The desire for more meaningful connections is innate in all of us and only through increased communication do relationships have the opportunity to grow and succeed. Social media has connected us through likes, swipes and follows, but disconnects us from the true nature of human connection — TALKING.

Unmute set out to tackle this problem by building an interactive online community where you can talk to anyone, anywhere at anytime.

What makes Unmute so appealing is that it gives its users the opportunity to be a part of a unique conversation; it is now possible for fans to hop on a call with their favorite celebrities, and engage in deep and meaningful sessions with their idols. All you have to do is call in on an ongoing conversation or broadcasting session and request to be ‘Unmuted’.

Unmute had a well developed application which even featured as the “best new app” in the iPhone app store; however, the size of the online community represented a serious hurdle. The larger the online community, the greater the number of connections that can be forged. Thus, the relatively low number of daily active users discouraged existing users from investing significant time on the app. Having a large and diverse community also allows for wide ranging creative content and increases engagement and retention.

Development and deployment of the solution

Working alongside the team at Unmute, P&P developed a host of recommendations to help deconstruct some of Unmute’s core challenges in user acquisition and retention. Our consultants, who were spread across 5 different countries around the globe, worked around the clock to configure various tactics to attract new users, increase engagement, and explore new growth strategies. We laser focused on a few key initiatives and worked together with the Unmute team on integrating these modifications into their existing platform. We deployed our talent broadly into 2 teams-

1. Market Strategy

• Focused on product strategy and assumption mapping.
• Based on industry trend analysis, the team identified new markets to expand into and also explored alternate revenue streams.
• Developed comprehensive on-boarding processes to help Unmute implement these expansion models.
• Conducted risk analysis to present an overarching picture to the Unmute team on the different product strategies.

2. Strategic Design

• Worked primarily on user testing. This was done to receive critical ease-of-use user feedback to guide strategic design ideas.
• Focused on reaching out to new and existing users across different continents to give a very thorough insight into how users interact with the app, and rate its different features.

Results

Changes in the Application

• Each piece of audio content now has a short description attached to it, and that helps users land on the right content and has drastically increased engagement and retention.
• The app now has a beautiful demo introducing new users to all the different features and sections.
• Unmute now has several hundred hours of pre-recorded audio content, modeled after podcasts. Podcasts are becoming increasingly attractive as a medium and concept. Over 35 million people listen to podcasts weekly with the average listener spending 4 hours and 10 minutes per week on podcasts.
• Diversifying into podcasts made perfect sense for Unmute because it gave users who can’t find anyone to hop on a live call with, the chance to feast on wide-ranging creative content. There is also a lot of money to be made in digital advertising; $17.5 billion was spent on radio advertising in 2016 alone. This market will go digital in the next decade or so and will fuel a commercial desire to get involved with digital audio platforms like podcasts. Thus, the incorporation of podcasts could represent an alternate revenue stream.

The future of Unmute

• Unmute is looking at expanding into the college market. Our in-depth feature analysis and market research led to the conclusion that implementing audio channels in colleges represents a sustainable growth strategy. We developed an onboarding process for Unmute to enter the college market by preparing a database of the most important points of contact and other important proposal notes.

Through the course of the 10 week project cycle, Unmute’s ambition and tech capabilities, combined with P&P’s market research and analytical skills, set the company on course to achieve its growth target.

It was an absolute pleasure for P&P to partake in the development of a social phone call application that will undoubtedly help us forge more authentic connections with one another.