Understanding the user behaviour
When we Launched Our Reach App Beta Version..
After tapping in the idea that people always like to discover what is going on in other’s mobile phones, the next step for us (the four founders of Reach) was to give shape to their idea and present it to the world.
In my previous blog, I mentioned how we four started making the prototype of our first version. Glad we could get through this:
We gave this version to our friends, family and relatives and got a validation that they are liking the concept a lot. We decided to tweak our designs a bit. After much speculation, hard work and many experiments with the peer-to-peer technology, the beta version of Reach app was launched on 23rd March 2015. This version was also released on the Google play store, with Google supporting the technology. See, how we improved —
As we were not certain if the peer-to-peer technology would be acceptable to people or not, and whether people would be comfortable sharing their data with others, we decided to launch the app only for sharing and accessing audio files (as everyone loves sharing music). But the one thing bothering us was that users might not be comfortable getting music on mobile data. This was one of the biggest concerns plaguing us. Surprisingly, data proved us wrong. 90% of our users were accessing music files while there were on Wifi. Though, we came out with a solution — People can now disable their uploads when they are on mobile data.
Another dilemma which we had to counter was that people are custom-used to playing audio files on their default music player. We had to do something so that users would not require switching to their default player when they would want to listen to music files that they had not downloaded on the Reach app. In order to overcome this, we brought the audio library on the app itself. But human nature does not like applying logic for something that it is habitual to. And so the matter remained: even after having the audio library on the app itself, we observed many people switching to their default music players to access audio stored in their phones. (Call it popular behaviour or instinct.) Though, a good sign was- 10% of our total user base started using Reach as their default music player. We learnt — probably, we need to give users a brilliant player user experience to enable that shift at a faster pace.
Another interesting incident which helped us learn a lot about human nature (and about how to execute our plans of action) happened when we were having dinner one night (by that time the team had grown to 5–6 people, and we had also got an office on hire). In that amazing moment, we discovered that users of the Reach app were increasing per second; at one instant there were only 150 users, the number then went up to 500, then to 2000, and so on.
The whole team was so spell-bound that none of us knew what to do, and just kept gazing on the screen. The number of the users was increasing so significantly because Reach had launched a referral campaign of providing some PayTM cash to the users, in order to build a network. Though the number of users was expected to increase, what was not expected was the fast rate at which the number was going up. Around 35k new users came around, and approximately one lakh file plays happened on the app at the same time. As a result of such a large number of users, the server went down, and the campaign had to be called off within two days of its launch. This led to some bad rating of the app (and it came down to 4.1 from 4.8). Nonetheless, most of the old users and even 30% of the new users retained the app, as Reach is beautiful, and one of its kind. Majorly, the users were frustrated because they could not get their money. Some even used to call us at 3 am, complaining that they had not received their money. None of us slept for almost 6–7 days, calling as many customers as we could, and explaining to them what had gone wrong.
Though users finally understood why the mishap happened with the app, and came back to using the product again, we still had a long way to go. Do you know what we did? We ran a referral campaign again.
Stay tuned to the blog in order to know what happened next.
