Author Archive
Lessons learned adding messaging to a notes app (Guest Post)
[Today we have a guest post from Alex Schiff, who’s a co-founder and CEO of Fetchnotes, which makes simple, smart tools that help people work together and get things done. Fetchnotes graduated from Techstars Boston in November 2012, and is currently a team of 5 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. -Andrew]
Alex Schiff, CEO of Fetchnotes:
Thereâs a big craze in messaging right now, and everyone seems to be trying to integrate some form of it into their product. Having learned that people who shared notes were way more likely to build a habit with Fetchnotes, we definitely caught the bug in our last iteration. It also coincided with a goal to evolve our value proposition beyond just personal organizationâââthereâs just a lot of noise in that space.
We learned a lot about the way people communicate and work together (which is informing a lot of future product plans), but we didnât really budge the core metric we were trying to move: % of monthly active users sharing at least one note per month (below).
The % of users sharing actually went down before returning to pre-launch levels. We had a large influx of users from launch press, but the sharing value proposition still didnât click. As a result, we had an even higher percentage using it as a personal notes app. Not the results we wanted, but we learned a lot in the process.
For anyone out there building social products, I wanted to share some of those lessons.
Be aware of invisible mental walls
Before we launched this iteration, a common complaint we heard was that the places people kept track of information personally tended to be isolated from where other people sent it to them (email, SMS, and other communication channels). This was pretty consistent across both people who used Fetchnotes and people who used other tools, and it was a major influence on the product we designed.
It turns out that while information silos are indeed a pain point, a major reason they exist is because people tend to think of âpersonal stuffâ and âshared stuffâ differently. They donât want them co-mingled in one organizational area. When we started asking people the right questions, we also found âI need to send this to someoneâ is just not the same mental mode as âI need to remember this for myself.â
With good reason, tooâââhere are some problems that you run into when you try to combine the two:
- People have different ways of organizing, prioritizing, categorizing, etc. that conflict with each other. And they are very particular about itâââeverybodyâs a little OCD.
- Where you keep track of personal information is sacred. When other peopleâs stuff start showing up, you feel like itâs not yours anymore. That leads you to not want to put deeply private material there.
- Messaging/communication is inherently noisy and chaotic. Personal organization is about order.
Most often, people bucket Fetchnotes as either social-only or private-only, and generally itâs the latter. So if youâre building a product that has anything to do with shared and personal organization, make sure you give people walls to protect their âpersonal space.â
The concentration of communication channels
We were trying to get people to use Fetchnotes to communicate things that had an element of permanence or action. It was all about adding things to peopleâs listsâââi.e., organizing your communication so it was where the recipient wanted it (featured to the left). What we didnât want was the more conversational fluff, like this:
At that point, we might as well be having a conversation in Google Docs.
By talking to a lot of users and non-users about their habits, we learned that communication channels tend to concentrate around only a handful of categories:
- People. âWhen I want to talk to Hans in Germany, I use WhatsApp. When I talk to my mom, I use SMS.â
- Context. âWhen I want to talk about work stuff, I use Slack. When I want to talk to my friends about going out later, I use Facebook Messenger.â
- Media type. âWhen I want to send my friends photos, I use Snapchat. When I want to communicate via text, I use SMS.â
- Publicity. âWhen I want everyone to see my thoughts, I use Twitter. When I want to send messages privately, I use SMS.â
If someone canât use a product for all of their communication within one of those buckets, you tend not to use it for any of your communication. There are certainly exceptions, but theyâre exactly thatâââexceptions. People need an extremely clear mental model to answer the question, âWhen do I use this app?â
Regardless of what product youâre building (though itâs especially true in messaging), make sure that your users can answer that without having to think.
Make sure your âviral hookâ is organic and frequent
Our users frequently asked for ways to share their notes with non-users, and that underpinned a big part of our growth strategy. That was the thinking behind our address book integration, which actually works quite well when people need it. In fact, about 25% of all notes shared are shared with non-users (via SMS or email).
The problem, as we realized, is that communication is about sending (one-way) information to another person. When I message someone about say, a link I think they should check out, Iâve already checked that link out. I donât need to save that information for myself, so I have no reason to send that information to you via Fetchnotes (since it will just send you a text anyway). People do share with non-users in other ways (like sharing pre-existing notes after the fact), but that behavior isnât frequent enough to make an impact on growth (less than 1%).
So as youâre thinking through your âviral hook,â make sure youâre building it around something that people organically need to do, and need to do often. âNon-user sharingâ around inorganic behavior is just an invite system no one uses. Get granular, map it out from beginning to end, and talk to people about how they accomplish these steps currently. Donât take shortcuts or make assumptions.
Your network-specific identity is probably confusing people
Way too many companies start off thinking, âWe need our own identity!â Pretty much every major social network has one, and theyâre enticing from a brand perspective (i.e., âFollow me @alexschiff on Twitter!â). However, most products donât really need usernames to be front and center. People donât want yet another identity to think about, and it usually ends up causing a lot of design complexity. Product managers tend to believe people will value their usernames, but unless youâre a product that is public in nature people stop caring after five minutes.
Ideally, identity should be something that fades into the background of a social product. Particularly for productivity-oriented tools, no one wants to share with â@alexschiffââââthey want to share with âAlex Schiffâ. Unless your product is public in nature, you might not even need a username at all. Either way, focus on real names, not aliases.
How groups adopt tools
Finally, we noticed a major trend in the way groups adopt toolsâââone that existed across families, businesses, friends, and pretty much anyone we talked to. We identified 3 major personas when a group chooses to use a new product, and one of them is much more important than the others.
The Leader
The leader isnât necessarily the âalphaâ of the group, but theyâre the one who takes the lead in planning and organizing. More importantly, theyâre the one who searches, evaluates and introduces a tool into the groupâââthey want to use something to improve efficiency. They would generally set up Fetchnotes, load in a bunch of information (i.e., a list of prospective apartments youâre sharing with your roommates), and start using it completely. Frankly, theyâre not that pickyâââthey just want it outside of the noise of normal communication channels.
The Engaged Follower
The engaged follower is the person who contributes to the conversation, but defaults to using existing channels like email or text. For example, rather than adding a new apartment listing in Fetchnotes, they would send everyone an email, text, FB message, etc. They vary in reluctance to adopt new technology, but the unifying pattern is that they end up dragging the conversation back into email by not using the chosen tool.
The Passive Follower
These are the people that just go with the flow on how things are planned. They might contribute a little or not at all, but theyâll generally just go wherever the conversation is happening. This is because, for them, the conversation is more for reference than it is actively contributing their own ideas and effort.
Today, collaboration products are built for the leader. In other words, theyâre built with the assumption that everyone in the group is planning on using it. But the secret truth is that theyâre already plenty satisfied with the tools availableâââitâs the lack of adoption by other members that causes problems.
The key to getting group collaboration tools adopted, I believe, is by making it work for the âengaged followers.â The âpassive followersâ will go wherever the conversation goes, and the leaders are generally satisfied with the tools that already existâââbesides the fact that no one will use them.