Memeja Loop

For the past three days at Memeja, we've been working to 3/4am in the morning, refining the tutorial system and the design. It's startup time, all the time.

Talking to people at Berkeley, a majority of students mentioned how natural it is for them to integrate with Facebook: they need Facebook login and be able to invite friends with Facebook.

We originally wanted to base the registration system on emails, but with the privacy of albums, it's a tricky problem. For instance, if User A chose to register with email rather than FB and invites User B via email. User B hits the landing page and chooses to register with FB instead of email. Now we have a problem because we don't know how to link User A (email) and User B (FB) together -- there simply is no link between them unless User B's FB email matches the email User A typed in, which is a risky assumption.

Because of similar situations, we opted for Facebook login and invitation. Now when you register with Facebook, you land on a happy tutorial:

Which takes you to a hands-on tutorial.

After dragging a few tutorial memes into your album, we ask you to invite your friend -- otherwise there simply is not much immediate value. Another reason we immediately ask users to invite is because we found that users who used our system were struggling to already invite their friend to the system.

As this is more of another hypotheses, we're eager to see what people think of our system.

Memeja Iteration

In the past week, we've found that people really love viewing rage comics. Bounce rate for new visitors is quite low (~10-20% - we think the variance is influenced by the quality of the front-page stories).

We're following up with a second, fascinating question: if people love viewing rage comics, why aren't people creating more of them? We realize that viewing always surpasses creation but it's rational to wonder why this hasn't been done before.

(1)

So like good entrepreneurs, we are going out to engage our users and ask them for their opinions why. We've learned in the past that what users say about themselves does not exactly coincide with what they do. But this still provides us a cursory understanding of user mentality.

Berkeley was on Veteran's Day holiday, but we thought we could still catch a number of students and continue to market. What we found is that 7 out of 11 students had seen rage comics before. 6 out of 7 had never tried to create. It's a small sample size but already interesting to think about. We know that rage comic creation is degrees more difficult to create than macromemes -- but is it the difficult mechanics of creation or the difficulty of imagining a story?

Max: I asked [a student] his thoughts on the current editor and said it was okay, I asked him if he would likely make more if there were an easier editor and he said "maybe, it's more about having a story I think is good enough to share than the process of making it"

So if that's the barrier to creating rage comics, we have a host of interesting ideas to pursue: perhaps by creating a social context, people will be able to create stories more easily. In other words, as with the original Memeja idea, if we have an 'album' together that already represents an experience, that makes it easier for people to think of stories within that experience context.


(2)

The second experiment we're conducting is based on the idea that people already know what rage comics are. We printed a different flyer that had a funny Berkeley rage comic on it. Essentially, we're split-testing the different flyers to see which has a better ROI.

It'll be interesting to see if more users come because of the rage comic flyer. If so, that may say something else again about how much people like rage comics.

Memeja Hypothesis Analysis

Over the past three days, we've taken a break from coding to focus on what our users want through marketing. Our site was a means to an end: figure out what users want and incrementally iterate towards it.

Through our experiments, we've found that for new visitors, the bounce rate is LOW. In other words, these new visitors are spending more than 45 seconds on the site. While it could be the case that they absent-mindedly left the tab open while surfing other things, I've watched about 20-30 real-time analytics to see that users slowly trickle from the first page to the second to the third (this can be seen in GA too).

This is great because the behavior suggests that users enjoy reading rage comics. We've always suspected that people enjoy reading rage comics, but the question was to what degree. Apparently a lot! Roughly more than a third of the unique new visitors came back to check for new content (marked as returning visitors).

So the question becomes: why aren't more people creating rage comics? People do enjoy viewing them. Is it simply a case of timing where because the medium hasn't attained a critical mass of popularity to breach the mainstream? Or is it the fact that the blank canvas is intimidating and people generally lack story ideas?

Luckily, we know a few things now: in the rage comic space, the biggest pain point for users is creation -- there just is no de-facto solution that works seamlessly. This is something that Max and I felt when creating too. I mentioned this in another post: it seems that Reddit users that popularize rage comics in f7u12 do so out of a hobby, not as a seamless mode of communication.

In any case, whether we pivot to become the de-facto site for college experiences/rage comics, a better rage creator is a must.

Our next steps are to see student awareness of rage comics and to gather info as to why more people aren't creating. If it's a problem of easiness, then a well-thought technical and UI/UX design solution will be viable. If it's a deeper problem, like a chicken and egg problem (where they need their friends to use it and popularize it first), we'll need to put the better creation tool in the hands of powerful early adopters and power users.

Next week, we'll be asking these questions and iterating ever closer to what people want.

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?