With Over 20 Million Downloads, What Is The Smartphone App CocoPPa’s Next Move?
by IGNITION Staff
Besides camera apps and mobile games, the only Japanese-born apps that have passed 20 million downloads are the messenger app LINE and customization community app CocoPPa. LINE’s success is easy to comprehend because it is a communication tool, but how did CocoPPa become popular abroad? This article will discuss CocoPPa’s origins and its strategy for the future.
CocoPPa was part of a personnel-training project
Teshima, head of the app division, explains how the CocoPPa project started.“At the time, we were looking into starting a smart phone app division and were working on various projects. We put most of our work into developing a music app, but we had an excess of young female employees, so we asked them ‘What do you think about creating an app aimed at females?’ That’s where the idea started from.”
After the project began, project members met in-house to discuss various ideas, one of which led to the basis for CocoPPa. The original project consisted of 3 female members: 1 producer / designer, 1 server engineer, and 1 iPhone app engineer. The iPhone app engineer was a 23-year-old first-year recruit who studied liberal arts and had previously only worked on 1 app.
“We started by talking about creating a community to share smart phone app icons and kept discussing how we could make it the best service possible. Even though we never even thought about creating a scalable service to reach foreign customers, 84% of CocoPPa’s total downloads currently come from overseas markets.”
Since there weren’t any similar services to base the app on, they put all their effort in finding the best way to realize their idea and incorporate social services. Teshima says they worked hard to create an app that is easy to use for people in the icon creation community. However, as they created the app, they realized that it was a very unique concept and something that could be translated at a low cost, and that’s when they decided to work on an overseas version of the app as well.
“We couldn’t find a similar app anywhere overseas and we knew if we used crowd sourced translation services like Conyac we could create a multilingual interface at a low cost, so we decided we might as well create an app for international markets too. If we had to spend thousands of dollars on translation, we probably wouldn’t have tried to make a non-Japanese version.”
Although they did feel potential in CocoPPa’s concept since there was nothing similar in the market, they never thought about how to make it work as a business venture. Besides, this project was just a way for the company to give employees valuable work experience that would help them improve their abilities.
An unexpected reaction after being released
They weren’t expecting much after releasing the app, but right away users gave us incredibly positive feedback. A bunch of icons were added the moment the app was released.
“I think the reason so many icons were posted at such a high speed is because the service itself appealed to everyone. Users could even upload hand-drawn icons if they wanted to. But because there were so many icons we had to review, we had to spend more money than we expected on the review process. This is when we decided to implement measures to try and lower the number of uploaded icons. The biggest thing we did was create a system that made it so new users couldn’t upload more than 5 icons. Even though we restrict our users from uploading icons that use photos, many users don’t read CocoPPa’s terms of service so we often had users who would upload 100’s of icons, all made up of photos. Since it took too much time rejecting every photo icon, we made sure to emphasize ‘NO PHOTOS!’ in our agreement.”
They review every single icon uploaded to CocoPPa. Because of the unexpected reaction after the app released, review costs exploded, and the project team members had to constantly work until late in the night to deal with the workload. Teshima explains that the icon restrictions were created so that the overworked project members would be able to leave the office at a reasonable time.
“In just 2 days, the app reached number 1 in the app stores for Sweden and Norway. That was the worst time for the project members. They had tears in their eyes from working so hard. For a whole week, there was so much to review that nobody was able to leave the office before 1 AM, not to mention the fact that server kept failing. Honestly, we seriously thought about taking the app down.”
This service, which was intended as a temporary project to help the members gain valuable experience, increasingly grew in popularity over the six months since it’s release, all the while project members were unable to increase their skill set and no new resources were made available.
In March 2013, the number of downloads for the app skyrocketed from 800,000 to over 6 million. Even though they weren’t actively promoting the app, it made it to #2 on the US App Store ranking for free apps. Still, no other companies involved in the app business showed any interest in CocoPPa.
“It felt as if we were the only people who realized the potential of CocoPPa. This was because we didn’t create any press releases or make our data available to the public.”
In addition to the android release of CocoPPa in May 2013, the team made their data public. The number of downloads increased by about 9 million, but even now, Teshima says the team still doesn’t know what was responsible for the sudden spike in downloads.
“Actually, since the moment the app was released, it was ranked in the App Store top 10 in Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan. We think its success in Japan was partly because it was featured in AppBank, but we didn’t do anything at all in Thailand or Taiwan. We figured this was just a temporary thing, but then the app made it to #1 in Malaysia’s App Store under the lifestyle category. After that it really took off, especially in Hong Kong and England.”
They have no idea how the app became so popular around the world. Teshima says that they probably wouldn’t be able to achieve the same thing no matter how hard they tried.
Understanding the function of the service by releasing a PC site
In the beginning, the team thought that users were creating icons on their PC with programs like Photoshop and then sending those icons to their smartphones to upload to CocoPPa. This led to the team creating a PC site to make uploading icons easier for users. The plan was to redesign the mobile app to make icons download-only. This would clean up the user interface by simplifying its functions.
However, the PC site wasn’t used as often as they hoped. Teshima explained, “We made the mistake in thinking that our users were creating their icons on a PC. Now we knew that users were using their smartphones to make original icons.”
At the moment, the PC site isn’t being actively updated, but instead is being used an extension of the app similar to PC sites for Vine and Instagram.
Releasing the CocoPPa first sister app, CocoPPa Play
Since CocoPPa may seem like a simple entertainment app at first glance, the team is constantly looking at data showing how many users continue to be actively using the app. In particular, they look at the number of downloads, number of DAU (Daily Active Users), and number of MAU (Monthly Active Users).
“By constantly looking at the MAU, it’s easy to see that the number of users are continuing to grow. Of course, since this is a specialized service there are some users who quit using the service so it doesn’t have a high percentage of active users like LINE has. If we only focused on trying to increase the numbers, we would have to add a bunch of new features that would make the app confusing. We accept the fact that some users just use the app to look at icons, some users only use it once a week, and some only once a month.
Teshima explains that it’s very important for app creators to have a focused idea on what kind of app they want to put out. This gives the team the ability to take a balanced look at the gambles other companies are doing with their apps and not worry too much about trying to increase their numbers. Their main focus is on how to increase the number of active users without compromising the primary concept of the app.
Teshima says he believes apps should be simple programs. He is not planning to add any extra features to CocoPPa. Currently, they are looking to increase active users by improving CocoPPa’s ability to work with other separate apps. He thinks this could be the secret ingredient to help CocoPPa increase the number of active users and monetizing the app.
In March 2014, they released CocoPPa Play, an avatar community service app to help them reach their goal. Unlike the simple CocoPPa app, this is a community service app that they hope users will flock to with the intention of connecting with others.
“We did discuss creating a game app, but the popularity for game apps tends to be temporary so we would have to keep creating new apps to keep users interested. We didn’t think that was the right way to go. For example, in LINE’s case, they released an avatar community service app called LINE PLAY, which users have continued to use since its release. But LINE GAME is a different story. Communication based services and apps tend to last much longer. With CocoPPa Play, we hope to create an app that encourages users to access it every day as well as spend money on premium contents.”
Although they had a feel for the media business, avatar based content was something they had never dealt with before so they were unsure how to proceed. So they created a very talented team by partnering with other professionals in the industry, including GCREST, a company they wanted to work with for a long time.
Creating a nonverbal community service
CocoPPa Play was released in March on iOS, and will be released this spring on Android version.
“We’ve made the avatar community into a type of fashion show. Users dress up their avatar and show it off to everyone. By doing this, we believe creativity and uniqueness will increase by collaborating with CocoPPa creators. We’re hoping users will create shirts with original designs made by CocoPPa creators.”
CocoPPa Play aims to create a unique service by bringing in CocoPPa creators. By linking the design and avatar community together, they hope to create a nonverbal community.
When asked about his strategy for expanding foreign markets, Teshima says, “we don’t plan to localize the service for different countries. We put a lot of emphasis on the idea of a global community and we don’t have the resources needed to work on multiple country-based apps. But more than that, just like certain Japanese services and products have been well received around the world, I think it’s best that we don’t focus too much on how to appeal to foreign audiences and instead keep working hard to create the best product possible.”
CocoPPa and CocoPPa Play will no doubt continue to be services to watch out for.
(translation: Nelson Babin-Coy)
Originally published at ignition.co
