3: You indicate that you will attend a proposed get-together, or suggest a venue for a proposed get-together, or propose a new get-together. Like Plancast.

Step 4: The system will connect you with [friends and] friends-of-friends who have also expressed an interest in attending similar get-togethers. Like Thread.

Step 5: Once a group has decided to attend a get together, they might get a surprise group deal offer from the venue. Like Living Social.

Step 6: Users can be designated hosts for venues, activities, or even cities. Like Foursquare.

After some debate we both felt that although this app had all the overhyped elements of group purchasing, game mechanics and FB/Foursquare APIs, it wasn’t “the one.” 

What do you think?  How can we leverage the mobile web to create fun, real world experiences?  Do you know of other companies like SCVNGR and Geocaching doing cool stuff in this space?

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8 Lessons Learned from Zynga about Virality

Editor’s Note: I’m almost embarrassed to say I actually had to play Frontierville and Farmville to write this post.  These games send notifications constantly and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with all my friends knowing how my pigs were doing. Therefore, I had to go undercover and create a new FB account under my Indian alter ego: Amit Kumar :)

Zynga has experienced explosive growth since it’s inception in 2007. They’re absolutely crushing it with:

How did Zynga become such a profit generating, user acquiring, viral monster? Here’s a few strategies that worked for Zynga which you can apply to your business:

1. Build sharing as an integral part of the product

At every point Zynga prompts users to sign up for updates and send notifications (many times crossing the line) through: fan pages/likes, invites, shares, bookmarks, stream publishing, in game messaging, and email notifications. In fact they’re so darn good at notifying ”Facebook had to change their notification policies

Before you even get started playing you’re prompted to:

- Become a Fan/Like (so they can push updates through your news stream)

zynga1 300x134 8 Lessons Learned from Zynga about Virality

- Invite your friends (pro tip: make it look like it’s required)

zynga2 300x188 8 Lessons Learned from Zynga about Virality

- Share this page on your news stream

zynga3 300x126 8 Lessons Learned from Zynga about Virality

- They again remind you right at the start of the game:

zynga4 8 Lessons Learned from Zynga about Virality

Sharing is not an afterthought limited to an invite section, it’s an integral part of the experience.  In fact the more you share and interact with others, the more you are rewarded.

2. Create ways to elevate a users status/social capital

Zynga doesn’t want you to just invite your friends to play, they want to enable you to do favors for your friends.  Mark Pincus’  (Zynga’s CEO) describes his goal’s in Wired:

One way to think about social capital is we’re all in a certain bucket with each other, and the lowest bucket is maybe you’ll accept a friend request, and the highest bucket is you’ll come over and help me move, or pick me up at the airport,” Pincus told the Wired Business Conference Tuesday. “The question is, is there something we can do to help you move buckets?

While it’s cool (sort of) that I level’d up in Frontierville, I’m not gonna tell my friends about it, but… if I can share with them some of the points I’ve accumulated then that’s a lot more compelling.  It no longer feels like spam, but instead that I’m helping them:

zynga7 300x220 8 Lessons Learned from Zynga about Virality

zynga10 299x148 8 Lessons Learned from Zynga about Virality

zynga11 280x300 8 Lessons Learned from Zynga about Virality

Applying this to a web business don’t just give a discount to the user who invites 5 of her friends to the service, let her pass on the discount to her friends (that’s something you really wanna share).

3. Assume you are gonna get it wrong at first

Don’t assume that your product is “the one.”  Zynga does a great job of experimenting and making decisions based on data.  I love this video of Pincus speaking at Stanford:

Towards the end he is asked if he could go back and share a lesson with himself when he was CEO of Tribes what would it be.

If I could do it all over again, I would have made Tribe a platform to test many ideas of social networking. We tried just one. Oh my god what the hell was I thinking? Just one? At our company we have several hundred tests going on every day and in every game. I would’ve done is made Tribe a platform to test every configuration

This is echo’d by others at Zynga:

Analysis, analysis, analysis. It’s been like that. [In traditional development] It’s just like, “Oh, it’s going to be a great experience,” and this and that. We’ll spend two years down a ship cycle, and, “Oops, I was wrong!”

So now it’s like, “If we do this, I think we can measure that, and here’s how we’re going to measure and tweak it later down the road…” We are an incredibly analytical organization, so we track just about everything. It’s the secret sauce behind all that stuff. There’s a lot of mathematics that go into it

That’s the magic behind what we do. Certain things we do will work, and others won’t. You try new ones, and A, B, C, D, E, F, G testing constant. (Source)

Several hundred A, B, C, D, E, F, G tests going on daily… :-o sweet bejeezus.

4. “Ghetto” test

You don’t actually have to build it to find out if it works.

In the last 5 minutes of the video above Pincus is asked what’s the best way to do market research. His answer – “Ghetto Test”. If someone wants to build, let’s say, a hospital simulator he creates an FB ad that says, “Ever wanted to run your own hospital?” which leads to a survey (or if it’s really ghetto a 404 page).

All Zynga has to do is track CTR and compare it to previous historical rates to get a pretty good idea of demand. I’ve heard a lot of people test demand for a product idea, and A/B test marketing copy using Adwords (you don’t care about the goal, just the intent).

The guys at Aardvark (another product I love) call this Wizard of Oz testing.

5. Kill products that aren’t performing

Focusing on products that don’t work funnels attention and energy away from ones that do.  Even if you’ve made substantial investments know when it’s time to let go.

We’ve actually made investments into some innovative games that were incredibly hardcore. If you look at Guild of Heroes, for example, we did roll that out. It was a version of Diablo built in Flash, and it wasn’t successful, and we didn’t support it any longer. (Source)

6. Create unexpected moments of delight

Surprise your users through game mechanics, humorous copy, badges, and easter eggs.  If you make them smile, they’ll tell they’re much more likely to come back and tell their friends.

One of the really fun and successful features we added is what we call the ‘Lonely Cow’ feature,” said Skaggs. “You can help find it a home, then somebody claims it. You’ll get a brown cow instead of the white cow you had before. Then you milk the brown cow and you get chocolate milk! That’s a ‘moment of delight,’ totally unexpected but cool (Source).

7. Leverage your size to cross promote like crazy

The best customer for one of your new products is an existing customer.  If you liked Farmville you’ll looooooooove Frontierville.

zynga5 8 Lessons Learned from Zynga about Virality

Only by leveraging their existing user base were they able to get 100,000 users on Frontierville’s first day.

8. Maximize Trends

Pincus says the web is about repeatable formulas and once you find something that works, it doesn’t break for a long, long time.  Think of LOLcats, rickrolling and Google.  Nothing that Zynga does is new, but they’ve executed on it tremendously well. They’ve found a formula that works and are bangin’ out hits at an astouning rate.

Certainly Zynga has it’s flaws: their games are boring, repetitive, compulsive and shallow and they’ve made shady deals to generate revenue.  But it’s undeniable that they’ve experienced enormous success due to the viral nature of their products.  Anything else I’ve missed in terms of reasons for Zyngas growth?  Lemme know in the comments.

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My IgniteMumbai talk on Happiness

watwilusay My IgniteMumbai talk on Happiness

Last weekend I gave a short talk as part of the inaugural meeting of IgniteMumbai. It was a really fun experience, the organizers did a great job and the crowd was really into it.

The talk was short, but the format made it difficult: 20 slides, 15 seconds apiece, slides automatically rotate. Not much room for fluff. The hardest part for me was picking a topic that would appeal to 70 strangers and fit within 5 minutes. I iterated through a bunch of topics but ended up speaking on happiness. Like everything else I feel I could’ve done a bit better but was pleased with the outcome.  The first slide didn’t make the vid:


Slides below:

What do you think?  How do you think the talk could’ve been better? You can catch the other 9 talks here.

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2010 Mobile Web Research: India and the World

We’re looking to develop mobile versions of the product suite I’m working on.  I know nothing about the mobile web and had some really basic questions.  Below is some research I did in Q&A format:

Q. How big is the mobile web?
A. According to Quantcast Mobile Web Trends Report:

  • In North America about 1.3% of all pageviews come from mobile browsers.  This is expected to grow a whole percentage point by the end of 2010.
  • Globally, Quantcast predicts growth from .95% to 1.8% in 2010.

Answers to the next set of questions from Admob Feb 2010 Mobile Report (please note this data is from AdMob’s network only and may not be indicative of the entire mobile web)

Q. Do smartphones generate more traffic then feature phones globally?
A. Mobile Traffic Share: 48% smartphones, 35% feature phones, 18% other (basically iPod Touch)

handset share by category 2010 Mobile Web Research: India and the World

Q. What smartphone OS is most popular globally?
A. 50% of all Smartphone traffic comes from iPhones (wow!), 24% Android, 18% Symbian, 4% RIM (surprisingly low)

Q. What featurephone is most popular globally?
A. 32% Samsung, 24% Nokia, 12% SonyEriccson, 10% Motorola

Q. What countries have the highest percentage of mobile web requests?
A. US (50%), India (5.9%), UK (4.2%), Indonesia (3.7%), Canada (2.9%)

country 2010 Mobile Web Research: India and the World

Answers to the next set of questions all from AdMob SE Asia Report (please note this data is from AdMob’s network only and may not be indicative of the entire mobile web)

Q. In India are smartphones or feature phones more popular for accessing the mobile web?
A. Smartphones – 66.3%, featurephones – 33.4%

Q. What are the most popular Smartphones in India?

smartphones india 2010 Mobile Web Research: India and the World

Q. What are the most popular featurephones in India?

featurephone india 2010 Mobile Web Research: India and the World

Additional resources which I found useful:

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Steal this Product Idea #2

35 2 Steal this Product Idea #2

So it’s 2010 and according to the 80′s movies I was obsessed with as a kid we should have hoverboards, flying cars, sexy robots, and violent but thrilling reality tv gameshows.

I can forgive scientists for failing to deliver on the important stuff, but at the very least, they should’ve come up with a really easy way for me to stay up to date on the music I love.

Here’s my problem: I love music, but downloading it is a pain in the ass.  Many times:

  • It’s not the right version (terrible sounding live album or kung-fu panda in croatian)
  • The quality sucks (camcorder rip)
  • It’s not tagged properly
  • It’s not what you are looking for (self-promoting rappers, porn or just plain weird)
  • It’s super slow (maybe that’s just cause I’m in India)
  • It’s “illegal”

So in order to satisfy my cravings for new music without the hassle, I buy albums on iTunes. The issue is most of the time I have no idea what to buy.  The only way for me to stay up to date is to manually browsing the iTunes store, explicitly ask my friends for recommendations, listen to internet radio and write down the tracks I like or browsing hype machine, pandora and other music sites and just sampling music.  That’s is a lot of work and I’m really lazy (which is why I don’t buy a lot of music).

I don’t want to go out and look for music, movies, games, books and apps I want stuff I like to find me.

Here’s what I’m thinking: create a service that lets you “follow” your favorite digital content: music, movies, games, apps, and books and receive notifications any time new related content is released:

  • Phase 1 – Music over Twitter:
    • Put in your favorite artist, band or genre (similar to iLike or Pandora)
    • Decide how and how often you’d like to receive notifications (as soon as it happens, daily, weekly) and how (tweets, @mentions, direct message)
    • Link to a summary page which shows an activity feed (new tracks, alubms, remixes, videos, etc…) for the music you have decided you like
    • Link to iTunes for affiliate sales
  • Phase 2 – Other content: Movies (Actor, Director, Genre), Games (Game, Genre, Studio), Books (Author, Publisher, Genre) and Apps
  • Phase 3 – Recommendations: Tie up with services like Netflix and Pandora to start making recommendations on content you may like
  • Phase 4 – Other Notifications: Email, SMS, Facebook, etc…
  • Phase 5 – Incentivize users to repost content, by sharing revenue

Great Scott! Music Hack Day is coming to SF in a few weeks.  Someone please build this, I’d use it.

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