Memeja Hypothesis Results Day 1

Day 1 Analytics

Day 1 has been a big success.

By success, I mean that we are on our way to validating the hypothesis.

We spent 11am-5pm spreading word of our MVP (that we created ~1 day ago) on campus.  We supplemented word-of-mouth with guerrilla marketing on campus: posting flyers in bathrooms and doors, tracking analytics in real-time with a hotspot.

Bathroom marketing worked surprisingly well. Makes sense: by putting flyers right above urinals, we have their captive attention. We also focused on putting flyers on seats before class, hoping that bored students would curiously log onto our website.

From the graph, you can see that around 1pm traffic started to pick up (10-20 uniques every hour). Around the time when we marketed in classes. My guess is that bored students started logging on.

What's awesome is that the bounce rate is so low. In the beginning portions of the graph from 12pm-6pm on Wednesday, we hadn't adjusted the bounce rate so it marked 100% bounce rate for visitors who just visited the one page (remember, Google Analytics doesn't have the diffs).

But started at 1pm today, the bounce rate has kept under 20% for the most part. Even though we don't have tons of visitors, the ones who are coming stick around. That's important because we want to build products that users want.

It's also satisfying to track users in real-time slowly reading through the pages. You can see this in Top Active Pages in GA:

Tomorrow will be the defining day of this hypothesis. But so far, it's looking great. We'll probably set up a booth on campus to ask people WHY they like to read them. Then follow-up with our other hypotheses...

Memeja Analytics Engine

Today, we spent all day setting a new MVP to test our hypothesis.

The key is to make it easy for people to engage with the site by reading the memes/rage comics on one page. This runs into a problem with Google Analytics, though, as it uses two different timestamps for a time diff (and records that as your Avg Time).

Even worse, GA counts someone who just views one page as a bounce because the user hasn't seen a pageview. Usually, this wouldn't be so bad, but for our one-pager site, it's a problem.

Javascript hacking to the rescue...

First, to adjust the bounce rate to exclude any user visit above x time:

setTimeout('_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'NotABounce', 'Over 45 seconds']), 45000);

We believe 45 seconds is enough to engage with at least a few comics. It's conservative but anything less means that the user might simply be curious but doesn't want to actually engage with rage comics.

As usual, returning visitors is the best sign. They know the website is already there and want to check back.

Next, we wanted to more precisely find out how much time a user would be spending on our site. This requires long polling to tell GA at different intervals. Knowing the adjusted bounce rate is nice, but knowing how much time the user is spending looking at these comics is even better.

Adding this portion of the code...

(function (timer) {
  window.setInterval(function () {
    timer = (function (t) {
      return t[0] == 50 ? (parseInt(t[1]) + 1) + ':00' : (t[1] || '0') + ':' + (parseInt(t[0]) + 10);
    })(timer.split(':').reverse());
    window.pageTracker ? pageTracker._trackEvent('Track', 'Check', tos) : _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Track', 'Check', timer]);
  }, 10000);
})('00');

This piece of Javascript will help us log the time spent for each user on one page. Although it will slow down the site (a little bit), we're wary of reaching out limit with GA. Still, it should serve us well.

...

Ultimately, what we want to know is how people react to rage comics. Do they like to read them if they're more personal? If so, then we have a host of other interesting questions to ask: Would they create them if creation was made easy? Would they create them for friends to read?

Testing More Hypotheses

After demoing yesterday, the upshot was that it is difficult for people to view memes as a form of visual  communication (as seen in the previous post).

While we believe that rage comics are like visual tweets (fast transmission of an experience), yesterday's experience told us that we need to more concretely validate that our solution can fully solve a problem. So we started back at step 1 again to validate our hypotheses by talking to users from the ground up.

...

Our premise is this: sharing stories, a fundamental human desire, is actually difficult. Telling it in words is difficult because language is limited and lacks contextualization. You've seen this: when someone tries to tell you a story but ends up fumbling around with the words, what do they say? "You just had to be there."

From our previous prototypes, we can see that other people share this problem.

So the question is: how are people sharing stories now? Can we use rage comics as a better way for people to share personal experiences?

My hypothesis is that people usually simply wait to see someone to tell them a story. Or if that's not possible, they would try to call them. These are the best ways of explaining stories, in my opinion. Then: IM Chat, emailing/Facebook messaging.

Online solutions include emailing/Facebook messaging a narrative. But anything that includes typing up a story is already a non-starter because it is difficult and time-consuming. Instant messaging is the exception because of real-time feedback that could clarify certain areas of the story.

In the cases of verbalizing a story through a call or in-person, online solutions still may be better. Like the rise of text-messaging, it's more convenient to communicate something without requiring the other person's availability. Also the advantage of premeditating a message is a big plus.

...

Researching online and talking to users, we know that most people don't read rage comics because they simply aren't funny. This is fair: not everyone shares the same type of humor, especially when an experience is irrelevant to you.

What we want to know is whether people would read rage comics more if it IS personally relevant to their social circle and their lives. Put another way, would Berkeley students read rage comics way more if all the stories related to UC Berkeley? We think so.

Testing Hypotheses Pt 2

Researching online and talking to users, we know that most people don't read rage comics because they simply aren't funny. This is fair: not everyone shares the same type of humor, especially when an experience is irrelevant to you.

What we want to know is whether people would read rage comics more if it IS personally relevant to their social circle and their lives. Put another way, would Berkeley students read rage comics way more if all the stories related to UC Berkeley? We think so.

But we've also learned that what people say and what they actually do are two separate things.

....

The Plan

1. Set up a quick subdomain (ucbstories.memeja.com) that has rage comics created specifically about UC Berkeley stories.  We'll host an upload button for any users that want to contribute their own creation.
2. Hand out mass flyers and market this subdomain all of Wednesday and Thursday. 
3. Watch for activity via analytics. Most importantly, how many returning users will we get? How long are they spending time on the site? This signifies that a user knows that the site exists and wants to see it again. (A first-time visit doesn't mean much unless a user spends lots of time on the site.)

Plan as mapped out on our whiteboard:

From there, we can validate whether or not people appreciate rage comics as a quick way of communicating experiences. Then shift our current platform specifically towards rage comics (like we had originally intended).

Another Demo at Berkeley

We showed a new prototype today at Berkeley with a built-in tutorial upon registration. Learned a lot. Even met a Dartmouth '96 / UCSD professor who gave us advice to better our pitch.

We talked to about 30 people today and noticed that the value proposition is still unclear. We showed the albums feature (dragging memes you like to privately shared albums), walked them through the tutorial, and certain problems became immediately apparent:

The tutorial seems to communicate that we are still all about entertainment.  The albums led people to pigeonhole Memeja as a fast way to share memes (and create them with the Pull Facebook photo of the generator). Interestingly, people still liked the concept of sharing privately, but our goal is for Memeja to be more than that. What we need to make clear is that Memeja is not only a faster way of sharing memes people love, but that it is a better way of sharing experiences than the current alternative (of writing a long letter or email).

Because we already know that currently alternatives to sharing stories are difficult and time-consuming (typing up a story via email or Facebook message).

When we didn't explain what we were all about, people believed that memes != experiences. And that memes == entertainment. Many Berkeley students characterized Memeja as a site they would go to waste time or distract them from studying. Working with the term "Internet meme" is already an uphill battle because of the associated stigma.

The key, then, is to differentiate Memeja as more than an entertainment site.

Furthermore, I hypothesize that these problems stem from the fundamental construct of our tutorial, which features personal UC Berkeley visual captioned memes. These memes create quick laughs but looking back, they are superficial. They convey no deeper experience that people can relate to.

Another big problem is that when people finish registering, there isn't any content to interact with. Put another way, Memeja only adds value to people's lives when they proactively create an album or a meme. This paradigm is different from other sites, like Quora or Facebook, where value is immediately added when a user registers because of already existing content.  Privacy necessitates limited content but an interesting idea is to integrate both: public memes within the context of a larger private group.

The biggest feeling I took away from today is that while we haven't yet found our product-market fit, we are inching closer and closer to a broader understanding of the market/space. We are flexible enough to keep iterating and changing our ideas based on feedback.

Fight. Persist with all determination.

Today, we get to work on our startup

There is this great scene in The Rookie (2002), where Jim Morris, the protagonist hits a low point in his baseball career. He's right about to quit, calls his wife and says he's coming home. He's not sure why he's even playing competitive baseball, but he feels he's not made for it. When he remembers why he loves the game.

Next morning,  he's smiling, finds his best friend on the team and says, "Today, we get to play baseball!"

That's how I feel every morning when I wake up. Sometimes, I'm exhausted and tempted to sleep in. But, I find that the bigger 'yes' burning inside is what drives me throughout the day. "Today, we get to work on our startup!"

It's about finding the joy inside of what you're doing and the passion of building what people want to use. We're not in it for a quick exit (those never seem to work out anyway). Because the more and mopre I talk to people about the way they share experiences online, the more I realize that Memeja has so much potential.

Shoutout to Ali, Rachel and Erin who we met last night at a piano warming party. They had made memes of their friends but didn't want to share it all over the Internet. So they were texting it back and forth to each other, saying "you wouldn't really understand the meme because you don't know him." They were also concerned of making memes of friends for fear of being made memes themselves (for all the Internet to see!).

It's always interesting to hear people encounter the same problems that drive you to work on your startup. For them, today, I get to work on my startup.

How to get people to try your demo

Today, Max and I went out to Berkeley to talk to Memeja users and hear their opinions on various things, including: album concepts, recreating experiences and privacy.

The conversation usually goes like this:

"Hi, we're launching a startup. Would you take a minute or two to check out our demo and tell us what you think?"

Important things: 

1. Always have a smile on your face! I find that people are much more likely to engage if you seem like a happy, well-adjusted individual.
2. Time constraint: What's interesting is that you can see people's thoughts and opinions on their faces even before they say anything. I've noticed that creating a time constraint (like a minute) is just enough to get your foot in the door. Even if the demo doesn't actually last a minute, people tend to be much more engrossed once they're playing around with a live demo.

"This is our working prototype. It just has functionality -- it's basically a shitty safe mode. So go ahead and play around with it and tell us what you think. Don't hold back! We have wills of steel."

Humor is great for reducing social pressure (especially when you have two people around a table listening to you). We don't want them to feel pressured because we want them to speak their mind! 

It also makes the experiments funner for us too!

"Imagine you're with a friend when you see something crazy happen. Like....  a hobo rob a kabab stand (which is totally possible). Now you want to share it with your friend because only he knows what you're talking about"

At this point, we'd either ask them about how they would share an experience (to see if there is a problem)... and try not to lead them on. We want honest opinions and feedback. Or we'd just take them through the demo by creating an album and adding different memes into them, explaining the concept.

It's especially important to keep checking if he/she understands what you're explaining.

We've noticed that people tend to continue along even if they don't fully understand the concept. Perhaps shyness or social courtesy discourages them.

...

Insights today:

Everybody knew what a meme was! And everybody knew what a rage comic was (if they didn't, we showed them an example and they recognized it)

People really love the album concept but don't seem to fully grasp actually recreating experiences.

A small number of people commented on how they would simply use Facebook message or create it on Reddit and then send the link over. I'm curious why so I will be following up on them.

We found it helpful to explain Memeja as a Google Docs for experiences.

Almost everyone said they knew a friend who would love the site, even if they wouldn't use it themselves.

Everyone said they would click through an invitation link if it was from a personal friend (we have that by passing the full name as context in Python).

Many people commented on  how they liked how the memes were all in one place.

For the people who didn't make memes, they didn't see themselves as creative enough.

BUT many people WOULD share existing memes they found funny with friends in albums (like a private Pinterest). It might be interesting to create a prototype Javascript extension that allows people to interface with Memeja.

Many people wanted to see a mobile app that complements the webapp. We are already making plans for this.

For the people who really liked Memeja, they understood that it was a better way of sharing experiences with everything integrated.