It’s hard out there for a Peach
The highly fragmented messaging app space is loud, crowded and pushy. No place for a thin-skinned newbie, or is it?
Described as “Twitter meets a group messaging app” Peach is built for close friends and family with some quirky surprises. Think Path — infused with the spirit of Slack and a splash of Snapchat. Experienced leadership, UX innovation, and strategic WOM are some of the things that give Peach its juice.
Founded by Dom Hoffmann (co-founder of Vine), Peach launched to big buzz at CES 2016, then cleared the gauntlet of the “Tech Twitter” community barely bruised. Investors, entrepreneurs and journalists helped the app quickly attain top rankings in the App Store. Innovation around “magic words” and embrace of the Product Hunt community also drove downloads.
By typing the “magic words” draw, shout, gif or song, users can doodle, share what song they are listening to or post a gif to share how they are feeling.
New words like: here, goodmorning, goodnight, battery, weather, move, meetings, safari, dice, time, date, movie, tv, and game are being added — a critical element to keep the “magic” alive and a fairly frictionless approach to engagement.
In February, Peach introduced gaming to the platform. Users can start a game of Peachball by typing the word “play” for five chances to get your peach in the basket. The most innovative gaming experience ever? No, but mildly entertaining enough and always just one word away. Never underestimate the power of proximity.
Assuming you’ll be able to soon play against your friends, this aspect of the platform has tremendous revenue potential following Asian messaging apps like LINE, Kakao, and others where the majority of high margin, recurring revenue is from games.
The on-boarding process for Peach is quick, simple and punctuated with a push to invite your three closest friends, a move likely to boost the viral co-efficient.
Increasingly a common Word-of-mouth metric, the viral coefficient is a quantitative measure of virality calculated as the average number of invitations sent by each existing user, multiplied by the conversion rate of invitations sent. A viral co-efficient greater than one sparks growth.
Peach has an advantage here, the closer you are to the people you invite, the more likely they are to sign-up. That said, one can estimate Peach’s viral coefficient to be approximately 2.099, assuming three close friends are invited per user (spouse, friend, sibling, parent, etc.) with a 70% likelihood of sign-up. Plausible, considering these are close friends and family only.
Following the trajectory of messaging app momentum, Peach is poised for significant growth given its rising profile which now includes Android and a web platform. Short term funding won’t likely be a problem, things get tougher a bit further out when apps like Slack, Messenger, iMessage, Peach and Telegram all start to feel the same.
If Peach keeps innovating and stays true to crafting a compelling UX, it has a real shot at becoming an industry leader, and not just another flambe in the pan.
— Anthony Cospito, Managing Director, Popbox Digital
Tagged: cmo, digital marketing, messaging apps, Messenger, mobile, Peach, product design, product development, Slack, user experience, UX
Originally published at popboxdigital.com.
