Catch up!
Friendfeed acquisition
$50m in stockAcquired the team
Leading to new search…
Facebook lite
Oh, and @ ‘ tagging’…
A better inbox!
A better inbox (cont.)
• Updates from fan pages historically had miniscule conversion
• All Facebook found that the new change has improved this – so don’t overlook anymore
What not to do
Jump the shark fin!
Most (seeded) apps look like this
Instead of… like this
Why?
• Everyone wants to be ‘viral’
• Virality is how many users join based on the activity of other users over a period of time (my own definition).
• E.g. for every user engaging in the app, another user engages for each time period (a viral rate of 1 = true viral)
But…
• A viral rate of 1 is extremely difficult – it’s normal to be much lower (e.g. for every 10 users you get one more in each time period)
• So – if people only use your app once, there’s only one time period. If you seed it to ten people, you’ll only get one more user.
The answer
• Retention rate!
• To make your app spread virally, you need to keep people coming back.
• Even with a viral rate of 0.1, if you’re users come back every week, they’ll double every ten weeks
Turn this… (50% retention)
To this (99% retention)…
And if you get the viral right as well, maybe even this….
Thank you!
• Contact me – [email protected]
• Follow me on twitter: @joshuamarch
• Some blogs to read:
– http://andrewchenblog.com/
– http://lsvp.wordpress.com/