Our path to a valuable product

Understanding our past to design our future

When we launched Ping back in February 2017, it was a total experiment. Since then, we’ve had over 15k downloads with zero marketing, of which 7k people became registered users, and 3k people have been making connections. 500 of these people have made 5 or more connections.

This funnel isn’t necessarily impressive in the context of mobile products, but when you consider the simple nature of the product, it paints a surprisingly optimistic picture of the future. Our early product instincts believed that by removing the dependency of needing 2 users to connect, and by piggy-backing a habit that exists (firing a quick email to exchange information), this product would be readily adopted — and to an extent it has.

But ahead of our 2.0 launch, we wanted to share with you our own candid analysis of the product, the challenges we face, and an idea of how we plan to move forward.

What users love

Users really do love our product. Not just by the fact they’re using it — but I get emails and tweets with the word ‘love’ in all the time. For this cohort of users, this 10x’s the traditional business card experience for them. This is for 2 key reasons:

• Delightful simplicity. The product doesn’t overcomplicate something which doesn’t need to be. The people that really love it, for them it does the job it needs to on a regular basis — exchange contact information. Despite the narrow product, retention for people who really use the product (10+ connections) is strong — 45% at 3 months and 30% at 6 months.
• Creates new value with little friction. The product creates data and meaningful value that didn’t previously exist (or was too manual to create), and has proved a great asset for retention. Power users found great value in location (remember where you met) and reminders (don’t forget to follow up). The launch of reminders contributed to a 75% uplift in the average number of sessions per power user in the 3 months after launch.

Love. Obsessed. Favourite. Feedback you dream of as a maker.

Key challenges

The reality is that this cohort of loyal and engaged users is currently quite small, yet we firmly believe that’s due to the size of the product, not the market opportunity. After a year of the product being in market (with no marketing and little product evolution), we’ve identified the key challenges we face:

• Retention is still low overall. For the majority of users (beyond power users), the product is not truly useful enough day to day in order to form any sort of habit. After a few experimental connections, they either deem it no longer valuable, or in many cases just simply forget to use it (direct user feedback). Even those that are well retained, there can be periods of 6–8 weeks (attendance at events or conferences the most common reason) between connections or even sessions.
• Viral coefficient not yet sufficient (0.82). Our current viral loop is way too long. The average number of connections made (invites sent) is 4.1, and it takes on average 20 days to reach this number of connections. We convert 20% of all invitations, which is great, but are inherently limited by being iOS only. Misery compounded in the knowledge that an Android version is very much in demand.
• Growing without growth hacks. In it’s current form, any invite friends mechanic in the product, beyond connecting, is a little redundant. There is no meaningful reason to invite your current connections to the product. Sure we could have utilised this to fuel growth, but this artificially manufactured growth doesn’t build a community of positive sentiment. We believe deeply in growing through value.

Product market fit

Product market fit for us, is to create more value, more often. We believe we can evolve the functionality of the product without compromising on simplicity .We believe we can expand the value of the product, not only in a meaningful way, but in a way that fuels our growth and retention. For us value comes in three primary forms:

• Manage and organise — tools to aid searching, filtering, remembering and discovering your network, as well as providing a sense of perspective and overview that currently doesn’t exist.
• Understand and support — Tools to provide better insight into the whole picture of the people you connect with, and in turn make it easier to help them get where they need to go or achieve their goals
• Solicit and leverage — Tools that allow you to get the help and support you need by being direct and intentional to the people best placed to do so

There are plenty of tools out there that do one or two of these things in isolation, but none truly embrace the vital dependancy between them. The interplay between these areas is what effectively creates the ability to build relationships. Right now our product sits firmly in ‘manage and organise’. On the journey to create more value more often, our roadmap needs to begin bringing helping yourself and others into the fold.

Moving forward

Having a part time team has seriously inhibited our ability to move fast, which is frustrating for a team motivated by learning from a product in the hands of people in market. It’s a huge motivation behind commencing our fundraising efforts, despite our metrics not being where we want them to be for this stage. That said, we‘re confident our 2.0 launch will go down well with users and give us a big boost!

With 2.0 launched and investment in the bank, our plan in 2018 is to make 3 substantial strides, that we believe will not only improve retention and fuel growth, but will also transform us into a radically valuable and viral product.

• Android. Product parity across iOS and Android is going to be essential for growth. We expect the launch of an Android version to effectively double our current conversion rate. Even if this doesn’t impact number of connections made, and only improves our conversion from 20 to 25%, it will push us over the magic 1.0 viral coefficient mark.
• Integrations with Zapier/IFTTT. We’ve had massive demand for the ability to integrate with a whole range of services. Bespoke integrations for each of these services will be a stretch, but a partner such as Zapier or IFTTT might allow us to get the ball rolling and accommodate an array of unique workflows. We believe integrations will be a huge incentive for retention and also increase the number of connections made per user.
• Introductions. The launch of the introductions tool (ability to make a double opt-in connection between any 2 people) will be both a substantial stride for the product, but also a major strategic initiative as we look to encourage the integration of users current contacts too. We believe this feature will fundamentally change how people use the product, and in turn our trajectory as a company.

What’s more, we’ll continue to iterate on other product pillars as we look to become recognised as a form of professional identity and an indispensable relationship tool:

• Profile. Being able to show yourself as you want to be seen, we believe will be a major driver for adoption by a broader base, and in turn increasing the number of connections made per user. In our 2.0 update launching soon, we’ll be overhauling the profile to allow people to share more, and in turn embracing the many ‘hats’ that any one individual might wear nowadays.
• Search. Our last post talked about search being the primary interface for the product. We’re fascinated by exploring the ways we can support people in getting what or who they need quicker with search — and that includes ‘how’ they search too.
• Reminders. Utilising data to create more human interactions is what gets us out of bed in the morning. It’s primitive right now by only using the data we create, but we’re already exploring the ways in which we can use 3rd party data to make reminders everyone’s superpower — and an intelligent assistant.

Wanna be part of the team? Keen to learn more about our fundraising plans? Got some feedback? Email me directly on carl@morethanwe.co and will be happy to share more!