Brief Overview of Bloon
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The document provides an overview of 'Bloon', a product designed to simplify organizing social activities among friends. It outlines the development journey, market research insights, customer pain points, product decisions, and a technology overview utilized to create the platform. The founder, Edison Zhang, shares his experience and objectives in building this service to enhance social interactions.
![Product decision example I
Getting users to organize more spontaneous activities
AFTER
2.65.8
BEFORE
Casual, spontaneous activities plays to Bloon’s advantage (more real time, less selling / planning needed).
Email, Facebook events, Paperless Post are good for planning larger, more complicated activities.
Why?
Days between =
[ Date of activity - Date organized ]
(smaller is better)
● Removed date, time, and
location fields (date field had a
popup that showed a whole month’s
range of days to choose from)
● Removed ability to send calendar
invitations
● Eliminated 7, 8, 9, and 10 options for
“minimum friends needed” selection
● Improved copywriting on landing page
Reduced the
time between
organizing the
activity and
doing the
activity by
over 50%
(grayscale)
(grayscale)
METRIC](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/bloonpresentation-140810165417-phpapp02/85/Brief-Overview-of-Bloon-16-320.jpg)
![User feedback
Data
Conclusion
Bloon would be more useful if let organizers poll their invitees
● Users were already doing it afterwards in the conversation
● pain point brought up by users
Hypothesis
Why
Metric
Product decision example IV
Adding a voting feature
● Voting makes organizing on Bloon too complicated, liked the simplicity of
no voting / responding to invitations via SMS
● Remove voting feature. Made Bloon more complicated and did not bring
much benefit for group organizing (didn’t want to compete with Doodle)
● Groups converge on a time, date, and location through a dialog
● Figuring out logistics is a secondary issue to figuring out interest
PRE-IMPLEMENTATION
POST-IMPLEMENTATION
[ # of Bloons using the voting feature ]
[ # of Bloons ]
The feature drove users to use Bloon for 1 on 1
meetings (where this feature was used), which
drove this relatively high usage rate
Utilization rate = 37%
Utilization rate =](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/bloonpresentation-140810165417-phpapp02/85/Brief-Overview-of-Bloon-19-320.jpg)
Brief Overview of Bloon
- 1. Brief Overview of Bloon Edison Zhang July 2014
- 2. Table of contents I. Introduction to Bloon II. Customer development III. Product decisions IV. Technology V. About me
- 3. I. Introduction A quick overview of Bloon
- 4. Introduction My goals 1. Build a product from scratch, starting with just a problem 2. Learn: a. Product management b. Engineering c. Design d. Marketing 3. Build sustainable business 6 months later Built Bloon from scratch, starting with just a problem Learned and gained experienced in: ✓ Product management ✓ Engineering (Rails) ✓ Design (UI, UX, front-end dev) ✓ Marketing Didn’t build company ✓ ✓ ✗
- 5. What’s Bloon? 1. Invite friends to activity that needs critical mass of friends 2. Friends respond to poll 3. If enough join, attendees are added to group text to finalize plans 4. Have fun! Bloon makes it easy to organize group activities Activities organized with Bloon only happen once a critical number of friends respond that they are interested, and attendees are then put in a group chat to finalize plans
- 6. Friends receive invites and reply ‘Y’ to join, all via SMS Create Bloon: Dinner Friday & 4+ friends needed Login with Facebook Invite friends How Bloon works 1 2 3 4 4 5 Do activity with friends! 6 Once 4+ friends join, they’re notified via group chat that activity is “on”
- 7. II. Customer development through interviews and user studies
- 8. “It’s really annoying when people who say they were going to join are late because they forgot, or even worse, flake” “ ”Organizing social activities is way more time consuming and stressful than it should be The problem “Don’t hang out with friends as much as I’d like”“Sometimes it’s too much of a pain to organize, but I would still like to hang out” “I would rather spend more time socializing in person than on social networks”
- 9. Service that helps with organizing frequently done activities with many friends Opportunity Understand the market and discover the opportunity & use case Frequency of activity # of attendees Social Activities... by # of participants and frequency Birthday party Event / show LTR date coffee catch up Team sport / gaming Nightlife Dining Movie Watch TV show BBQ ...and services used to organize them by # of participants and frequency Email FB events Group messengers SMS / IM Frequency of activity Birthday party Event / show LTR date coffee catch up Team sport / gaming Nightlife Dining Movie Watch TV show BBQ # of attendees
- 10. Existing services (SMS, group messengers, email, FB events) are the least helpful for organizing activities in this area Understand the market and discover the opportunity & use case (continued) Services used to organize Key insights on opportunity Frequently done activities means: ● Little to no customized selling to each invitee needed ● Allows for spontaneous, little-planning-needed activities ● Frequent activities means frequent use of Bloon. More virality, less marketing needed Many friends invited means: ● Existing solutions are non-scalable in terms of personal connection. Organizer either has to fragment the invitations and ask people individually to get responses, or risk no one responding to an email ● More difficult to organize over non-specialized communication services (email, SMS, group text, IM)
- 11. Goals / motivations: Regret minimization, Hang out with only people he cares about, Have a good time Frustration points: Making a decision, Regret, FOMO, Turning down other friends' offers Scenarios: 1. Invited to go out on Friday, but must be compelling enough to not just stay in 2. Compelling activity, joins Goals / motivations: Satisfaction from successfully organizing something where everyone has a good time, and gets to do what she wants Current methods: Text, email, facebook messenger Frustration points: response time / not responding, flaking, gaining momentum, figuring out friends’ availability, splitting costs Scenarios: 1. Something she really wants to do: Gain momentum by getting yeses individually first 2. Something she wants to do: Send out invitation to everyone at same time 3. Plans for the weekend on Mon/Tues/Wed Develop personas through interviews Age: 24 Hangouts / week: 4 Main points: Socialite, single, extroverted, always planning her weekend, won’t hesitate to quickly join anyone in her close circle no matter what the activity is Olivia the Organizer Ivan the Invitee Age: 23 Hangouts / week: 2 Main points: Indecisive, more introverted, socially awkward, wants to know who else is going before deciding (doesn't want awkward situation with just 2 people), wants to evaluate all options before deciding
- 12. Invite rest of friends, let them know who’s committed. Get availability and coordinate Understand the organizer’s planning process and pain points Build momentum Identify a couple friends who are influential and most likely to join, and individually ask / sell to. Get availability Pain Level Time Services used: Real time, 1-on-1 comm.: IM, SMS, phone, in person Remind friends Check in with friends to make sure they still can make it. Last minute changes Group comm.: email, group messenger Repeat events, Sosh, Eventbrite, content media Post-activity tasks. Share photos afterwards, split costs Momentum attained (critical mass has committed) Do activity Get idea for activity Bills: Venmo / Paypal; photos: Dropbox, FB Pain points: Real time comm.: IM, SMS, email Get responses, uncertainty, face rejection / failure Find activities friends want to do, cut thru noise Get responses, coordinate logistics Lateness, flaking, last minute changes to plans Get people to do non-urgent tasks Details finalized (time, date, location) using Doodle, Yelp, Opentable, maps, cal. Step 5 Step 4 Step 3 Step 2 Step 1 Olivia, Organizer Organizer’s biggest pain points
- 13. Question Difficulty Notes How to make it easier? Time conflict? Low ● Check calendar (if the time for the activity is set) ● Not everyone keeps their calendar up to date ● ideally: know invitee’s complete schedule Automatically check calendar Interest in activity? Low ● If interest is high, invitee will respond “Yes” right away ● If interest is low, invitee needs to answer questions 3 and 4 before responding, leading to a long response time ● Key insight: people care more about who they’re doing the activity with than the activity itself Propose activities that invitees are very interested in Who else is going? High ● Invitee has to take time to ask other invitees, who also have the same question (becomes a circular). Getting to group consensus takes even more time ● Emotions triggered: FOMO, loneliness Get everyone else to commit quickly Opportunity cost? High ● Respond at the last minute if no better option appears ● Key insight: If enough close friends join, opportunity cost is not a big issue Once friends have committed to an activity (bc of above), other opportunities aren’t as attractive Why is getting responses so difficult? Let’s understand the invitee’s decision process: 1 2 3 4 To get a faster response, make these questions easier for invitees to answer Ivan, Invitee Invitee’s biggest pain points
- 14. Discover, create & socialize activities Value prop: content to figure out what to do, one player mode Critical mass for your activities Value prop: lowers the barrier to organize and join activities Product concept iterations derived from organizer and invitee pain points ● Recurring is less of a problem to schedule because most people are committed already ● Still need convo to plan (corner cases every time) ● Many recurring activities have the logistics set already ● Not many people have >1 recurring activity ● May be easier to just have a group chat or email thread ● Lowers the bar for friends to organize and join activities ● Eliminates the need to socialize activities with friends ● Needs to be personal, don’t want to be told by a computer what to do. Need a leader to make exec decisions ● May already have a group chat / email thread with relevant circle of friends in it Key takeaways ● Provides a 1 player mode ● Content is fun to browse ● Difficult to match people’s interest with right content ● Most people just do recurring activities (vs new ones) ● Don’t need another service to socialize ideas, will socialize directly immediately via direct channels (email, text) Mock up & testConcept Auto schedule recurring activities Value prop: save time / pain of organizing recurring activities Go?1 2 3 4 ▾ ▾ ▾ ▾ ▾ ▾ ▾ ▾ ▾ ▾ ▾ ▾ ▾ ▾ CONCEPT A CONCEPT B CONCEPT C
- 15. III. Product decisions driven by data
- 16. Product decision example I Getting users to organize more spontaneous activities AFTER 2.65.8 BEFORE Casual, spontaneous activities plays to Bloon’s advantage (more real time, less selling / planning needed). Email, Facebook events, Paperless Post are good for planning larger, more complicated activities. Why? Days between = [ Date of activity - Date organized ] (smaller is better) ● Removed date, time, and location fields (date field had a popup that showed a whole month’s range of days to choose from) ● Removed ability to send calendar invitations ● Eliminated 7, 8, 9, and 10 options for “minimum friends needed” selection ● Improved copywriting on landing page Reduced the time between organizing the activity and doing the activity by over 50% (grayscale) (grayscale) METRIC
- 17. APP PUSH NOTIFICATIONS ● Best user experience ● Need to build app ● Invitees need to install app EMAIL ● Easy to implement, universally accessible ● Easily mistaken for spam, not as real time SMS ● Most real time (~⅓ of texts are planning related) ● Universally accessible ● Harder to get numbers, unless native app OTHER OPTIONS ● Phone, group messengers USERS (INVITEES) ● No need to download another app ● Works within normal flow of communications ● Creates sense of urgency so invitees will respond faster ● The fewer steps to join the better BLOON ● Easy to onboard users ● Universally accessible to all potential users ● Easy to build (for an MVP) ● Reliable communication channel ● More real time Considerations Options BLOON INVITEE Product decision example II Choosing the right medium for sending invitations 1. Push invitation 2. Confirm 3. Notify that critical mass has been reached 1. Simple response 2. Group chat just like normal group texting 1 2 Solution: Send invitations over SMS3
- 18. Product decision example III Improving invitation response times Invitations come from ONE phone number Why? One phone number would give user an ‘invitation feed’ to join Feedback: Like simplicity, ease of responding via SMS Data: 51min median response time Conclusion: Confusing to users what activity they’re responding to Sent link to website for activity details & response Why? Can provide more activity info on website than a single text Feedback: Users miss the simplicity of responding to SMS to join Data: 20min median response time Conclusions: Responding through SMS is more effective than website New invites come only after responding to current one Why? Incentivize invitees to respond faster with FOMO Feedback: Time sensitive invites may be blocked by other invites Data: 311min median response time Conclusion: Invitees missing activity invites doesn’t make for a good experience Why: Organizers want to know as soon as possible whether there’s enough interest Metric: Median response time for an invitation, in minutes Each invitation comes from a new phone number Why? Simple, dedicated lines will lead to less confusion Feedback: More user friendly, but have too many phone numbers going on at same time Data: 5.1min median response time Conclusions: Best results, good enough to focus on other things A B C D A 51 min C 311 min B 20 min D 5.1 min (Smaller is better) Multi-threaded SMS invitations get the fastest response
- 19. User feedback Data Conclusion Bloon would be more useful if let organizers poll their invitees ● Users were already doing it afterwards in the conversation ● pain point brought up by users Hypothesis Why Metric Product decision example IV Adding a voting feature ● Voting makes organizing on Bloon too complicated, liked the simplicity of no voting / responding to invitations via SMS ● Remove voting feature. Made Bloon more complicated and did not bring much benefit for group organizing (didn’t want to compete with Doodle) ● Groups converge on a time, date, and location through a dialog ● Figuring out logistics is a secondary issue to figuring out interest PRE-IMPLEMENTATION POST-IMPLEMENTATION [ # of Bloons using the voting feature ] [ # of Bloons ] The feature drove users to use Bloon for 1 on 1 meetings (where this feature was used), which drove this relatively high usage rate Utilization rate = 37% Utilization rate =
- 20. IV. Technology
- 21. Technology overview Ruby on RailsMixpanel & GA APIs HTML / CSS Responsive Bootstrap jquery Twilio API Facebook API Postgres ● Built Bloon’s MVP in < 1 month on my own. If Bloon took off, I would then invest in building native mobile apps for optimal user experience ● Learned Ruby on Rails ● Integrated Bloon with APIs including Twilio (SMS) and Facebook (login and friends) ● Collected and analyzed data using Mixpanel, Google Analytics, and spreadsheets ● Hosted on Heroku Technology Stack
- 22. Responsive layout that’s optimized for all screen sizes Used a single code base and layout design that works well on desktop browsers as well as mobile browsers
- 23. Setting up SMS group chats most cost efficiently Background: Once enough friends join an activity, the participants are put into an SMS- based group chat to finalize plans Why is efficiency important? Twilio charges $1/month per phone number. Inefficiently assigning numbers to each concurrent activity leads to high costs, is a non-scalable solution Solution: ● Assign each invitee in an activity a number instead of assigning an activity a number ● The total phone numbers that need to be purchased from Twilio is equal to the most number of concurrent activities the most active user has, which is almost always <10 (activities expire after 1 week) Friend 1 Friend 2 Friend 3 Friend 4 Number A Number B Number C Number D Bloon via Twilio Activity I: Friend 1 Friend 2 Friend 3 Friend 4 Number B Number C Number D Number A Bloon via Twilio Activity II: Bloon assigns a number to each friend, and the same numbers can be assigned to different people in other activities
- 24. V. About me
- 25. Edison Zhang Experience Bloon Founder & CEO ● Learned Rails and built web app, integrating Bloon with APIs and frameworks including Twilio and Facebook ● Mocked up many prototypes based on user feedback and tested them with target users to see what resonates and doesn’t New Enterprise Associates Venture Capital ● Worked with and invested in startups including Pulse, Houzz, Cloudflare, Blue Jean, Nicira, and others Credit Suisse Tech Investment Banking ● Modeled detailed financials and analyzed market data for tech companies Duke University Biomedical & Mechanical Engineering Double Major, Economics Minor ● Graduated cum laude and with Distinction from robotics independent study