Daily Active Users
How this week’s Silicon Valley nailed what real startups face everyday.
Today I watched this week’s episode of Silicon Valley — Daily Active Users. It was filled with plot twists and entertaining as usual.
However this episode went on to show many things that most new startups face everyday. This episode follows on how Pied Piper although have high installation rate is filing to gain daily active users (users who are returning to the platform).
At first in previous episodes although everyone seemed to like Pied Piper it was only Monica that didn’t like it and we missed the fact that it was only Monica that was the only normal user who tired Pied Piper and everyone else were engineers. So although engineers loved it the normal users didn’t want to use Pied Piper.
This is something that startups face everyday, people build ‘cool’ stuff that is technologically good but poor user attraction because normal people fails to understands the technology or what it does, something that Google is famous for.
And in failing attempt to gain users Pied Piper falls in to deeper trouble by burning through it’s cash with a ‘Table Ad’ and people who are working leaving the troubling startup leaving only the original gang.
Upcoming Pivot?
When I looked at the episode of Pied Piper I asked myself, will I use such a product? And the answer that came to my mind is also no, why do I need a compression product to compress my data when storage is abundant and cheap.
I think the idea came from Dinesh, which was mentioned few times, about his quality chat app which gives superior video quality using Pied Piper compression.
This seems to be more of a better product than a compression platform. Although Dinesh brought up this idea within the Pied Piper team it was quickly brought down by Erlich Bachman.
Pivoting is nothing new, pivoting happens all the time in startups. One of the famous such pivot was the pivoting of Instagram when it was originally a location based service like Foursquare but during cold war between Foursquare and Gowalla it pivoted to what we now call Instagram.
As always this week’s Silicon Valley nailed it what startups go though in real life.
Plus
Also Jack Barker was hired by Hooli as head of production where he build the ‘Box’ that he failed to build at Pied Piper. And Gavin Belson gets a sigh of relief as Hooli’s profit goes beyond expectations as they make money from the Box.
And Gavin Belson summs up with an elephant in the room. You gotta love Gavin Belson.
One question?
By the way was Erlich Bachman hitting on Laurie Bream at the beginning of the episode? From the looks of Erlich’s face I think he did try to hit on Laurie Bream.
What’s Pied Piper future going to be look like? Eagerly waiting for the next week episode.
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