z on life

I Love It
The other day my friend Arjun got me hooked on Bitstrips and after using it for a while I realized that the mechanics of the site were so good I would just have to discuss it. The basic principle of the site is that you create little characters of yourself and your friends and make hilarious comic strips out of them. The process is fun, quick, and so easy. The first time I got sent one, I almost fell out of my chair laughing. That said, I clearly liked the site a lot. The following are a number of great strategic, design, and interaction principles that totally impressed me about Bitstrips.

Effective Landing Page
The initial homepage (see above) is colorful, friendly, inviting and you just get a good feeling when you go there. The organization is actually intuitive with the full menu on the left, an eye catching focal point on the scene builder logo, the different core initial actions on the far right, anchors to the most popular or recent content, and functional boxes below. For existing users, there is a lot to do, but for new users it is also very clear how they should initiate their Bitstrips experience. These two concepts are generally mutually exclusive (unless two different pages are used), but I think Bitstrips nailed it. The best part is that, no matter what you click on, you delve into fun and action right away.

Viral Loop
The site has an immediate viral loop that comes into play when you go through the registration funnel. It lets you “find your friends” who are already on the site or invite new ones via email address book importing. I’m not a huge fan of email inviting, as the overuse of the medium across thousands of sites has strongly diluted the effect. In this case though, going through the process was actually useful, because people on the site generally have fictional personas (not many real names) so it is hard to search for friends other than via email. It was a pretty frictionless process and one that was reinforced by the banners on the site saying “It’s More Fun With Friends!!” For the first time in a while, I felt I agreed with the viral incentive. Kudos to them for making the spam useful.

Usage Loop
Possibly even stronger than the core viral loop is the number of usage loops they have created. A usage loop is like a viral loop stemming not from the invite process but from usage of the site that throws off cues for others to join. Inherently, these strips are most fun when they involve friends. So, once you make a Bitstrip you will likely send it to friends, making the core of the site an effective usage loop as the friends come onto the site to see the comic. But it goes a bit deeper. Not only can the user base spread through passing links to whole comic strips, but since you create characters of yourself and others, your friends can use your characters to make strips. When your friend uses your character in a strip, you get notified and want to come back to see what they did with him or her. This is an awesome and highly playful mechanic that sucks you back again and again.

Minimized Entry Process
One of the hardest things for web people to do that games people do so well is to not give the user every piece of functionality right away. When the user is able to do too many things at once, they get hit with a paradox of choice and/or utter confusion and leave the site. When the experience is limited and directed, they are much more likely to have fun, stay un-confused, and actually complete whatever process they were attempting. I love the restraint the Bitstrips creators exercised on the initial character creation step. Despite the fact that the characters can get incredibly rich with hundreds of variables, they limit the initial granularity with which you can edit your character to a smaller, more manageable subset of attributes. Why take power away from the user? If the user is overwhelmed and they leave, this is far worse than if the user gets through the process and generates a character at only 80% detail. If they want more, they can go back and refine later, but the initial process is smooth, quick, and fun even for the non-power users. Kudos to restraint!

Sustained Calls-to-Action
Like LinkedIn has the progress bar of completing your profile, Bitstrips has bold, colorful, simple messages telling you what is left to complete on your profile. If you don’t complete them, these huge annoying boxes stay on the page. This in-your-face incentive is awesome as a subliminal cue to make a strip, find friends, build more characters, etc. If the site can get you as a user to buy in by filling in everything in the cues, you are much more likely to stay an active user because you have fully experienced the site and have significant investment in it.

People to Media to People Navigation
An interesting facet of the site is how you find yourself navigating through it. The navigation, at least for me, worked like this. First, I would go to a friend’s page and see what their new strips were. I would view a strip, and immediately look to see what other characters were in the strip. Upon clicking one of the other characters in the strip, I would be taken to that character’s page. That page provides links to the creator of that character, and I would see who it was that made that character and view more of their strips. The interesting thing is I didn’t just move people to people (Facebook, with the exception of photo viewing) or media to media (YouTube) and instead I get this very rich experience where I am interested in people and media and consume them in parallel.

SEO Hooks
There is lots of potential for SEO-able content on the site. Every user, character, and strip has a static detail page with rich metadata that can be indexed via keywords, genres, references to people, etc. There is the ability to embed these strips on external pages, providing a great number of external hooks to come back to the site. The link structure within the site is interesting with all of the highly intuitive relations between the different types of pages (users, characters, strips, series). Finally, these things are just so playful and funny that it is the type of thing bloggers would post, people would put on their Facebook or MySpace, or and friends would email/IM around. This site has the ability to push so much content to external locations that, if done right, it could be a great SEO play.

It’s Just Fun!
When it comes down to it, I really do just love the product as it is inherently fun for me. What I think is more neat is that the product really provides something for everyone. The achiever persona can focus on racking up points, views, laughs, and favorites. The explorer has a huge array of people, characters, and strips to dig through to find funny stuff. The socialite can leverage the platform to flirt with, poke fun at, and harass others and try to incite reactions from their friends or enemies. The builder has an obvious method of achieving satisfaction in the extremely rich tools they can leverage to create some really cool, detailed comics. I think what’s best is that they have really nailed a casual, fun, social interaction where there is something for everyone no matter what type of person you are, or if you’re a power-user or newbie.

Some Subtle Nice Touches
I wanted to close with two little things that impressed me regarding the level of thought put into the site. First, instead of the boring, played out, not-fun positive and negative ratings of “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down”, Bitstrips uses “laughs” and “groans”. Subtle cues like these indicate to the user that the ability to rate the strips isn’t just a bland feature, it’s a fun social stimulus. Second, in the address book importer, it defaulted the pre-@-symbol portion of my email address to my Bitstrips user name. While this guess could have been wrong, for me it was right and ended up being hugely influential (not sure why, subtle psychology is in play) in me actually going through the import step. From experience with analytics of viral invite processes, I can’t stress enough how important “all the little things” are. Even “little things” can make single or double digit percentage gains in success rates through a viral funnel. I love the attention to detail here.

So that’s it. Go make some Bitstrips!

When you’re creating a web property that you intend to ‘go viral’ with, whether it be a Facebook app or full-blown destination site, you’re going to have to meticulously track the growth to understand how you’re doing, where improvements can be made, and so forth. Tracking the growth correctly is actually very hard and even the most rigorous analytics can sometimes fail to reveal the true growth rate.

There is one easy trap to fall into, and it’s one that I just did, so I thought it would be good to talk about. The trap is in not understanding that you may be locally viral, where being ‘local’ is defined relative to some super-specific demographic, or user-behavioral context. In English? You may only be viral for some small set of or narrow type of users that will quickly adopt whatever it is that you’re making. However, if that demographic isn’t sufficiently sizable, you may burn through all of those people and be left with no new users to acquire.

The worst part about this is that, early on, you may see excellent growth. My roommate/coworker Aman Gupta and I recently released the ‘Hotter Than’ Facebook app as a pet project. It took a few hours to build and was a fun experiment (it’s not by any means our day-job). When we opened the floodgates, we saw in the first week a doubling day over day. If you study viral, recursion, and logistic growth from a mathematical perspective, as long as the remaining population of potential users is large compared to the amount of current users, your growth per new user on day N should be a good indicator of growth per new user on day N+1.

So have we continued, then, to double day over day? No, in fact growth has slowed to basically nothing. Why is this? Well, from looking through the raw data logs, we can see that during our growth phase we had spikes of users in very specific demographics. Moreover, it is fun to look at who was actually sending out invites. It turns out invites were sent mainly by a few categories of users: older, international, small friend networks. Now certainly, there are plenty of older people and international people on Facebook, many with small friend networks, so shouldn’t we have spread like wildfire through these huge demographic categories?

Interestingly, no, and here’s why. We thought a bit deeper about this and it turns out these were all indicators of being a newbie Facebook user. The average Facebook power user is something close to a United States college student with tons of friends*. The farther outside of this age, location, and dense friend networks you get, the less savvy the users likely are. We were way outside of this.

So what does that tell us? What we actually probably got were users easy to trick into viral invite processes, and thus, our invite scheme was not effective, logical, and enticing enough to hit the mainstream. Thus, we prayed on a few ‘fish-in-a-barrel’ types for whom this was likely a very early application install in their personal Facebook lifecycles. These people were most likely not aware of the ramifications of spamming friends and were thus much easier to convince. We burned out those users quickly and eventually there were no new accessible users who would succumb to the virality. After day 7 or 8, the growth halted and the usage flat lined.

Moral of the story, you need to understand exactly why people are taking the bare and sending your invite. Is it appropriate only to a certain culture, age, or interest group? Or can it be generalized to the mainstream? Hopefully, when all is said and done you’re not just tricking newbie users like we were. If you cannot generalize to the average user, then you’re early growth may not be any indicator of future growth so don’t get excited until you have a diverse set of users who have proven acquirable across enough of the spectrum to make the pool of potentials huge enough for a macro-success. It’s crucial to know where are you viral? Is it local, or is it global?

*note: This definition of an FB power user isn’t backed up by any data and is more by ‘feel’. Thus, the reason for our failure is still a hypothesis, not proven fact. The point here isn’t to know exactly what users we attracted, but to understand that those initial users were not normal and their affinity for our viral hooks was not generalizable over the whole population.

Where will all of these Facebook and other platform app developers go when the hooplah subsides, existing viral channels get blown out, and the economics no longer make sense? Here are some first guesses (in order of least to most risk):

1) Long vacations

Likely, a lot of these guys have made more money more quickly than ever before and they’re enjoying it. At the end of the day, unless you’re Max Levchin sitting on top of an application empire, these things are lifestyle businesses, but the expendable cash flow could be healthy enough to sit back and relax for a bit until the next gold rush comes along.

2) Big tech companies

I’m not sure if I have personally heard of any app developers jumping into the stable corporate world yet, but the option will always be there for them. Companies like Google would love to have some of the best, self-starting, creative tech people in their circles to revitalize things, but can the developers ever get excited inside these painfully slow beauracracies?

3) Top tier app companies

Obviously, developers are getting sucked into these big players like Slide from all angles. They are swallowed up with less than healthy buyouts of their apps, but get the stability of work and the chance to leverage the huge arsenal of resources and cross-selling opportunities. Aside from the buyouts themselves, I don’t know what the compensation structure is inside these entities, but it can’t be as rewarding (since it is certainly not as risky) as going at it alone. At some point, if not immediately, these economics won’t make sense and app developers will want their control back and be sick of working to make their bosses’ pockets deep.

4) Small-scale developer rollups

It is common lately to see these individual developers or mini-teams banding together against the big guns. Andrew wrote a nice short post about that last month about why it’s almost impossible to compete over the long haul in this space. This to me seems like a futile compromise on the parts of the developers. Working at Slide has its career perks and stability. Going at it alone has exciting bursts of revenue and mini-fame. Is there longevity to this middle ground position that doesn’t really have the pros of either?

5) Full-fledged startups

So I’ve been skeptical enough about the first four possibilities that I think the fifth is where these developers will head, into the true non-platform-dependent startup world. Economically, founding or getting in early on something potentially huge makes much more long-term sense than even the best Facebook apps and they still get the excitement of building something quickly (just not quite as fast end-to-end).

On the plus side, these developers will have great DNA for the startup world and particularly consumer internet. They understand rapid development and scaling, user psychology, incentives, interactions, and every trick in the book to pump page views, click-throughs, and all the revenue drivers. Their creativity and prowess could be great in the startup world.

The challenge for these guys is understanding how to go big, and fast, without the training wheels of Facebook. Googlers who release products in the Google Pack might make really cool things, but what happens to their distribution when you take away the automatic deployment? What happens when you take a Microsoft developer’s Windows Update away (ok, that would never happen, but think about it)? Similarly, the cold, hard world of starting from the ground up will be an excellent challenge, and one that these guys should be eager to step up to.

It will be cool to see what interesting things spring up when these app developers realize their career path is not sustainable or no longer so economically or socially lucrative and begin to go off the platforms. Many will fail, but some may succeed and we as users of the Internet will probably get some very cool web products as a result. But again, that same question remains. Will these guys who are used to immediate growth leveraging existing social graphs be able to persevere in a world where good viral is something only earned with lots of hard work, statistics, reporting, attention to detail, and countless steps of iteration?