Now what?

“Our vision was to be reality TV celebrities”

Here are some of my notes from Justin Kan’s talk about the making of SocialCam at tonight’s Lean Startup Circle. They don’t cover all the things Justin discussed, just stuff that caught my attention. Full video of the talk is available here.

History:

• They started with a live broadcast app for justin.tv, but nobody on their mobile was watching the videos live. People’s time of posting and the audience’s watching would rarely ever naturally sync up.
• They noticed mobile users were only going live for a few mins at a time (vs. longer duration for desktop users)…and the type of content they were creating (with family/friends in them) wasn’t suitable to be shared to a global audience. Users weren’t comfortable sharing family/friend videos with youtube. This is interesting because some people are wondering which sharing dynamic will win out, 1:1 or 1:many - but I think it really depends on the type of content being created/shared that will determine which structure is best.
• The Justin.tv team was so quick to build stuff without any proven market or need that it took them a long time to actually discover a “real world” problem (ie: other people wanted to broadcast their life, not just watch Justin’s).

Building SocialCam:

• When it came time to build Socialcam they applied their lessons learned from Justin.tv. First up, they didn’t start building stuff until they had specs. Another interesting point - you don’t often hear about spec / requirements as part of today’s startup development, but it’s still relevant and can help save time down the road.
• Justin himself was a self proclaimed shitty coder and decent web developer…and he didn’t know jack about mobile development.
• His lack of knowledge about mobile development turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it forced him to use his time thinking about what the app was going to be about…to define a mission statement for the app’s purpose. In general, they wanted to build a “social camera”, hence the name.
• Their team consisted of:

-2 iphone engineers
-1 android engineer
-1 product designer
-1 backend engineer
-1 project manager, aka cheerleader / editor (Justin)
-Other peeps on helped with marketing, server set up, etc…
-Total of 6 full-time people over 4 months

• Their one designer worked on both OS’s and the website, which in hindsight was probably asking for too much, spreading design work across three platforms.
• After defining the app’s purpose, they thought about what features they’d need to enable the app’s goals and deliver the type of engagement they wanted.
• Their specs covered:

-specific features and how’d they’d work
-user flow mockups
-a rough cut of screens
-then higher fidelity versions
-and then development came in at this point

• Spec/requirement writing took about the first quarter of total project time
• Some of their keys to getting the product out quickly:

-they invested heavily in writing out a spec
-they had everyone on the team use the product a lot. they did a weekly team meeting where everyone on the team had to contribute a video, and the whole team watched the best ones.
-they had their prod designer engaged early, providing lots of revisions/high fidelity mocks.

Marketing:

• When doing Justin.tv, they believed that PR didn’t matter. Early on, press was positive cause of their unique story. When attention wore off or turned negative, they didn’t really do much to address it.
• With Socialcam, they started to write blog posts about the product even before development was done…and submitted them to hackernews and techcrunch.
• They put together a calendar of 8 weeks before launch. each week had multiple promos going on. 50% got no attention at all. But overall they were successful at generating a lot of buzz before launch.
• They had expensive promos and cheap promos. Some of the expensive ones: planned to give out a trip to fiji for best video at SXSW, made expensive promo video (which he really thought was wasted money). They had a launch party, but in a twist, people at the party had to use the app while at the party.
• They have a running tally of how much money they’ve wasted over the years.

Distribution:

• One of their key product iterations was around tagging.
• In general, they wanted to have FB photos-esque tagging for videos, but at first it wasn’t a required step.
• Making tagging users in the video a required step had a huge impact on distribution. Users could discover the app by being notified that they were tagged in a video. That’s how they were able to build distribution into the app experience organically.

Product vision:

• With Justin.tv, they didn’t think too deeply about their overall vision. They weren’t trying to ride or create the “live video” wave. Instead, their “vision was to become reality TV celebrities.”

Android vs. iPhone development:

• 1 developer on android, 2 on iPhone  (based on who was available at their company).
• Their iPhone design was better than Android’s cause that’s what their designer used as his primary phone.
• For android, it was easier to get stuff out. Easier to do beta releases and testing through android.
• But iPhone feature development has actually pulled ahead, despite Android’s easier test/release cycle.
• iPhone usage is still pretty dominant (60-75% of downloads)