How did the success of one product push us to fail at 10 more?
In the previous post in this series, we talked about why we decided to build new products at Wingify and the story of the first 4 products we tried out. In this post, I will take you through the other 6 products, our learnings, and how we are approaching new products from here on. The idea, as I explained in the last post, was to experiment and course correct rapidly without spending too much money and resources.
Hey, India’s a market too
We have always been building global products at Wingify, so focusing on India, our home country, as a market does not come naturally to us. But when we realized that India is the fastest growing smartphone market in the world and there would be 500 million smartphone users by 2020, only 10% of whom speak English, we sensed an opportunity. When these users come online, they are going to need content and services in their own native language. This was a chance to become the WeChat of India.
We were building this in parallel with Firi, the first avatar of our events app, so the way we validated the concept was also similar. We acquired a couple of thousand users in Meerut, a small city in India, and sent them jokes in Hindi and Hinglish over Whatsapp. We called it Gabbar, the famous villain from one of the most popular Bollywood movies ever made, Sholay. The response was great and people would add us in their Whatsapp friend groups and command, “Aye Gabbar, joke bata!” (Hey Gabbar, tell us a joke!)
Core concept validated, just like Firi, we decided to product-ize it. We built a simple app with a feed of popular content from around the web — jokes, lifestyle tips, news, sports, Bollywood gossip — that people could share easily with friends and family. Our pilot had shown that people were already sharing a lot of this content on Whatsapp, often getting back the same joke you had sent an hour back, so we could add more variety to it. The content shared from our app would have a link to us, which is how we would go viral. We named the app Mogambo, another famous villain from another famous Bollywood movie, because of a reason we can’t remember now and rolled it out.
Just like Firi, the results were disappointing and for a very similar reason — how Whatsapp fits into people’s lives is very different from when the same thing is served through a separate app. Also, we thought it would go viral when people shared content but without paid ads, we only got a couple of installs per day on an install base of 1000. And when we finally went out to show the app to people in our target audience, most of them went “meh” and told us that the content was very similar to what they already got on Facebook and Whatsapp.
We also realized that India is a very different market than China with each state having their own language, their own culture, their own music and movies, their own jokes, so we would have to conquer multiple markets with their own unique challenges. The target audience we wanted to go after was very different from us — their sense of identity, their social lives, their idea of fun, their smartphone habits — so we were no better placed than any other competitor in going after the opportunity, something that we had assumed earlier.
With a number of issues staring us in our face and some seemingly better ideas we came up with, we decided to move on from Mogambo.
The WeChat for India vision is still strong
Another reason for moving on from the native language angle to become the WeChat of India was that we had found another angle of attack that we were better placed for — apps within chat. The hangover of having to switch between multiple apps to plan an outing from our Firi days had still not gone. Nor had the hangover of solving the boredom problem — we thought people ran out of things to talk about even when they wanted to hang out with their friends over Whatsapp or other messaging apps.
How about bringing all kinds of apps friends use with each other to a single app with chat as the central glue? You could play games with your friends, share YouTube videos, music, Internet funnies, sports updates, add reminders for each other, split bills, all of these while chatting with your friends. With this app, hanging out both online and offline with your friends becomes so much more fun.
Having learnt from our previous mistakes of jumping into development too soon and not validating the product itself that we were building, we put together some product designs and went out to malls to ask people what they thought of it. Malls seemed like a good place to find lots of people with free time on their hands whom we could talk to. We ended up talking to 40–50 people and almost everyone went wow. “Mast idea hain (this is a great idea)”, “pakka use karunga (I will definitely use it),” people told us.
Convinced that we had finally found our big opportunity, and had the right validation from the market, we put together a team of eight people to build it (all our other experiments were small teams of 2–3 people) and decided that come what may, we are going to keep at it for the next two years because of the great user retention messaging apps come built in with. Messaging apps were also all the rage back then with Google releasing Allo with its AI-powered assistant, Facebook trying all sorts of experiments with M, WeChat catching the world’s attention and Hike raising a ton of money. Our plan was to go to market with the unique angle we had and out-execute everyone else.
We worked really hard over the next couple of months and released a first prototype internally within the organization. And then reality hit us. Even though this time we validated what we eventually built, we validated it in isolation. The idea works if Whatsapp builds it because all your friends are on it already but the value was not strong enough for people to get their friends to start using another messaging app (Allo also faced this messaging app fatigue). We tried out some fun ways to get people started with the app but they fizzled out soon, so we decided to shut down Mogambo.
Too much yet too little content out there
At Wingify, we love reading. One of the things we noticed was that it’s easy to get lost in the barrage of content out there. Clickbait is prevalent everywhere, and halfway through an article you would realize it’s not worth the read. Maintaining RSS feeds, subscribing to magazines, keeping a tab on social shares is a lot of effort. We wanted to make it extremely easy for readers to find great content, and absorb deep knowledge in the shortest time possible by reading hand-curated summaries.
We started a service called in3bullets that would summarize the latest articles from Medium and share it in three bullets on Twitter. That seemed like the easiest way to validate the value proposition.
Turns out Medium did not have a lot of well-researched articles and Twitter wasn’t the best medium for habit-formation. Also we realized that staying updated and becoming smarter every day is most pressing for business managers and entrepreneurs, so we started summarizing business content from HBR, Economist, WSJ, Forbes, a lot of it from behind paywalls, as an email newsletter. We got an incredible response with 40% email open rates, twice the industry standard for business newsletters.
People loved the service, so it was time to make a business out of it. We went ahead and did a study with our users on how much would they be willing to pay for the service. The results were an eye opener. Even though people loved the service, the maximum they were willing to pay for it was $3–4/month. That might be decent business for an individual but at Wingify, we were really looking for opportunities that would help us grow to the next level, so this was not going to be it. We shut down in3bullets.
Augmenting reality with an Indian twist
Snapchat filters were all the rage in 2016, and with speculations around how they had no interest in the Indian market, we sensed an opportunity there. How about we bring in some filters with an Indian twist? Better yet, how about we make AR-based face games?
We tried multiple ideas for games, but ultimately settled on two — eating laddoos (an Indian sweet) flying around the screen with your mouth and preventing mosquitoes from biting your lips and sucking the blood out of you.
We put together an MVP, named it Clown Cam and put it up on the Play Store. We also went out to get people to play it and give their feedback and there was a lot of initial wow around the app. It was new, it was fun, people hadn’t seen something like this before. But it quickly got boring because of the limited gameplay and there’s only so long that you can hold the phone and do things with your face. Also, the app size was over 90MB because of the open-source libraries we had to used for face detection which was 80MB too much for people to download.
By this time, we were also growing a little tired of our consumer experiments, so we decided to shut Clown Cam down.
Not just software
Since we were going all-in on experiments, we decided why just restrict it to software? Why not try our hands at hardware as well? If we are looking to build a 100-year company, we would have to get into hardware sooner than later. We started off by building a smart mirror prototype that showed you the time of the day and weather forecast. It had voice commands for news, Google search and to tell a joke. Then we built something that showed you interesting content from around the Web in the form of looping videos, and when a user came near the system, the proximity sensor detected it and showed you more info on it. This didn’t receive a good response within the office itself and came off as unnecessarily complicated, so we shaped it into something much simpler — a digital art device.
The device came with a 24” screen, a brightness control so it felt like framed artwork and matte finish to avoid reflections. It was pre-packaged with 10,000 pictures, and users could buy more from our store if they liked. We named it Maya.
With Maya built, we decided to go out and talk to users. We got some of our friends to keep it at their homes and tell us what their family and friends thought of it. We went to home decor stores to show it to people and we also put it up on display in a bar right below our office. No one really paid attention to Maya in the bar, the managers at the home decor stores didn’t allow us to showcase the device thinking it will distract people from what they were selling and while some of our friends thought the device was cool, a very unscientific study of how much were they willing to pay was way below what we wanted to charge. Also, it turned out that another player in the market who had a pretty similar device and had been in the market for years wasn’t exactly killing it either, we decided to shut down Maya.
Playing on familiar turf
Re-engaging people once they leave your website has been getting increasingly hard. Facebook and Twitter posts work to an extent but they are dependent on your user being on the platform. Retargeting ads cost money. And email engagement rates have been dropping for some time now. In 2015, when Chrome released an update that allowed websites to send push notifications, we jumped on to the opportunity to build a product around it that made it very easy for any website to re-engage their subscribers by sending them web push notifications.
We put together a prototype in a couple of weeks with a team of two engineers and named it PushCrew. We built a quick website and were about to head out for a celebratory dinner when someone put us on Product Hunt and we spent the entire day on the 2nd position. We got 500 enquiries in the next 48 hours, a lot of whom subsequently became paid customers.
Today, PushCrew has grown up to be our second major revenue stream after VWO. Being a SaaS product in the marketing space, we were able to use our domain expertise and strengths built over years to scale it fast to generate a couple of million dollars in ARR, and it’s only growing faster. The PushCrew growth story deserves another post by itself, so I am going to leave it at that.
Where do we go from here?
Building 10 new products in 18 months with all the chaos and uncertainties is exhausting. And having to shut down 9 of them does take an emotional toll.
At the end of 2016, we decided to take a break from releasing new products to spend some time looking back at everything we had built and what we could have done differently. Here are the main lessons:
- Solving emotional problems is much harder than solving functional problems.
- Solving for consumers is much harder than solving for businesses. Making a profitable business from them even harder.
- Understand core problem and target market really well before jumping into execution.
- Think about business model and go-to-market as well before pursuing an opportunity. What’s the point of solving a problem if we cannot reach users at scale and make meaningful revenue from it?
- When validating an idea, do not validate in isolation. Validate it in the larger context it exists in.
- We cannot beat Facebook or Google at their own game. Let’s be real about our capabilities.
- Confirmation bias is a very real thing.
Now some of you might think — “These are obvious lessons that are talked about all the time. Why did you have to build 10 new products to learn them?” Well, yes you are right — some of these are obvious. But by making and living through these mistakes, we have understood and internalized them in much greater nuance than if we had just read about them.
Along with the learnings from our product experiments, we also introspected on what our strengths and weaknesses as a company are. What markets should we play in? Where are we well positioned to win? The answer again was pretty obvious: B2B SaaS products (with a lot more nuances that I am not going to divulge :) ) This helped us drive a lot more clarity for new products and for Wingify as a whole.
With our strategy in place, we put together a more structured process for new products to go through to increase their chances of success. We also put together a business unit for new products called Foundry, where we are pursuing multiple new B2B opportunities at once.
For me personally, even with all the failures, it has been one of the richest learning experiences in my career. Also, we did all of it with a small 15-person team and very low marketing spends, so it was a fairly cheap way to learn. And we are not going to regret not going after billion-dollar SoLoMo opportunities :)
