LifeSpiced was our next iteration of the social adventure platform we started with CheatDay
Adventures. (Read about that here: First Go Around: CheatDay Adventures.) On a personal
side note, it is both encouraging and discouraging to be writing a blog post
detailing LifeSpiced in the same place where I was a year ago developing the initial aspects of LifeSpiced: 901Columbus Café drinking a double zebra mocha… and Facebook check-in/Instagram
photo/FourSquare check-in complete… again.
From running CheatDay Adventures we
learned that people didn’t care about the ‘cheat day’ concept and that the Four
Hour Body community, even in San Francisco, was too small to make the service viable. However, we discovered through meeting so many new transplants that a significant percentage of people new to San Francisco are not living the
social life they want. They have interests and hobbies but find it difficult to discover related activities or make new friends. Social clubs are a gamble because of the cost to pertinent event ratio. Meetup.com presents its own set of challenges simply because of the sheer number of groups available for each interest and the disproportionately large number of dead, inactive or poorly run groups. People want a simple service to easily
communicate with others that share a hobby or interest and organize activities that they can attend without having to lead a group themselves. And so, LifeSpiced was going to be a social platform where people could
list their hobbies and interests and then easily communicate with others to
create and join adventures.
Before continuing, to gain a better grasp of LifeSpiced here is the value proposition feature and benefits copy below.
Before continuing, to gain a better grasp of LifeSpiced here is the value proposition feature and benefits copy below.
Profitability
LifeSpiced was essentially a new service that came with its own complications, but some carried over from CheatDay Adventures. Profitability was a problem from day one with CheatDay Adventures. First, there was not a large enough user base to make the system viable and second, we did not know whether it should be a paid membership service, a pay per adventure service, or an advertisement/sponsor based service. LifeSpiced automatically solved the first part of the profitability problem because it was going to handle all categories of interests, not just food activities, creating a much larger potential user base. This presented a new problem however, namely how could the service frictionlessly connect individuals across all interests. Our solution to this was an interest tagging system we developed that I will discuss along with the website design.
The second half of the profitability
problem was determining the correct revenue source. I fleshed out three main solutions when transitioning away from CheatDay Adventures.
- LifeSpiced could be a subscription based service where everyone in the community paid a flat fee.
- Only registered guides that were approved by us would develop adventures for others and charge a fee per adventure that we would rev-share.
- Alternatively, we could allow anyone to create an adventure for an interest, and if it happened to be a paid event simply rev-share that.
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| Transition from CDA to LifeSpiced |
Having an upfront pay barrier, obviously, would require some ingenuity to
persuade general users to join and then do the hard work of creating adventures for themselves. The membership cost
could potentially be overcome with good pre-launch buzz, a great landing page,
and a free trail period of some sort.
The second and third idea required a
whole review and feedback system to ensure that the cost
our guides charged was fair, to make sure members paying for
adventures were receiving the things and experience they expected, and to
reward good guides and weed out the bad ones. Part of this system, an email
review questionnaire via SurveyShare, was already developed for gaining
feedback from users in CheatDay Adventures. The other hurdle with these two ideas,
which was much harder to overcome and more crippling, was that it's quite likely there will be groups of users wanting an adventure centered around a specific interest but no guides or no knowledgeable guides in that interest category to create
it.
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| Review Questionnaire |
After much discussion we
decided that solutions two and three required too many features that were not necessary for a successful MVP launch. More importantly, we realized that no matter what we chose there would always be a need for a simple quick system to motivate general
users to create adventures and content. After launch and gaining a decent user base, we could switch to having hired guides that would produce higher quality paid
adventures. Perhaps even better, the community would continue creating better
and better adventures by themselves with a good review/reward system and
therefore, attending adventures would always be free and the only cost would be tickets to an existing paid event or to pitch-in for materials for an adventure. Additionally, we wanted to do away with a membership fee to ensure we could grow the
community as quickly as possible.
The entire service would be free with the goal of attracting a large enough user base that at some point we could bring in revenue from ads and businesses that would want to sponsor and create adventures. We also had a feeling that simply through the process of developing the product and attracting and interacting with a decent user base new revenue opportunities would arise around white-labeling, premium features or something completely unexpected.
The entire service would be free with the goal of attracting a large enough user base that at some point we could bring in revenue from ads and businesses that would want to sponsor and create adventures. We also had a feeling that simply through the process of developing the product and attracting and interacting with a decent user base new revenue opportunities would arise around white-labeling, premium features or something completely unexpected.
We didn't solve the immediate profitability problem that lingered from CheatDay Adventures, but we did expand the size of our target market and with the low startup and initial operating costs of LifeSpiced, that was good enough for us. At this point we were also getting extremely antsy to grow a community and start using a service
the two of us also wanted. If all else failed we could start selling anonymized user behavior data
like all other free services, after all, "If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product." Seriously, google that.
Motivation
Designing a system that successfully motivates users to
create adventures is THE key aspect of making LifeSpiced viable. To persuade users to take that step and create content, Ian and I both began learning about community management, motivation, and gamification. I had a
general understanding of motivation in terms of extrinsic and intrinsic
motivation from my educational background in social and industrial psychology,
but also spent some time finding scholar articles on Google and reading blog
posts discussing motivational systems used within various businesses and websites. My
general notes from all this is below.
We decided to use both non-monetary extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. I understand that only positive intrinsic motivation leads to sustainable motivation, but if we can provide sustainable extrinsic motivation then why not use it? Here is the break down for the decision to use extrinsic motivation.
Innovators. The first users, or innovators, would be willing to create adventures because they enjoy using a new technology or product first.
Early Adopters. The people after them, or early adopters, would start creating adventures for an intrinsic reward such as autonomy over their social life, mastery of sharing their local knowledge in an engaging way, and perhaps for the urge to increase the level of overall happiness which is a larger goal.
Everyone else. People that follow these two main groups (and maybe even early adopters at some point) may require some kind of external motivation and reward to create content. Therefore, extrinsic motivation would be used to convince people to start creating adventures. After reaching this point, creating and going on adventures would probably provide enough intrinsic motivation for a user to continue.
Hopefully the extrinsic rewards we put in place wouldn’t diminish a user’s natural intrinsic motivation to create adventures via a crowd out effect, but if they did, the extrinsic rewards would always be there. We would also use extrinsic motivation for simple actions that had a clear set of rules and one simple outcome such as inviting friends, tagging interests to oneself/others, and providing feedback.
To create a system of extrinsic
motivation and rewards Ian and I began learning about game mechanics and
gamification. I attended multiple San Francisco Startup Meetups discussing
gamification for a startup web service, watched Mixergy interviews,
and read Jane McGonigal’s fantastic book, Reality is Broken. My notes about gamification, types of rewards,
motivation, and the game design for LifeSpiced are below. I built the game system to promote the specific actions crucial to the site: promotion of
the site, tagging/making new interests, attending adventures, creating
adventures, being active within a group and providing feedback. The types of
rewards we were going to use included badges, geographical teams, leaderboards, earned social
names, and general redeemable points. The types of motivation
fell into player vs player, social, team based co-op, and self-achievement categories.
As all this planning and research was going on, I pushed forward with re-validating the business idea through light user-research and began working on how we were going to position and market LifeSpiced. Since we didn’t have a Meetup group like with CheatDay Adventures to check how we were doing, I wrote a general questionnaire and interviewed a random selection of people that were in our target market. A majority of the participants were female because we found that mainly females were interested in CheatDay Adventures and because females are more likely to branch out to entire new groups of people when compared to males (and only just a little bit because meeting new girls is a good thing). The questionnaire (below) was also intended to gather thoughts on the name/logo and general information on the participants’ social lives. From the questionnaire, I confirmed that LifeSpiced fulfilled a need that was unmet, that the name LifeSpiced worked well for communicating the correct message and was liked by females, and that a central color for the logo and site design should be green. I also gathered specifics on the problems our target market had with their social lives, which was used to create more convincing copy. PS - I'm not really a graphic designer.
Branding
For marketing and positioning LifeSpiced, I researched topics including marketing strategies, PR practices, value proposition statements, the user sign up problem, and information architecture of a landing page. Here are a few of the resources I found particularly interesting or useful:- I took notes for PR techniques from a Mixergy interview, PR Techniques.
- From another Mixergy interview, Communicating Product Value, I learned about value proposition statements and how they fall into these four main categories: aspirational, fear, competitor, and description.
- I learned about the user sign up problem and therefore how to properly structure a landing page from another Mixergy interview that led me to the presentation here, Designing for Social Traction.
My outline I worked with for a marketing plan can be viewed here. Also below are my brief notes on how we were going to start marketing LifeSpiced. I focused on and began developing aspirational statements first because:
- It promoted the correct attitude for us.
- Because we didn’t have enough content yet to support fear based statements.
- Because competitor based statements would be more beneficial after the initial launch when customers are considering alternatives and comparing other preexisting options.
Marketing for lifeSpiced
PR Techniques
Value Propositions
Landing Page Structure
Product Champion/Customer Persona
Site Development
After researching and fleshing out the building blocks to create a useful and engaging system, we began designing the features and website. Unlike with CheatDay Adventure's singular focus on food adventures, LifeSpiced needed a system to match users together across many interest and adventure categories. There are plenty of sites that allow users to tag interests on their profiles, however, the flaw with most of these systems is that an individual’s interests are kept private. As a result, if a group for a particular interest doesn't exist, then users with that interest won't be aware of each other and probably won't start a group for that interest. With this in mind, we designed an interest tagging system that was completely public, that connected users automatically, and that automatically started a group for an interest once critical mass in a particular geographical region were met.Specifically, once enough users tagged the same interest a dedicated group page for that interest (interest group page) would go live and from then on users that tagged that interest would automatically be added and given access to that preexisting interest group page. More specifics will be discussed below when covering features and website design.
Before looking at some wireframes for the site lets first go over a typical user's life cycle through the site.
- First, a user would sign up through Facebook with the opportunity to invite their friends and then immediately tag interests to themself. The interest list doubled as the adventure categories, too.
- Next, the user would search for adventures that are going on regardless of the interests just tagged to ensure no interests were missed and to get him or her signed up for an adventure as soon as possible.
- Third, the user would either be added to their interests' group pages or be notified that some of the interests tagged did not yet have enough users to begin a new interest group page. As mentioned above, once a minimum amount of users tagged the same interest that interest group page would go live automatically encouraging communication and adventure creation on that specific interest.
- Fourth, the user would start creating adventures individually or collaboratively while RSVP’ing for preexisting adventures.
- Finally, the user would continue using the site because of the game mechanics, the social community, and because he or she would gain recognition and continue to grow within the community via his or her preexisting interests and newly found ones.
That's pretty broad and abstract,
but let's delve a little deeper by checking out some wireframe drafts.
To start designing the website, for
which I did information architecture, basic wireframes, and interactions, I pulled elements from various successful websites and redesigned them to
fit our specific needs. There were going to be five main pages to the website.
1. A home page that functioned as an interest and adventure search. This page pulled elements from
Ebay.com's search
page and specifically its filtering side bar design.
2. An interest group page that would
be created automatically whenever enough people tagged a
specific interest.
Therefore there could be as many interest group pages as there were interests.
Elements on this page mimicked some features from Facebook’s event pages.
3. An adventure creation page where users could either individually or collaboratively create
adventures. This page was based off of our CheatDay Adventures’ create page/system.
4. A profile page containing the same
information as a Meetup profile page, but also including a user’s
interests,
statistics (points, badges, rating, etc.), and his or her private message inbox.
5. A user activity page. This page followed
the same general outline as the subscription page, at the
time, from
Youtube.com. It was meant to keep a user up to date across all his or her
interest groups’
activities in a simple quick manner. The majority of time
spent on the site was imagined to be on this
page since it served as the nerve
center for a user.
So at this point marketing for pre and post launch, positioning, some user feedback, website design, and an entire background game system had been completed. However, a solid revenue source was still missing and a few other unforeseen complications arose. The biggest issue is obtaining critical mass for a particular time and place when trying to get people to commit to real life events. It's a little known secret that the vast majority of Meetup groups are dormant and the most successful ones charge their members. Unless your group is established and successful your attendance rate will be something along the lines of 50% of your RSVP rate. People just seem to like to be busy or rather feel busy. And from past experience, even if 50% did show up for an event, the event still felt like a failure in some sense. We wanted to avoid our guides/organizers and particularly our members from running into this problem. Also, while we automated the creation of groups, we couldn't find a good way to automate the creation of events for a group and so the task of actually getting a group of people together at the same time in the same place didn't improve much. These two problems, upon understanding them, were inherent to the structure of the system. The system of having people first connect online to plan/organize/talk about an event, then schedule an event, and finally attend said event was flawed.
So we went back to the drawing board, envisioning a service that essentially reversed this flawed system. The service needed to provide a full list of events and activities that individuals or groups of people could attend whenever. First events, then scheduling and people, and finally, if desired, connecting online. Enter the Throwdown.
So we went back to the drawing board, envisioning a service that essentially reversed this flawed system. The service needed to provide a full list of events and activities that individuals or groups of people could attend whenever. First events, then scheduling and people, and finally, if desired, connecting online. Enter the Throwdown.
