Meerkat Deconstructed

This is my first public attempt at publishing the outcome of my process to train your product intuition, with frequent deconstruction of other products.

My first post takes a look at Meerkat which I found on Product Hunt.

I am primarily focussed on the side of the broadcaster/host because that experience that is most baked at this point. e.g., for viewers no easy way to discover other broadcasters outside of following them. However in all two-sided platforms this deconstruction needs to be done on both sides.

So here goes.

User Job

Given I have an established social following
When I want to connect with my followers in a more personal way
I want to provide a live interactive experience
So I can be perceived as authentic and human

Forces

Gain

I want to give my fans a new and personal way of interacting with me.
I’m curious about using a richer emotional medium to communicate.
I want to give fans an experience that can’t be replicated.

Pain

I have to plan live event far in advance because the current tools aren’t immediate to set up.

Anxiety

I am concerned I will look bad on video.
I heard video was really hard to do well, I don’t know how to “shoot” video.
I don’t want to invest in building a following on another social platform.
I feel like I need to plan the experience as an *event*.

Habit

I use other products to achieve the same live or real-time experience using text.

Job Requirements

Functional

Provide a unique experience to fans (new form of access), reach more potential followers.

Personal

Express my true authentic self, feel like I have used what I have to offer, learn a new skill.

Social

Connect with followers on an innate human level, Grow social following online, be recognised as an early adopter.

Solution Consideration Set

Live Video Conversations

YouNow, UpClose, Google+ Hangouts Air, YouTube (I need to be approved), Ustream (am I an enterprise?), Livestream (am I hosting an event?), Laifeng (if you are in China).

Live (Real-Time) Text Conversations

Reddit AMA, Twitter.

Interactive Conversation

Tumblr Ask, Ask.fm, Seesmic (If I was having async video conversations in 2007).

Recorded Video / Audio Conversations

Soundcloud, YouTube, iTunes Podcasting…

Innovation Vectors

Situations

When would I be able to take advantage of my presence at a location/event to give people access who can’t be there?
When would I have access to other people that my followers would like to see me meet and interview?
When would I want a real-life conversation to be public?
When would I want people to have access to my personal life?
When would I want to express my opinion about something?

Product Design

How would I use a more emotional medium like video (or audio) to communicate?
How would I enable viewers to participate in the experience?
How would I reward specific viewers in a unique way?
How would I prefer to manage the experience of hosting the experience?
How would I give specific fans or numbers of fans access to the experience based on certain conditions being met?
How would I enable fans to keep the event to share with their friends later?
How would I be able to set up an event in as few taps as possible, including social promotion?
How would I add more information, media, data for scheduled broadcasts — to help prepare and excite the audience?
How would I use audio/video/text to preview the future or current live event?
How would I be able to change what the user can see of me during the live event?
How would I be able to quickly test the video experience without notifying my followers to build comfort with it?
How would I use the social platform to build anticipation and help spread the word?
How would I enable people to see the experience without leaving their social platforms?
How would I be able to set up an event in advance?
How would I be convinced to set up an immediate live experience?
How would I be able to use this experience adjacent to existing solutions I use for Live and Recorded Video / Audio / Text?

Go to Market

Who has a fanatic following already using recorded video or audio to connect with followers?
Who is using other real-time non-video experiences to connect with followers?
Who speaks in public forums and events to people who are interested in what they have to say?
Who regularly meets with other well known people to interview them?
Who leads a life that others would be intrigued by?

Wow, that’s quite a list, and it’s only for the broadcaster side. I have probably touched on 5% of all the questions the Meerkat team asked themselves during their process.

From here, you could come up with many, many more. Let’s derive some ideas from all of this work, let’s guess where Meerkat might take this.

Insights

1. This is a smart use of Twitter because it remove the pain of growing and managing YAPP (Yet Another Platform Presence), although there aren’t really any other social platforms that would support real-time conversation in this way. Also I don’t think the tweet load is crazy or spammy, and could be optimized through cards and things like media previews.
2. The medium is a relatively expensive way for rewarding and further building a following. That’s ok, but I wonder if it limits how frequently I would do this. Also I wonder if it matters if you don’t have an established following, can you use this to start a following?
3. The current audience participation is limited to comments, it would be interesting to have two-way human interaction through video, audio or images.
4. Creating a live experience like this is an investment (mentally and physically) and something I may think I need to plan ahead of time, but at the same time it’s one click and I’m broadcasting. With a good first time experience this could actually help remove barriers around the need to plan and quickly change existing behaviour to be more spontaneous.
5. There’s significant anxiety with using video as a publishing medium, the application addresses some of this by making the video ephemeral (thank goodness there’s no permanent record of me). Also I wonder if the same anxieties exists for audio.
6. There are a number of solutions that exist in the market and it’s interesting to think where users could be switching from
   a) Many of the live video solutions enterprise focussed and desktop first, with an emerging class of mobile first solutions, can this change behaviour?
   b) Asynchronous real-time conversations using text (Twitter, Reddit AMA) happen all the time. You could argue video is a slower medium in terms of information delivery, but it’s a faster medium in terms of emotional delivery.
   c) Recorded audio and video can deliver on the need of an authentic and emotive experience (est. 20–30% of YouTube traffic), and for a lot of people that may be enough. Does it really need to be live?
7. The current go to market has been most obviously through product hunt, and although that seems unfocussed and haphazard, it actually let’s Meerkat test across multiple situation contexts, which is where the value lies. It’s not about who is doing it, it’s about why they are doing it.

Finally the fun bit, use the analysis and come up with some more ideas to push the product forward.

Ideas

1. The app should be much clearer about the value of building on another social network. This is not conveyed particularly well in the app (“Everything that happens on Meerkat, happens on Twitter”), and you don’t really know it’s posting to Twitter on your behalf.
2. Add ability for the user to record a preview video introduction to the event, and autoplay these in the discovery experience in the app.
3. Distribute the preview and the live event in a Twitter card (sure everyone has said this!)
4. Play back both sides of the conversation. Record the entire show including the interactive audience elements, not just the video itself.
5. Enable zero-click workflow to store my recorded video in adjacent solutions — post my video to YouTube, iTunes, Soundcloud.
6. Query the Twitter API to find people who “ask me anything”, “taking questions” and other potential calls-to-action, to research how Twitter is being used to call an audience to interact NOW.
7. Consider anxiety around or even usefulness of video and create a more comfortable medium for the live experience — audio only with photos, filters/blurring of video, avatar representation of broadcaster.
8. Enable the broadcaster to “dial-in” guests using their video or audio from their phone, so they can contribute using the same medium.
9. Support a way for users to give rewards to the broadcaster. Stickers, gifts, voting, appluase, other forms of feedback.
10. Enable broadcaster to give extra rewards to their followers; new follower, new viewer, regular viewer. Perhaps they get to join 5 minutes early, or stay 5 minutes longer. Or maybe they have access to the recorded show.
11. Create a different view for the broadcaster and the viewer. The need for certain actions and information on the screen during the broadcast are different. For example, everyones retweets are noisy for the viewer but useful for the broadcaster. In this example it would be better to show aggregate retweets to the viewers, but the details to the broadcaster.

That’s all for now. You could easily create another 100 ideas from this material.

I’m going to try and deconstruct products more frequently, so stay tuned for updates.