Seeing the Golden Gate Bridge 75th Anniversary fireworks live was absolutely incredible but watching them again with the soundtrack on top is also amazing.
What are your favorite strategies and tactics around launching a product?
A few months ago I did a talk in Japan around the topic of launching a product. The goal was to discuss different actionable strategies and tactics that will maximize the impact of the launch.
Impact doesn’t just mean “how many users sign up”. It also means what is learned from launching.
I’ve been asked by True Ventures to teach a class on this topic at True University. The general framework of the talk is this:
- Setting the Right Goals
- Choosing the Right Metrics to Track
- Visualizing Metrics (dashboards)
- Promoting the Launch (Press strategies, baked-in-virality strategies)
- Gathering User Feedback (inside and outside the product)
The examples I use in the talk are based around my experience launching 5 products over the past year. While I could just deliver the same talk, I wanted to involve more members of the community to contribute to the insights that will be passed along to a group of about 60 founders and entrepreneurs.
I’d love your stories (either emailed, posted in comments below, or answered over at Hacker News). I’m looking for more examples to include in my talk and potentially a future TechCrunch post.
Have you every done anything that worked really well (or totally failed)? What have you done that has allowed you to maximize the launch? What’s the best way you’ve learned from your users? What are your favorite strategies and tactics around launching?
Q:Hello there, i love your webbygram, is there anyway to share my Instagram gallery to public (for non-instagram users)?
Yes, that’s been added. As long as you log in with Instagram, you can share it with anyone!
Q:Hello and excuse for using this mediumhow do I enter Webbygram to view the comments made about my work??thanks Jorge Rosensvaig.
You just need to sign into Webbygram with an instagram account and then go to the photo you want to see the comments on.
Uber Experiments With Lower-Priced Taxis
A few days ago, Uber announced that it was going to start an experiment with getting existing taxis involved. I was absolutely thrilled to hear the news.
While I’m a fan of Uber and know people on the team, I rarely feel like I need the full Uber experience. I split Uber’s value offer into the following buckets:
- Uber makes it easy to find the closest driver
- Uber guarantees someone will actually pick you up
- Uber gives you a car with a clean interior and usually calm, responsible driver
- Uber makes paying easy and frictionless
I detailed this out a bit more in a post I did for TechCrunch called Reduce Friction, Increase Happiness. In it, I summarized my opinion of Uber with:
Uber has reduced all the friction. What was a tedious process before is a seamless, pleasurable interaction. The most important thing Uber provides its users is that frictionless experience. The fact that it’s a black car means it’s generally an aesthetically nicer experience (and with SF Taxis, that can make a big difference), but that’s a small detail compared to the other benefits of using the service.
So it’s clear that what I truly value about Uber isn’t the fancy, it’s the easy. It’s knowing that when I order a car, someone will pick me up. I dont even care about the payment stuff. I really just care about the reliability of the ride.
You don’t get this reliability with cabs in San Francisco, which is why Uber is such a hit here. But that doesn’t mean I want cabs to go away and be replaced with higher priced town cars. I love disruption, but I dont want the existing system replaced. I want it improved.
It’s because of this that I’ve been excited for apps like Cabulous and Hailo to exist. But while these apps have the potential to make a big impact, they haven’t delivered yet. They still haven’t nailed the “guarantees someone will actually pick you up” aspect. And that’s all I really care about.
So, this is why I’m really excited to hear about Uber getting into the taxi business. If they’re app, rating system, and user base can quickly create a community of reliable cabs, then I dont think I’d ever use another taxi app again. I can’t wait for it to come to SF.
Uber, put me on your SF beta list!
I’ve always had a strong emotional relationship with large bodies of water. I’ve naturally gravitated living close to them (Chesapeake Bay in Baltimore, Lake Michigan in Chicago, and the Pacific in San Diego and San Francisco).
Thanks to Elle for sending this over.
Source: skillshare
Introducing Webbygram, my vision of how Instagram on the web should feel.
Synopsis: I’m tired of Instagram not having a simple web app. So I built one.
I’m a huge, huge, huge Instagram fan. As a user, I’ve been enjoying the app for well over a year. I’ve posted 750 photos. I’ve probably made at least as many likes and I comments. I love the app.
As a developer, I’ve also been a long time fan. About a year ago, I launched PhotoPile, a simple, fun way to view Instagram photos on the web. Then, I launched MorningPics, a way to refresh old memories through a daily email. Both apps have done well and are completely built on top of the Instagram platform.
In fact, PhotoPile has done so well that Drew from The Next Web wrote a piece about it in January titled “This app nails what your Instagram profile should look like”, even saying:
The folks who made PhotoPile would be a good group of designers to bring in [to build the web version of Instagram].
Of course I was flattered since I did all the design and engineering work, but I actually disagreed with Drew. Although PhotoPile is a fun experience, there are a bunch of reasons why it wouldn’t make sense as the official Instagram web app. So I’ve been patiently waiting for Instagram to finally release their own.
Several other apps have built Instagram on the web experiences, including Webstagram. Although they’ve all been interesting, none of them resemble enough of the design and product ethos that exists in the native apps.
Instagram is put on a pedestal for being “mobile first”, meaning they launched on mobile before they launched on the web. But that term isn’t “mobile only”. Unfortunately, that’s how Instagram has stayed. They provide some very rough web views of individual photos, but that’s it.
Some would say that Instagram doesn’t need a web presence. I disagree. When I click an Instagram link on Twitter, I want to have a slightly similar experience than I would within the app. I want to be able to like the photo, or comment, or dig deeper and see what other photos that user has posted. I don’t need to be able to change settings, or even see my own home screen. I just want to interact with posted photos.
Path has managed to create a beautiful “mobile first” product with a beautiful accompanying web view. They didn’t port the whole app to the web. They just brought the important interaction points. I brought this up on Twitter the other day.
.@Path proved you can be mobile first and still have a light, interactive, and useful web presence. Wish @Instagram would follow their lead.
— Brenden Mulligan (@mulligan) April 13, 2012
But instead of just continuing to bitch about it, I’m going to try to contribute. I did this a few months ago with Uber’s UI, and it ended up being a useful exercise when the company actually improved the UI.
the updated surge pricing screen seems to take into account some feedback from OneSheet creator Brenden Mulligan on his blog after the New Year’s Eve debacle.
Source: GigaOm
So I sat back and thought, what would the official Instagram Web UI look like? The result: Webbygram. A silly name, I know, but who cares.
It allows you to see a photo, like it, comment on it, and browse around. That’s it. It’s not supposed to completely mirror the Instagram native apps (so you wont see account settings). It’s meant to bring the important interaction points to a web interface.
Here are some of the rules I used when building it:
- It’s all about the images. Make them bold and beautiful.
- The colors and assets should be consistent between the app and the web. The icons are from Instagram. The brown background is from their website (which I used because there is no background in the app). The link colors are the same as within the app.
- The format should feel similar to the app. Although the web browser has greater width, I think one of the joys of Instagram is scrolling through one photo at a time. So I used the centered format to keep this interaction.
- Photos can have their own page. Within the app, photos are just part of a stream. Because it’s the web, they all can have their own page. This is, after all, what people link to on social networks.
- Photo lists can be simplified. Because the photos get their own page, I used this as an opportunity to simplify the photo lists. I moved all the likes, comments, and captions onto the photo pages (except liking on the lists - see #7). This allows for the photo lists to focus more on the actual photos (see #1).
- Make users more human. Because the web has more space, I wanted to make the contributors (likers, commenters) more visual and tangible. In the app, it just lists usernames. On Webbygram, it shows their photo and lists their full name if available.
- Liking photos from the list has to be easy. The double tapping in the app is so simple, that I wanted to make liking a photo on the web just as easy. When you hover over a photo on a list, you reveal a button that allows you to easily like the photo.
- The interface has to be minimal. The native apps are beautifully minimal, I wanted the web app to be as well. I tried to add the least amount of information as possible to each interaction.
- Photo metadata has to be browsable. In the native app, you can click a username and go to that user’s page, or click a hashtag and see all the photos with that hashtag. This is one of the biggest deficiencies of the Instagram web experience today. On Webbygram, everything is browsable. You can keep discovering new photos as you click usernames, user photos, hashtags, and soon, locations.
- It has to be simple.
So, with all this, I present Webbygram. It was a fun project to build that used a bunch of the codebase of PhotoPile with a whole new front end. (Another rule was that I needed to build it in under 12 hours). Hopefully you like it.
I fully expect members of the community to tear it apart, tell me why I’m wrong, etc.. If you do, please link to it in a comment, so all the discussion around this is centralized.
Hat-tips to: Ryan Marshall for writing the code that allows users to actually like and comment on photos. Danny Trinh for the Path web UI, which I used for inspiration. Elle Luna for helping me find a name. Instagram for building a phenomenal app and community.
It wasn’t long ago that the billion dollar Instagram boys set out to debunk 8 startup myths to a room full of Stanford Mayfield fellows. At the time of this video, the service had about 4 million users. Earlier this week they announced having added that many users in just a matter of days. My how time flies.
But the advice and insights shared here really are timeless. From the “bar exam”; i.e., a test to see whether you’re able to explain your product to a friend in a bar without losing their attention, to the 6ft tall 1 yr. old; ie, scaling up a company before it’s ready or needed, there are some real gems in here.
As they talk it seems their primary takeaways are to believe in yourself, trust your instincts and build the product that only you can build. But most importantly, just start.
Priceless advice and required weekend viewing.
Source: brycedotvc
Caines Arcade: Kid from East LA builds arcade out of cardboard. Flash Mob arrives. Joy ensues.
Micah Baldwin told me about this a few days ago, but I forgot to watch it. Then tonight Crystal English tweeted about it. It’s wonderful. Watch it.
