The 3 Big Product Decisions Behind Rithm

We launched Rithm about three months ago and have been amazed by the uptake and response so far. I wanted to share a few of the key product decisions we made in creating a platform for mobile music messaging.

1. Beyond Recommendations

Rithm was inspired by the behavior we saw in our social recommendations app, MavenSay. Amidst all the noise in our data, the signal on usage of music was crystal clear — we were seeing hundreds of thousands of songs posted and played every month. In creating a recommendations community, we had built a successful social music product kind of by accident.

The most natural evolution from MavenSay was to create a platform focused on social music recommendations. We spent a few days talking about this and even wireframed what it might look like. But at the same time we felt it didn’t capture what we were observing on MavenSay — people connecting over music; people posting an old song and tagging an old friend. Even in a recommendations app, the use cases for sharing songs went beyond recommendations.

That’s when the conversation shifted towards a platform for “Music as Communication”. Below are a few of the emails that started it. We were compelled by the expressive power of music and the social gap created in digital music by everyone else’s focus on discovery and streaming. We felt this could even be a more natural way for people to share and promote music. The idea of personalizing songs with videos, photos and dancing emojis came quickly after this. We saw a big opportunity and leapt at the challenge of creating it.

2. Music Social Network or Music Messaging Platform?

Should Rithm be a public feed with followers, following and posts (like Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram) or should it be a private messaging platform with an inbox, friends and messages (like Snapchat, Kik and SMS)? We decided on a messaging platform for two related reasons:

• Feed Fatigue

Building and iterating on MavenSay, we learned a lot of lessons about the challenges of retaining users with a social feed of content. Peoples’ time for checking and browsing a feed is limited. In order to win some of that time, you need to offer an experience that is competitive with established social juggernauts (in terms of quality of content but also volume and frequency of posts) and become part of peoples’ downtime habits. This is a long and steep road paved with a lot of user fatigue and skepticism.

• The Power of a Message

A message is different from a feed. You don’t need people to habitually check it in their downtime — they check it when another user pulls them in by sending them content. Anyone whose SMS notifications are set to vibrate knows what I’m talking about. There’s a great statistic that says 90% of text messages are opened within the first three minutes. That’s crazy, and we loved the idea that if we could create a fun and meaningful platform for communication, our users would be the ones bringing each other back (and they do).

3. RIP Playlist (Do one thing really well)

Just like in writing, in product design you sometimes need to kill your darlings. In the transition from MavenSay to Rithm, our most precious darling was the Playlist. The ability to make a Playlist from your friends’ recommended songs was MavenSay’s most popular feature. Naturally, we thought it was a must-have feature for Rithm. We even built it into the private beta release before seeing something surprising: nobody (including us) was using it.

Even worse, it was confusing people about what the app was for and where it fit into users’ music product needs. We went back to the core concept behind Rithm — it was about music as communication; not curation, discovery or consumption. The best mobile products are the ones that stay disciplined about doing one thing really well and resist the urge to do a bunch of related things just because they can. In order to deliver a simple mobile music messaging experience, we had to stay focused on features that supported that…this meant killing our darling Playlist and Rithm has been simpler and more engaging ever since.

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We have lots of ideas for making Rithm better and many of those come from our users. Please tell us what you think (feedback@rithm.me) and we’ll be sure to keep you posted on what we’re up to next.