Product culture and startup destiny
Product decisions are not made in a vacuum. They are guided by principles that evolve between a startup’s team members and its customers. The evolution of these principles begins early in the process of a product gaining traction and a team learning what its new and growing customer base is looking for.
Over time, product decisions compound one another, and develop into a product culture. Changing circumstances may require a new product direction and a new relationship with customers, but once product culture is encoded in a company’s DNA, it is very difficult to change. We’ve seen this happen recently on a global stage with companies like Facebook, Uber and WeWork. Zoom, a product that parallels ours in many ways, is now facing some of the same challenges, with the emergence of so-called “zoom-bombing” and concerns about how the product secures user permissions. In some ways, early product decisions will determine each startup’s destiny.
At Kast, we have made product decisions in a spirit of collaboration with our community members (a term we use consciously; I’ve asked my team to avoid the word “users”). We’ve had their insight from our earliest traction stages, and we’ve cultivated and built a customer service operation that gives us a direct line into what brought them to our platform, and how they are interacting with it, now they are here.
Here are three product decisions we have made at Kast, how we thought about them in collaboration with our community members, and how they have allowed us to retain users and grow.
Admin features that emphasize control and curation
Some of our early growth and traction came in the form of new community members who came to us specifically for the ability to host private viewing parties with their friends. On other platforms, this feature either wasn’t offered or had been turned off. This early influx of community members helped us see the value in developing viewing-party admin controls so that our platform would enable community members to curate and manage their viewing party attendance.
Their need for better ways to control their experience was easy for us to understand, due to our background in the online gaming world. Some of us came from Daybreak Games, developers of Everquest and H1Z1. We understood how bad behavior could ruin experiences in online environments, and were involved on a daily basis in issues related to moderating communities. My PhD research explored “grief play” in online gaming. In online games, there are players who follow the rules in letter, but not in spirit. They may not be doing anything that is explicitly prohibited, but their behavior is causing problems and unhappiness for other members of that online community. In such circumstances, community members need tools to manage their own experience and keep it positive.
Today, 95 percent of our viewing parties are private, and we’re committed to providing our community members with the tools to curate their own experiences, and invite only the members they want participating in their online events.
Onboarding: slow and safe
Many of the concerns around Zoom have arisen as a result of the ease with which people can sign up and join ongoing meetings. This has reduced friction for new sign-ups, but it has also allowed the kind of disruptive “zoom-bombing” activity that has been in the news. On Kast, each member has a persistent identity; there are no guests with throwaway identities that can change from one session to another.
Given our emphasis on private parties from the get-go, we’ve always had the kind of individual approval features that allow our community members to curate who joins their watch parties. Admittedly, if you want to have a private party where you have a lot of people, it can get a little bit tedious having to accept everybody, one by one. We think of it like knocking on the door and checking who is coming in, before you let them into your house. This is in contrast to Zoom, which by default made it easy for anyone to join who has the code to a meeting.
Reporting system, moderation and customer service
The heartbeat of all our community-centric features is our reporting system and the community team that moderates and manages it. If somebody files a report, we get it in real time. This allows us to see and evaluate unwanted behavior as it is occurring. We’ve developed an internal app, where the moderators can choose to take various actions based on established criteria, and we’ve documented our own internal best practices that make it easier for our community team to address these issues quickly and efficiently. We are not using a third party company for the moderation, and that enables us to be closer to our community and make sure we don’t miss any critical insights.
Instead of viewing it as a bolt-on or a cost center, we view the community team as an essential component of our offering. It lifts our retention numbers and creates loyal community members who love coming back to Kast to hang out with people who matter to them. New members are invited to a welcome party, which we host. We have many people come through that party each day; some are just there to hang out, others are asking questions, and our community team is there to help them. These events give our community team the opportunity to set the right tone with new members.
Without moderation and customer service, we would need to change the way the product works; and we couldn’t have public parties at all. It’s as important as having Amazon running our servers, having these people on the front lines, helping out people, moderating and making people feel welcome.
Conclusion
There are many other product decisions Kast has taken that have prepared us for this point in time. For example, we do not store any user content, other than chat logs, and all interactions on Kast are end-to-end encrypted.
At Kast, one product decision flows into another, with our community’s growth and engagement informing our product roadmap and the features we build supporting our ability to respond to their needs. Of course, not every requested feature can be built — not even when it’s something the majority of our members say they want. For example, we have emojis and animated stickers, which are popular in chat. For a long time, many people have been requesting the ability to paste pictures into chat. Unfortunately, this is something that will probably never make it into our product. We’ve seen what people are likely to do when you let them post pictures into a chat, and it’s not pretty.
Product decisions are not something to be taken lightly. As we discussed above, they quickly compound one another and become a culture that can define a company’s destiny and the relationship between a company and its community. Often, it’s tempting to do the thing that reduces friction for the metric that matters most today. Companies that have a truly collaborative relationship with their customers, regarding them not as users, but as community members, will be able to navigate those decisions in a way that sets them on a path of long-term growth.
