When a bug is inseparable from features
The idea of Fling was inspired by the author map of flights. Only instead of airplanes, he decided to send photos all over the world at random. The idea was interesting. People want to communicate, but not knowing how to do this with their neighbors, they are ready to search for friends by interests all over the world. But today the history of the company is sad. Having spent from 11 to 21 million dollars, the founder Marco Nardone quarreled with the whole team, left the company and went to rest, taking all the development rights. In the press, the story goes like this: a golden boy with a rich dad started to play and caught a bird of fortune by the tail, turned it in a year and a half with a string of personal nonsense into a plucked chicken.
However, he is not the first self-confident and inexperienced kid, climbed into the world of startups. Many have succeeded: the first investors advised something sensible, the first mistakes made us think about user requests, and so on. Why did he go bankrupt?
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There are two versions of his collapse. The first is too quick success. The second is that the products are never built on a single feature, and as soon as the hype passes through single-product products, they naturally die.
Nardone really launched the application very well. The father gave the money for the development. In June 2014, the application appeared in the AppStore. For the first month he had 400,000 downloads and half of those who downloaded actively used the application. A year later, the pace was still good - 4 million downloads and 15 million daily watched messages. In total, Marco estimated the sent messages at 50 billion pieces. The idea of the application was in demand.
For me personally, the idea is not very clear. Send your photos and messages with the help of the fifty instant messenger (and in the future, 500) to any recipients at random all over the world, but somehow reminds throwing a personal photo from a public balcony in the courtyard. Psychologically strange people will be your most loyal users.
The rest will be too lazy to shout down with you or go up to this balcony. Yes, and scatter on an ongoing basis will also be very specific lovers of communication.
So it happened with Marco - the ease of contact turned into an avalanche-like growth of strange users in your "inbox" and almost did not lead to one of two real goals - to sex or to relationships.
Long-distance and international flirting is difficult for fast and frequent sex, and for long-term relationships such a search for a partner requires a great deal of purpose. It happens that they leave for another city or country for a possible partner, but this is still not a massive case. And this means that you cannot build a mass service. But nudity from exhibitionists appeared in approximately every tenth message. While you find an interesting interlocutor or start a conversation with him, at the same time you will see hundreds, and even thousands of pornographic pictures of dubious quality.
Marco went in two ways - he hired a large department of the previews of the photos sent, which blocked the exhibitionists, and also decided to complicate the contact procedure so that the beginning of communication did not proceed when the message was received, but with confirmation of readiness for mutual correspondence. But he did it not too quickly, as he was fascinated by the growth of metrics, reflecting the growth of users and the number of sent photos. The faster metrics grew, the more he clearly saw himself in Zuckerberg’s dreams and the more he had investors' money.
However, a year later, his application was completely excluded from the App Store. Apple demanded tighter moderation. Then he literally ordered to lock the employees in the office with a key, so that they could quickly make updates to the application and it would again be available for download. Marco even thanked the administration for exclusion from the app store. He admitted that he became a metric addict and could not bring himself to impose more control on sticky guys. The more the guy sent messages, the more likely it was that he would return for a new send. It was the other way round with girls, with each new photo sent, the desire to communicate in the messenger disappeared more and more quickly.
Men behaved as it should for loyal users, and women on the contrary. Marco acknowledged that the picture is harmful and characteristic of compulsive harassment, but he considered the activity of the sent photos more important than the reputation of the application.
After 20 days, the application was returned to the store. The updated version of the application allows you to send new photos only to those who have already subscribed to you. With the aim of perfect moderation, they introduced a number of filters based on big data analytics to the messenger, tried to prioritize content with an emphasis on the popularity of certain pictures and videos from the female audience. Like the best quality.
The result was quick. In place of self came reports from the life. More than 50% of the images and video repost further recipients. Comparing with 2% of Twitter's initial retweets, Marco foresaw a new application life and 20 million users.
Alas. That did not happen. The audience did not grow, although activity remained. And if a startup has no growth, then there is no investment. No one else gave money for experiments, advertising and salary payments. Marco transferred all development rights to the new company, left the old bankrupt, and went to rest.
Perhaps we will hear it again. After all, the point is not only that the filters did not work well, but the ban of obsessive harasser was late. Each feature and application as a whole moves from uncertainty by the audience to its oblivion through the emergence of interest, interest growth, habitual use and utility decline. There are difficulties at each stage. Mechanics of the awakening of demand and the mechanics of its retention things are different.
In search of ideas for long-term development, Marco asked two questions in 2015:
The interim summary of the story says that he could not find an answer to them. He had already begun to think in the right direction, but did not have time to find the mechanics of holding interest. Thought, however, not too active. He actually took on the role of the chief marketer, and on his girlfriend laid the role of the chief of personnel. Someone from such dilettantism escaped himself, someone drove Marco. Team as such is left. Until the summer of 2016, Marco was implementing his advertising ideas and eating up the remaining investment. Alas, the number of active users did not grow, the majority of new users deleted the application in a month. Investors sensibly reasoned that a sharp turn in the reporting channel would take him to a very extensive field of competition and refused him new money.
In August 2016, the father began bankruptcy of the company. Marco, as mentioned above, flew away. But he promised to return, because his credo is “a random search in human nature, no one chooses a new girlfriend from among friends of his friends on Facebook.”
Video story about Fling from the first person:
However, he is not the first self-confident and inexperienced kid, climbed into the world of startups. Many have succeeded: the first investors advised something sensible, the first mistakes made us think about user requests, and so on. Why did he go bankrupt?
')
There are two versions of his collapse. The first is too quick success. The second is that the products are never built on a single feature, and as soon as the hype passes through single-product products, they naturally die.
Nardone really launched the application very well. The father gave the money for the development. In June 2014, the application appeared in the AppStore. For the first month he had 400,000 downloads and half of those who downloaded actively used the application. A year later, the pace was still good - 4 million downloads and 15 million daily watched messages. In total, Marco estimated the sent messages at 50 billion pieces. The idea of the application was in demand.
For me personally, the idea is not very clear. Send your photos and messages with the help of the fifty instant messenger (and in the future, 500) to any recipients at random all over the world, but somehow reminds throwing a personal photo from a public balcony in the courtyard. Psychologically strange people will be your most loyal users.
The rest will be too lazy to shout down with you or go up to this balcony. Yes, and scatter on an ongoing basis will also be very specific lovers of communication.
So it happened with Marco - the ease of contact turned into an avalanche-like growth of strange users in your "inbox" and almost did not lead to one of two real goals - to sex or to relationships.
Long-distance and international flirting is difficult for fast and frequent sex, and for long-term relationships such a search for a partner requires a great deal of purpose. It happens that they leave for another city or country for a possible partner, but this is still not a massive case. And this means that you cannot build a mass service. But nudity from exhibitionists appeared in approximately every tenth message. While you find an interesting interlocutor or start a conversation with him, at the same time you will see hundreds, and even thousands of pornographic pictures of dubious quality.
Marco went in two ways - he hired a large department of the previews of the photos sent, which blocked the exhibitionists, and also decided to complicate the contact procedure so that the beginning of communication did not proceed when the message was received, but with confirmation of readiness for mutual correspondence. But he did it not too quickly, as he was fascinated by the growth of metrics, reflecting the growth of users and the number of sent photos. The faster metrics grew, the more he clearly saw himself in Zuckerberg’s dreams and the more he had investors' money.
However, a year later, his application was completely excluded from the App Store. Apple demanded tighter moderation. Then he literally ordered to lock the employees in the office with a key, so that they could quickly make updates to the application and it would again be available for download. Marco even thanked the administration for exclusion from the app store. He admitted that he became a metric addict and could not bring himself to impose more control on sticky guys. The more the guy sent messages, the more likely it was that he would return for a new send. It was the other way round with girls, with each new photo sent, the desire to communicate in the messenger disappeared more and more quickly.
Men behaved as it should for loyal users, and women on the contrary. Marco acknowledged that the picture is harmful and characteristic of compulsive harassment, but he considered the activity of the sent photos more important than the reputation of the application.
After 20 days, the application was returned to the store. The updated version of the application allows you to send new photos only to those who have already subscribed to you. With the aim of perfect moderation, they introduced a number of filters based on big data analytics to the messenger, tried to prioritize content with an emphasis on the popularity of certain pictures and videos from the female audience. Like the best quality.
The result was quick. In place of self came reports from the life. More than 50% of the images and video repost further recipients. Comparing with 2% of Twitter's initial retweets, Marco foresaw a new application life and 20 million users.
Alas. That did not happen. The audience did not grow, although activity remained. And if a startup has no growth, then there is no investment. No one else gave money for experiments, advertising and salary payments. Marco transferred all development rights to the new company, left the old bankrupt, and went to rest.
Perhaps we will hear it again. After all, the point is not only that the filters did not work well, but the ban of obsessive harasser was late. Each feature and application as a whole moves from uncertainty by the audience to its oblivion through the emergence of interest, interest growth, habitual use and utility decline. There are difficulties at each stage. Mechanics of the awakening of demand and the mechanics of its retention things are different.
In search of ideas for long-term development, Marco asked two questions in 2015:
- Why on such an extensive database of contacts, people did not communicate by coincidence of interests, and sexual trolling prevailed?
- What indicators, besides traffic and user activity, should be monitored to achieve long-term success?
The interim summary of the story says that he could not find an answer to them. He had already begun to think in the right direction, but did not have time to find the mechanics of holding interest. Thought, however, not too active. He actually took on the role of the chief marketer, and on his girlfriend laid the role of the chief of personnel. Someone from such dilettantism escaped himself, someone drove Marco. Team as such is left. Until the summer of 2016, Marco was implementing his advertising ideas and eating up the remaining investment. Alas, the number of active users did not grow, the majority of new users deleted the application in a month. Investors sensibly reasoned that a sharp turn in the reporting channel would take him to a very extensive field of competition and refused him new money.
In August 2016, the father began bankruptcy of the company. Marco, as mentioned above, flew away. But he promised to return, because his credo is “a random search in human nature, no one chooses a new girlfriend from among friends of his friends on Facebook.”
Video story about Fling from the first person:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/321716/
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