The Power of Instant

Speed: the king of all features

As a founder, and product nerd-ball, I’m always looking for unlocks. Those features, ideas, or discoveries that really move the needle. When I find one, it’s like finding a huge nugget of gold. But much like the people who sifted through the silt in rivers, finding a gold nugget is few and far between.

These unlock moments are what I live for — they define for me what it means to be a product-oriented founder.

When someone says feature, they are often referring to things you can touch, see, or feel. However, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years is that feature is something, anything in fact, that moves the needle — e.g., it dramatically improves a key metric that has an as-direct-as-possible impact on the bottom line of the company.

Money.

A Golden Feature is one that truly creates an unlock moment. One that improves things by 1,000%, not 1%. Further, a Golden Feature is something that can be clearly measured, proven even. It’s something that once you see it and its impacts on the metrics, it is undeniable. The moment Golden Feature = TRUE, it changes the game, the paradox, and the competitive environment from a close race to an easy win.

And I like winning, especially when it’s a lay-up.

When it comes to speed, we don’t often think of it as a feature. But not only is it a feature, it’s the grand daddy Golden Feature of them all. When you consider the impacts of speed, think about how speed can be a game changer in almost every aspect of a product. Think about how all of the big players are concentrating on it now as a core part of their product offering.

Here are just a few examples where speed changed the game.

• Think about what happened to society as the speed of delivering information reached a new unlock. From writing, to the printing press, to the internet, each of these features unlocked a whole new era of humanity.
• Think about the unlocks that have occurred as the speed of buying reached new unlocks. From the days of trading, to currency, then checks, the debit cards, and finally now we have instant checkout with Amazon’s one-click checkout.
• Think about what happened to society as the speed of transporting goods has changed. It used to take months to get a product from China to the US, but now we have Amazon’s same-day delivery service?
• Think about what happened to society as the speed of learning changed. We used to have to go to a library (remember those?), then we got Google, and now we can just ask any speaker-shaped object around us for the answer to any question.
• Think about what happened to society as the speed of communication changed. Humanity started with word of mouth, then writing, then the pony express and then morse code. Could you imagine living without instantly being able to call your friends where ever they are with your mobile phone?

And that’s not the end of it. Speed has been, and will always be, one of the cornerstones of change. Imagine how speed could be a game changer in the future.

• How much would it impact the sales of electric vehicles if re-charging was instant?
• How much would it change your idea of travel if you could go from San Francisco to New York in 1 hour?
• What would happen if we changed the speed by which an average person could go to the moon from never, to an hour?
• Imagine if we could produce a new elephant in an hour? Better yet, what if we could produce a human in an hour?

So all of this important thinking got me to thinking about a topic that at first seems pretty boring. The speed a mobile web page can load.

It sounds pretty boring, but the data proves otherwise. Take a look at these shocking stats (by a research by a group called Soasta, The State of Online Retail Performance) that I paired with my own findings compiled by interacting with much of the top 500 brands. The Soasta findings are in bold while mine are in italics.

• 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load + none, yes that’s none, of the brands I interact with have a mobile web page that loads in under 3 seconds.
• For every 2 seconds of slowdown in loading time on a mobile phone, brands’s conversion rates go down by 26%+ the majority of brands I’ve interacted with have a mobile page loading that loads in 6 seconds or more — that’s a total impact of 78% loss in conversion just from load times.
• For every 2 seconds of slowdown in loading time on a mobile phone, brands’ bounce rate gets worse by 102%+ the majority of brands I’ve interacted with average 60%–80% bounce rate on their mobile landing pages.
• For any time, yes that’s any time at all, associated with downloading an app, bounce rates for brands go through the roof. The majority of brands I’ve interacted with have download abandonment rates between 40% and an astonishing 99%.

So what happens if there is a dramatic increase in load time? What happens to these numbers if load times goes to zero?

That’s what Google and Facebook have been asking themselves now for a couple of years. Both Google and Facebook have made significant inroads when it comes to speed, even as they run away with the lion’s share of digital ad spend. Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Facebook’s Instant Articles represent two ideas for creating one-click-level innovation to content consumption.

Google AMP requires you to build a version of your site using their own specifications — what Google considers to be the lightest-weight website possible — and place it at a separate address. Google finds those versions and serves them up to mobile visitors who find the site on Google search. And the positive results have already been pouring in, for both view-ability and click-through rates. And so far, more than 70 ad tech companies, 25 analytics companies and 13 video platforms have created AMP-enabled products, with more being announced all the time.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s Instant Articles provide an ultra-quick loading experience for publisher content by bringing content and assets directly from a publisher’s feed into its own servers, then serving the stripped-down, high-speed reading experience to mobile users. A simpler solution than AMP, but one that keeps mobile visitors inside the walls of Facebook’s curated experience.

So why do I care about all this crap?

Notice my company’s product is called Instant Apps right? Well I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but we’ve been able to achieve a truly instant load time on Snapchat and as low as 50ms on Facebook and Twitter. The kicker is, those load times are with a full app experience, interactivity, and content that includes video, animated gifs, and hi-res pictures. The results are stunning. We don’t just see small improvements to bounce, time-on-brand, and conversion — we see dramatic and game changing results.

So here are the questions I’m asking myself.

• What if brands got rid of their landing pages and moved their experiences to apps that load instantly from inside of Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat? What good are native apps to brands if Instant Apps existed?
• What if apps were just the beginning? What if we instant-ized articles, ads, stories, AR, VR? What if all immersive experiences were simply instant?
• What if the entire Internet inverted on itself and moved from brands trying to get customers to go to a monolithic digital storefront to a world where brands have a distributed presence of bite-sized experiences that instantly loaded within the apps that everyone already uses?

Now that would be a real needle-mover.