Solving the ‘Adoption’ & ‘Engagement’ puzzle for your Internet Product Ashootosh Chand & Tarkeshwar Singh Email: ashutosh_chand@yahoo.com, tarkeshwarrpsingh@gmail.com

Introduction Internet and Smartphone together can be compared with the inventions like the Printing Press and the Steam Engine both of which changed the course of history. It has been about 20 years since the Internet came along and the smartphone is barely a decade old, yet we can’t even imagine about going back to a non-internet and smartphone era. This is at a time when the penetration of both of them are still at sub 20% levels worldwide which means ‘The Future is Long!’ Every subsequent year in this era of the pocket supercomputers has seen more rapid changes. Every industry is being forced to either accept this new world order or perish with the older one. Most industry incumbents have understood this and are rapidly trying to evolve and as they say ‘Go Mobile’. But be it an industry incumbent or a small startup, the problem of marketing has suddenly become the largest problem. Gone are the days when the supply chains, government regulations, and product scaling used to be the largest problem. The biggest problem these days is adoption and repeat usage of products and services. The irony is that we are facing this problem in the ‘age of information’! Customers(and users) in modern times are continuously overloaded with information. Gone are the days when getting a ‘Super Bowl’ ad meant an immediate increase in sales and attention from customers. The question then becomes is how do we create a space for ourselves in the end customer’s mind. Before we indulge into how to tackle this major problem, we want to answer the question that might be on every readers mind since reading the

title of the whitepaper. What is so different about this SnapChat and Tinder world? The answer can be understood by some simple facts. An average smartphone user downloads more than 25 apps1 on their smartphone with advanced early adopters downloading more than 402. More than 20%3 of the apps downloaded are not used more than once and only about 40% of the apps get used more than 10 times in their entire life on a user’s smartphone 4 . And both iPhone and Android are making uninstalling apps easier every new release. However in all this chaos and grim news, there’s a silver lining. Smartphone users worldwide are now coming back to the trend of using products and services that do one thing and just one thing really well. Hence the adoption to daily usage ratio of apps like SnapChat, Instagram, Secret, Tinder and Vine are much higher than apps like Twitter and Facebook. This is a large difference over the prior era of where people enjoyed apps doing multiple tasks more.

Challenges with driving

adoption in current times Complete understanding of a problem is the most important step towards finding its solution. The reason the Go To Market plans of most mobile apps and services fall flat on their face is because they devote very little of their time towards

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countries/ 2 http://mashable.com/2013/09/05/most-apps-download-

countries/ 3 http://www.localytics.com/blog/2014/app-retention-

improves/ 4 http://www.localytics.com/blog/2014/app-retention-

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understanding the challenge at hand. Hence we will use this section to highlight some common problems that every marketer for mobile apps and services will definitely face while pushing their product.

A million apps on the App Store The extremely low barrier to entry in the mobile app world has led to creation of way too many apps in way too short a time frame. In less than five years since it’s launch, Android Market(currently Play Store) saw it’s 1 millionth submission. This puts a lot of pressure on discovery and standing out. The million apps have completely crushed the discovery ability of the App Stores. Both Play Store and App Store have now become just a supply platform than a discovery platform.

Low face time for each app Even though the number of hours users spend on their smartphones and tablets have increased consistently over the years, the face-time per app has been reducing consistently and it’s primarily because of the increase in number of downloaded apps per user.

Lack of a Google for the App World Google as a search engine helped the entire web world by solving the most critical problem that existed in the portal world: Discovery. Due to Google, websites with good content and a little SEO can hope for continuous traffic. But the same doesn’t hold at all in the mobile world, you cannot conduct a search like ‘Photo Filters App’ and expect to find Instagram on the Play Store(the first result I got for it was Candy Camera). Hence it’s important to take marketing for your app much more seriously.

Reducing Switching Costs in the Mobile World Right from the mobile carrier to the mobile apps, the switching costs for apps and Internet services have lowered every year. Uninstalling apps is now just one touch away whereas installing one is several. Further the amount of apps offering the exact same capability has increased exponentially. A simple demonstration of this was the switching over of 5 million users5 to Telegram in one day after the announcement of the purchase of WhatsApp by Facebook.

Clogging of current large scale Social Channels In the early smartphone days several mobile and Internet apps became extremely popular by just using Facebook and Twitter as a social media channel. Examples of such companies are Zynga, Instagram, Evernote, Path, Pinterest, Shazam and Pocket. But this has now changed completely, hoping that a social integration will make your app popular is like expecting people will find a needle in a haystack. The good thing about the Facebook and Twitter channel was that they were used by almost everyone so you immediately get access to a huge crowd of potential users. This is simply is not the case now due to over use of each of the platforms.

Reducing Innovation Gap in the Mobile World The rapid changes and advancements that the Internet brought are both a boon and a curse for the innovators. On one side, it’s extremely easy to get into a new market but at the same time being forced out of a potential market despite having the early mover advantage has become

5 http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/02/21/whatsapp-lost-

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extremely realistic. When you think of giant like Google getting scared of Facebook and the same done to Facebook by SnapChat and WhatsApp, it seems scary. To add to that, making an exactly similar product is no more a process of years. Startups are continuously creating products that are better than what incumbents offer in a matter of weeks.

Difference between driving

adoption and driving usage Before we set out to establish a framework that helps you build your GTM plan, it’s important to understand the difference between driving adoption and driving usage. As we highlighted in the prior section, the face-time received by each app has been reducing continuously year over year. However the phone’s memories have been increasing consistently leading to a point where we don’t worry about memory usage while installing apps. This has resulted in a scenario where the ratio of daily active userbase for apps to their downloads go down to rates of 1%, a 10% ratio is considered extremely good. This increasingly large gap between people who have downloaded your app to those who use it regularly makes it important to plan for adoption and engagement separately. This significant difference is what forced an app like Circle with more than 5 million downloads to do a complete pivot from being a local social network to being just a local event discovery tool.

Framework for building a plan

to increase adoption With the above foundation, it’s time now to discuss the framework that shall help organizations increase adoption.

1. Know thy users and power users This is one of those things that almost all product managers and marketers think they know but they barely do. This is the first and most important step towards a great GTM plan. We suggest you to write every characteristic that you think you know about your users, knowing the demographics is just the first step. You must write down the other characteristics of your users like their interests, products they might be using, the kind of media they consume the most, etc. Power users are like the super-nodes among your user graph. These users exert a lot of influence on their fellow users. The influence can either come from being popular on social media or due to their expertise in the subject matter. Targeting their power users who are Fashion bloggers and designers has led to the success of Pinterest and The Hunt.

2. Know how to reach your “Power Users”

Once you determine your users, the next step is to determine where to find these people. Dropbox knew that their power users could be found on Reddit, Pinterest learnt that their users were at design and fashion schools. Medium knew their power users were bloggers who enjoyed writing about startups & tech products and not just any blogger. The proliferation of all the different kinds of apps and services has made it quite easy to locate power users online. Know that reaching out to your power users before

reaching a product market fit might lead to a quick death.

3. Define the buzz that you want for your app

By the word ‘Buzz’ what we mean here is the messaging that your app carries. For instance, Pinterest has made itself standout as a tool for designers, Twitter as a tool for journalists and celebrities, Quora as a tool for nerds, Tumblr and Instagram for those who like photos and photo blogging and finally SnapChat for teenagers who wanted some privacy and respite from their parent on Facebook. As you see each of these apps succeeded because the buzz was very concise and focused. As a marketer, this falls directly into your area of expertise and responsibility to identify and define the buzz.

4. Offer a “Strip Tease” to users before making them signup

Revealing enough but not revealing everything is the one secret that works every time. Strip Tease is the single largest reason behind the success of Apple Products, they use their keynotes to reveal quite a lot about their products but then they make you wait for a few weeks/months to feel the product in your hands. It’s the one strategy that’s common to Quora, Tumblr, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest and LinkedIn.

5. Ensure Signup is just One Touch A study done recently had concluded that every extra step in your signup results in a drop out rate of 20%6. With roughly around 60% of app signups happening via Facebook and almost

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everyone on Internet using it. It’s important to atleast have the Sign Up via Facebook option in your signup options. However if you don’t plan to do any personalization in your app, then the best idea is to not have any sign up at all.

6. Be useful right from the first time The reason why most apps never get used after the first time is because most of them don’t respect users’ time and attention. The first few minutes are almost always a break it or make it minutes for every app. If the app can’t demonstrate its usefulness in the first couple of minutes, then it shouldn’t expect any of its users to come back ever.

7. Ask User to invite others at the right time and context

Word of mouth is the only long-term marketing channel that makes products successful. These days the word of mouth translates into making users share your app on different social channels. The most important thing to understand here is that when a user shares your app with his friends, it almost always is a favor from them for your good service. And hence knowing when to ask users to invite their friends or share you on social media is critical to your success. The worst strategy here can be making users invite friends right in the beginning.

Framework for building a plan

to increase Engagement Usage and Engagement as discussed in the earlier section are two different kinds of problems and hence the approach required to solve them also differs. As you would notice, the frameworks for increasing usage focus a lot on the product

related tactics and hence are much broader in nature.

1. Personalization, Personalization and Personalization

Gone are days the where products used to be ‘One Size Fits all’. In current times users expect every product they use to be customized for them. Even though most app developers and marketers understand that personalization is critical, few of them understand how critical it is. It’s important to look at personalization from a broader perspective than just a feed of information. It’s about remembering the minute details about a user and utilizing that to give them a better experience. Keep an eye out for the things like the iBeacons they are going to take personalization to another level.

2. Stop trying to do multiple things Most app and product developers think if they add a lot of toppings onto their product then people will start liking it. The truth is far from it. Unless the core food item tastes well, the dressings are not going to take you far. In the current cluttered app world, it’s important to do one thing really well so that users remember you for that. When you think of notes, the first app that comes to mind is Evernote, when you think of messaging the names that pop out are Whatsapp and SnapChat. Now think of the Google Hangouts, the reason it never did as well as even the Facebook messenger is because it was trying to be both a Whatsapp and a Skype and hence couldn’t beat either.

3. Focus on the UX not just the UI According to many people, SnapChat’s UI is terrible7 but nobody has been able to question the user experience bit of it. Infact the reason the app has done well, is because the user experience is flawlessly simple. I am not saying that you should make terrible looking UI, but what we suggest you is to make a good UX. Ofcourse you will hit a homerun if you can pull off a great combination of UX and UI like Medium did. At this point think of your development team, is your UX designer really playing a critical role or is he just giving out assets that the developers need? If he is just handing out assets then most likely your product is doomed.

4. Choose the right platform for yourself

One of the major reasons why some apps do better than others, is because they understand what platform suits them the most. For instant Pocket(formerly Read It Later) understood very well that they had to have a Chrome and Firefox app from Day 0 and that indeed helped. The mobile app came much later. The same is true for Dropbox and Evernote. So before you decide to build a mobile app, judge carefully which platform suits you the best. Most of the times the answer would be a combination of two or three platforms but never will the answer be all of the platforms.

5. Push Notifications and Weekly Emails

Apps like Medium, Quora, Product Hunt, Pinterest and Tumblr have redefined the use of weekly emails to get users come back and use the product. These along with Push Notifications are

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basic weapons in the arsenal of every app developer. But these must be judiciously used, overdoing the push notifications or emails might backfire entirely.

6. Cross Linking with Other Apps Cross linking of apps for most users is now a similar experience like having a Apple TV work with a Samsung LED TV. AirBnB did the efficient cross-linking with Craig’s List and the rest is history. The Hunt did the same for Pinterest and Instagram and saw the numbers soaring suddenly. Look for the existing apps and services with which your app has a synergy. This can be a both a good adoption and engagement strategy.

7. Easy Share Capabilities Easy Share Capabilities can technically be clubbed with Cross-linking with other apps. The reason this one is taken separately is due to the huge importance of it. Most developers just add a Facebook & Twitter share and think that their app will go viral. It’s important to understand what platforms will your users like to share to. For instance if I’m inside a phone app, I would never want to share onto Facebook but might want to share to Whatsapp or Message app. Similarly if I’m reading news I might want to post onto twitter and not send that as a sms. Showing the list of all apps while sharing is a strict no for any app. It shows lack of thought from the app developer, instead show a select few apps on which you think your users will like to share and control that experience really closely.

8. Show up where your users spend most of their time

Another important factor to understand is where do the users of your product spend the most of the time. For instance, The Hunt has a very good presence on Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest.

Fifty-Three has a great presence on Tumblr. Quora has a brilliant presence on Facebook, Jelly has on Twitter. Each of these apps understood where there users came from and where they spent most of their time.

9. Gamification and Game Mechanics

Gamification is the single largest reason why FourSquare became so popular. Game Mechanics are the single largest reason why Twitter still does so well. Waze is another one that leveraged Game Mechanics to the hilt. As an app developer think through the Game Mechanics and Gamification aspects seriously and use them judiciously

10. Continuously monitor and interpret data

Finally the most important tool to getting engagement for your app is the analytics generated from the data captured from it (This might be a good time to go back and check if you are tracking every single thing in your app!). Try to find patterns among users who become repeat users, for instance Facebook noticed that if in the first 10 days, you make more than 7 friends then you have higher chances of becoming regular to it. There’s an interesting talk on this topic, formally known as ‘Growth Hack’ by Chamath Palihapitiya 8 who worked with WinAmp, Facebook and Quora.

Innovative techniques to

increase adoption In this section, we will mention a few smart techniques to increase adoption for your app. All

8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raIUQP71SBU

of these techniques can be understood and created by using the Framework mentioned above. We haven’t added a section on some techniques to increase usage for the simple reason that no shortcuts exist when it comes to long-term retention and usage. There are several quality articles and blogs that describe and explain each of the following techniques, so we encourage you to Google these to gain more understanding rather than us trying to explain everything.

i. The Dropbox strategy of incentivizing users to make others sign up

ii. Stumble-Upon ads if your app has anything to do with good visuals.

iii. LinkedIn strategy of sending out emails to your contacts and linking you to them automatically

iv. Create an initial scarcity like Facebook and Medium did by not letting everyone sign up

v. Content Marketing like Mint.Com did so that users find you as the true option for any credible information on the niche topic

vi. Gamification like Quora, FourSquare and Waze

vii. Web and Mobile Search presence like Quora has and had

viii. Physical Meetups like Pinterest used to reach out to early users

ix. Launch at a huge event like SXSW which Twitter and FourSquare had.

x. A great PR strategy like Jelly and Instagram had

xi. A viral video like Camp Gyno(Hello Flo) and Mint.Com

Most important of all, solve a real

problem and not a made up one.

Conclusion Most markets and opportunities can be understood as either a ‘Push’ or a ‘Pull’ market. In a ‘Pull’ market, the end users will extract a product out of you because the demand or need is way too high. In a ‘Push’ market typically all the basic needs of the end user in the segment are already satisfied and hence it becomes more difficult to capture such a market. The mobile app market is currently a ‘Push’ market and to succeed in this market Entrepreneurs and Product Managers need to start looking beyond the obvious and approach every problem from a completely different angle than what has been tried before. That’s the only way to win the market with your mobile app.