Building an SMS-first service for men
The Origin of Ask Alexis
A month ago at Neo, Nicole Rufuku and I started looking for cooking resources targeted at men. 103 million men in the United States cook 30 minutes or more each day but most cooking products are aimed at women. Despite these numbers, big, invested brands were telling us men don’t cook. It felt like a classic case of The Innovators Dilemma; since the businesses were built on the philosophy that only women cook, they couldn’t see past them to identify changing social norms.
From there we started exploring other lifestyle products for men. GQ has been a leader in men’s lifestyle over the last few decades but we found their digital product offerings and innovation efforts uninspiring. Esquire is doing interesting things, especially around Esquire TV, but they still fall short on digital products. From there we had to ask, if the old media companies are using the old media playbook, what would a men’s lifestyle company look like if it was invented today? A whiteboarding session later, Ask Alexis was born.
Ask Alexis is an SMS service for giving advice to the modern man. It’s like having an editor at GQ in your pocket. Want to know a great place to take a first date? Ask Alexis. Need to know what bottle of wine to order? Ask Alexis. Need a brunch spot that can accommodate your girlfriend’s dog? Ask Alexis.
Building Ask Alexis
Our idea was to reinvent men’s advice in an on demand modern world, but first we wanted to know if this was a product people wanted. The next step was to launch a small experiment to see if men found it interesting. A two-person team consisting of a Product Manager and an Engineer got started on our first experiment; we would sign up 5 men and observe how and if they used the service. We would give the experiment one week and evaluate it on a weekly basis. 3 days later we had a homepage, a phone number and a simple admin dashboard along with a plan to answer the questions from these 5 men.
Then, as we began recruiting that initial group of customers, Ask Alexis hit Hacker News and a few hours later it was on Product Hunt. We were prepared for 5 men and overwhelmed with hundreds of them on our first day. We prepared a strategy for answering each question quickly, with high quality and a personal touch.
Growth has not stopped, engagement is great and retention is promising. We validated a lot of our assumptions and have operationalized Ask Alexis, adding content strategy and community managers to the team increasing the quality of our responses. We continue to run experiments against our riskiest assumptions while staying focused on growth.
In my next post, I’ll talk about the challenges and lessons learned from designing, building and operating an SMS first app.
Until then, give Alexis a try!
