Overview
“Remini is a mobile app that lets you relive, share and visualize your best moments to help you stay connected with your life”
Remini’s premise was simple. From defining the vision to the actual user experience; it was always centered around 3 points:
- Relive your best moments in context
- Share them to create meaningful conversations with friends
- Visualize and build-up the stories of your friendships
At onboarding — All that was asked from users was to sign-up using Facebook and choose to connect additional photo sources (Instagram & Camera Roll). Remini would then automatically take care of the rest by processing all the moments that represent a user’s life.
This would in turn lead them to the very first Remini feature:
Relive
At activation, a user would land straight on the “Relive” tab.
The core of Remini was built around the idea that the best way to relive our life is when it happens by surprise.
This is particularly true when it relates to our current context and can be linked to the present, keeping us connected with our lives and in touch with who we are.
We intended to offer just that by letting you rediscover your best moments at the right time.
Here are some examples:
The exciting part was the engaging interface: Keep swiping down to refresh and new moments that fit your context will keep appearing to better surprise you:
- By Date: Wake up with a daily throwback of what you were doing on this exact day in previous years.
- By Friends: As you hang out with friends for a while, Remini would resurface a moment you share with that specific friend.
- By Location: As you spend time by a particular spot, Remini would help you rediscover your moments that happened nearby.
But what’s the point of reliving your life if you don’t get to share that feeling with friends? What defines us above anything else is our social interactions with the world.
Most of all, Remini was a social app; which leads us to our second main feature:
Share
The point of reliving our best moments was to interact and create conversations with the people who matter. Remini was designed around the promise of offering you a way to feel a little closer to the people you care about most.
Every time — when reliving a moment from his past, a user would be given the option to share it with his friends:
Since context was a major part of what we were offering, our typical line of thought was as follows:
“As I relive my past in context; I naturally wish to share my frame of mind as it happened to me at the time”.
In that sense, Remini was all about bridging the gap between our past and our present, by connecting the emotions from our past experiences to our present context.
When you shared a moment on Remini, friends who were part of it would get notified to let them know “you shared a moment they’re part of” — Re-engaging them so they could interact around that moment, or many others.
So on top of surfacing your best moments at the right time, Remini really was a tool to help you reconnect with the people who mattered in your life.
With that in mind, part of keeping track of who we are, is knowing to whom we owe our present identity; which leads us to our 3rd main feature on Remini:
Visualize
We are all defined by the relationships we built over the years. They say a lot about our experiences and are the foundation of who we are.
So far, no one has placed enough emphasis on this — Our goal was to change that.
As you relived and shared your best moments, the idea was to let you seamlessly build-up the stories of your friendships and visualize your life in a whole new way.
When sharing a photo, a user would always be asked to tag his friends who were part of that moment. This served a double purpose:
- First, of course to guarantee that your friends don’t miss out on content they’re a part of.
- Secondly but most importantly, to gradually fill-up your profile.
Your profile on Remini was essentially made up of “Friendship Albums”. Those albums were created automatically simply based on the tags attached to your photos.
They portrayed your life based on the relationships you built over the years. Each album represented a friend, and opening one would take you to a feed of photos shared between you and that specific friend.
Think of it as a “see relationship” feature but with an emphasis on pictures exclusively, presented in the form of “boards”.
The more you and your friends shared photos from the Relive tab, the more you were seamlessly collaborating and building up the stories of your friendships together – All done for you naturally, with little or no conscious thought.
Consequently, if a photo had no tags; then it would simply be moved to the “My Moments” album which represented a user’s individual memories.
Potential
We thought we had quite a few things going for us:
Activation
Every great product starts with a great on-boarding experience. We understood that early on and did our best to make use of the advantages that building on APIs can provide.
What got us really going was the realization that we didn’t have to face the chicken & egg problem that most social products usually deal with.
The rules of building social products are changing. It’s important to understand this shift to build social products that can effectively gain traction on the Internet today. The connection-first model is no longer as effective as it used to be. As the social web grows, and a larger number of social products compete for our attention, we are seeing a dramatic shift towards the content-first model.
What made Remini such a compelling product was that to some extent, we didn’t fall into either of those 2 categories.
From a user’s perspective:
I download Remini, sign-up with Facebook and link my Instagram account and Camera Roll. After going through the typical permission requests and brief walkthroughs, I can directly and effortlessly start enjoying the benefits of the app.
In other words: I don’t have to go through the learning curve or effort of uploading content — On Remini, content directly comes to me.
With time, I realize that the app is actually delivering on its promise of letting me contextually relive my best moments. I can then start spreading the word to enjoy more social interactions and improve my overall experience.
This meant that activation on Remini was as fast as it could get, provided of course that users happened to have a photo that fit their context at the time of sign-up — A situation that proved to be almost always favorable (thanks to all the existing data provided by the APIs).
Engagement
Engagement on Remini came in different forms. A few that made us stand apart:
We anticipated early on that down the line, our one metric that matters (OMTM) should be average number of shares per user.
In light of this, we made certain that sharing on Remini could not be easier. As mentioned earlier, activation was unique because users didn’t need to worry about creating content since it naturally came to them, provided the context was right.
This statement holds true for sharing as well. Since content comes to you, the only effort required of you as a user was clicking on that share button.
Eliminating friction from this crucial step helped kick-start engagement in 2 ways:
1-First, by sharing, you’re effectively creating new engaging content to consume on the news-feed.
2-Second, frequent sharing meant albums would get filled-up at a faster rate, which in turn lead to more investment over time from users, hence more stickiness. This also meant a user would have more incentive to visit friends’ profiles and explore the evolution of their own albums.
The key to making sure fresh content was always available for sharing was collaboration on albums between friends, either by adding new photos or by filling up the gaps on existing ones. This would lead to new content being resurfaced on the Relive tab and therefore more variability.
As you might recall — 3 different photo sources were used for Remini:
1) Facebook 2) Instagram 3) Camera Roll.
The benefit was that the data attached to each photos meant that users didn’t have to customize their pictures from scratch.
But here’s the twist: Each source had its own missing links for resurfacing your past.
- By Date: A moment could come from all 3 sources since all have the date information attached.
- By Friends: A moment could only originate from Facebook having the necessary tags attached.
- By Location: In that case, a moment would mainly come from your phone camera roll due to the pre-requisite of having GPS coordinates — Or in some other cases from Facebook and Instagram (if a photo already had a venue attached to it).
The benefit of using Remini was that those missing links would get filled-up seamlessly at the point of sharing.
To clarify further: As a user, when I share a photo, I choose to fill-up the missing information such as the people who were with me, or the venue where it happened.
As I do that, not only am I making sure that this photo is later brought back to me in multiple ways; but I am also ensuring that my friends who are part of that moment also get to benefit from my initiative. The same holds true for my friends when they share a moment I am part of.
This meant that at scale, once I reach a critical amount of connections, I am making sure that fresh content will always be available to me by way of a collaboration on content between myself and my friends.
The benefits were also clear further down the line:
Even if I’m the first of my group of friends to join Remini, I can still add new moments or edit information on existing ones.
That way, by tagging people in these photos, I can see to it that once my friends join me at a later stage, they still get to enjoy that extra value I created for them.
Retention
External triggers on Remini were simply push notifications. As obvious as this sounds, if you stop for a moment and think about it, they’re actually the most effective tool app developers have at their disposal.
Prior to the usual social notifications such as news-feed likes and comments, friend requests and so on — One should look at that external trigger that comes very early in the user’s life cycle. On Remini, it was mainly based around the “Relive” part.
The idea was to leverage users’ data to send timely, relevant and often personalized push notifications — Creating that spark of curiosity that would improve the service’s open rate.
Internal triggers however, can be better explained from a user’s viewpoint:
“With repeated use of Remini, I develop the habit of regularly checking it out because I know it will always offer me value relevant to my current context.”
No matter where I am, who I’m with or what day of the year it is — I will always be curious to find out if Remini has something in store for me.
In that sense, without a decent amount of variability, Remini was pretty much a useless service — We therefore made sure to work on our recommendations for the sake of offering elements of surprise.
Referral
Referrals on any kind of product are essential for organic growth. Being aware of that from the day we set off to build Remini, made us always aggressively look for creative growth hacks that would ultimately improve our viral cycle time.
As previously indicated, albums on Remini were created seamlessly when a user shared a photo. As a user, the more I shared and tagged my friends, the more I got to create albums that showed my relationships with those friends.
Once I understood the added value that Remini had to offer, I could start creating connections — An action that was made easily accessible to me on my profile.
I could simply tap on the invite icon to let my friends know of Remini, or tap on the add icon to create connections with my friends who already joined.
Vision
The vision was to have Remini become “the place for your life”. The one stop shop to contemplate your life moments.
We could say we fell into that “photo aggregator” category — We did however believe we had our own secret sauce to add.
The underlying structure and philosophy of Remini was to address that need through a captivating and fun experience, albeit in a deeply long-term thinking manner.
By focusing only on the services that matter and by simplifying the process of filling information gaps on photos through a collaborative process between groups of friends.
Experience
Our Failure
Ultimately, our failure could be boiled down to one main reason:
Friends List with FB API V2.0
On Remini, as I relived and shared my life, I could tag all the friends who were part of a moment, whether they were on the app or not, for the sake of adding photos to my friendship albums.
This could be done thanks to access to your full friends list via Facebook’s API, which also allowed for these photos to be automatically added to these friends’ profiles once they joined Remini.
Indeed, when we first set out to build Remini, this did not pose us any kind of problems as we were working with the early API version.
But all of this changed on April 30th 2014, when Facebook introduced a first major update in 8 years to their Open Graph API. The new API rules only gave us access to a list of friends who were already on the app.
Strictly speaking: I would not be able to start building up my friendship albums without my friends being on board. I would now have to wait for all my close friends to join me on the app in order to enjoy the full value that Remini had to offer me.
Simply, this went against everything our product was built around, preventing us from going further.
Thanks. for reading, hope it was interesting ✌️ If you like what you just read, please recommend 💚 this post so that others might stumble upon it.
