First launch of the app Singlebeep
I first launched my app Singlebeep at Sep 23, 2016. It was a failure, at least until before I changed my business model.
The service is live for slightly more than 2 days, there are also many times I have to tune the matching mechanism and hope for a better matching rate for people to talk to and send out a broadcast or something. It didn’t work.
The app is an anonymous chat app. It helps you to find strangers to talk to nearby but eventually you should be able to find anyone interesting in any places in the world. It would be extremely cool to talk to Egyptions about the pyramids and to Icelanders about the Aurora.
My initial thinking is that if you have so many users online at any instant and then you can match them very easily.
I failed to take into consideration of a few things:
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You just cannot match people anytime they’re online. Suppose you have a pool of 100 users. After you match those people you would create 50 rooms. And then when the next user comes inside the pool the pool would only have 1 user. And even if you wait for a few seconds you would have a pool of less than 100 users because some of the previous matched users stop using the app and some of them are still being engaged in a conversation with the match. Eventually you would have a shrinking pool that no one wants to spend any time wasting lives on the platform because they kept being matched with old people they talk to.
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people don’t check push notifications at the same time. Say both A, B are matched and we send them a push notification. A sees the push notification and checks the chatting and see B is still waiting. And maybe 5 minutes later when B starts using the chat app A has already left the chatroom. We lose so many great installs this way.
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Minimum variable product. Apparently the app is too minimum. Althought there is a demand for people to talk to strangers the bad matching mechanism and the horrible user interface gives people a bad user experience and a reason to uninstall the app quickly.
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Side note: The cost to advertise on Facebook is getting too expensive nowadays. in 2011-2013 the average cost to install an app when you advertise on Facebook is about 0.1 USD. Recently when I check the website, the cost to advertise on Facebook under the dating category is over 3 USD per installation when you advertise over the weekend. So advertising the way to the top cannot work anymore.
You can also like my page here. I will continue to update it in the future just need to pivot a bit now.
https://www.facebook.com/Singlebeep-674356802719541/?fref=ts
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references:
23 Sep 2016