Keep up with the real world. Stay informed.

Be careful with MVP!

This is a lesson we learned a couple of months ago at MIT. In the first few months after we launched, we made a major mistake. We did not talk to our customers as much as we should have, and we added a lot of features we thought were cool, but our customers never asked for. So, we wasted a lot of time that could have been better spent on actually talking to our customers and figuring out what they wanted. 

It is very important to stay engaged with your customers and tailor your product towards the needs of your target consumers.  We did a lot more testing these last few months, as we actually sat down with some potential consumers and did some UI testing.  Some questions we specifically asked included  : 

1) Have you heard of us?  If so, from where?

(We wanted to see which of our marketing efforts were working the best.)

2) Do you know already about what we do?  If not, take a look at the website, play around with it, and let us know what you think this service is about.

(We wanted to see if consumers could figure simply and quickly what our site was and what value they would get out of it.)

3) If you know what we do, what can we do to make you use the site more frequently.

(We wanted to know how to increase engagement.)

You will now be notified if someone upvotes or comments on your stories.

See the lives of your communities, cities, and countries on an interactive world map. Post, upvote, and comment on events at any level of granularity (think Reddit on Google Maps).

Watch the Demo here!

Explore:  Browse stories from your neighborhood using a map.

Find out what's important: Upvoting brings the important stories to the top.

Inform others:  Share what's going on with your entire community, not just your social network

Be alerted:  Automatically receive community advisories.

It's been almost 5 months since we launched the beta of our service at http://geosocial.io. geosocial.io is a service for sharing information about the real world, such as links, pictures and upcoming events, with the entire MIT community, not just your social network. You can get a good idea of the problem we're trying to solve by checking out these couple of 1-min videos.

Demo we created for Techstars  

Introduction to the problem we're trying to solve

We wanted to talk about what we've done so far, what we've learned, and where we're going. In

Background.

First, here's a little bit of background. I was prompted to build this service because I always felt out of the loop with all the interesting things going on around campus. I finally started working on it seriously as part of Ken Zolot's Founder's Journey class, and continued into David Gifford's Entrepreneurship Project class at MIT (I totally recommend taking those classes).

I was very fortunate to find 3 excellent co-founders. Cathy Cao is a recent MIT graduate in management science, and she's responsible for our marketing. She's super hard-working, resourceful, and amazing overall. Alejandro Wainzinger and Lloyd Chan are Japan-based developers who I met while I was doing an internship in Tokyo. They're seriously the best developers I know, and they're in charge of our backend. I (Raf) am responsible for the product design and front-end development.

The first 4 months.

Before even working on the product we decided to create a launch page and a Facebook page to validate our idea. The response was very positive: we were able to get around 300 launch page signups and 200 likes on Facebook before we even started. That converted into around 100 user registrations the day we launched the service.

The service launched with only the ability to post a status update on the map. Based on constant user feedback, we've added the following features:

User profile pages

Facebook-like link scraping and preview

Image uploads

Filtering by new, top stories and events.

Ability to look at the top stories of all time.

Responsive design (our app works well on a mobile browser)

User reputation (a score based on the upvotes of that user's submitted stories).

Key decisions.

We made two key decisions at the beginning: we were going to develop for the web at first, and we were going to focus exclusively on the MIT campus. Many people disagreed with the decision to postpone writing a mobile application. I think this was a good move because for the first few months we needed the ability to improve the product as quickly as possible, and we needed to figure out what changes needed to be made to our initial API. Iterating on a mobile app is a lot slower. By developing our app for the web, we were able to learn a lot from how our users reacted to the changes.

We focused on the MIT campus because we wanted to have an area super-concentrated with content. If we had launched to the whole world maybe we would have a bigger userbase, but the service would have felt very empty because the data would be diluted. Focusing exclusively on MIT also helps us figure out our strategy for growth.

What we've learned. The last 5 months have had their ups and downs. This is what we can say about the journey looking back:

Starting a company is hard, in many ways harder than MIT, and it really takes resilience and resourcefulness. As Jason Calacanis puts it, you need to be able to not give up when you get smacked in the back of a head with a brick. Because of all the startup cheerleading happening lately, it seems starting a company should be really easy, but the reality is very different. Before we launched our beta we had these ideas that the service was immediately going to take off based on the excitement we felt from people. However, once we launched it, the picture was completely different. We were just doing ok, which isn't what we were expecting. So once you've executed your plan and it went meh, what do you do?

We thought creating a bad product is the biggest setback a company could have. Boy, that's so not true. Our main enemy is indifference. We have a really good product and we hear lots of good things from our users, but that's not enough to get people's attention. We should have built a referral mechanism before launching our product. Services like Facebook and Pinterest didn't launch without the ability to invite your friends into the service. We've found that we have many happy users, but they don't think of inviting their friends. We're working on making that easier for them.

Staying in touch with the universe (talking to your customers) is really, really important. If your company is stuck and you don't know what to do, it's probably because you stopped listening to your customers. Also, just like a regular person, a company needs friends. It can't exist in isolation. Some of our best ideas and insights have come from talking to fellow entrepreneurs and advisors. Whenever we've drifted into working in isolation, we've gotten stuck. In particular, Christina Qi and Luca Lin from http://domeyard.com/ have given us some good ideas.

We noticed that 99% of our users are just going to browse content. We had assumed that a much larger percentage of people who register would try to post or comment, but it didn't work out that way. People love just browsing the map and taking in what's going on and that's it. Based on that knowledge, we're working on making the app more rewarding for users who post.

Also, we learned that international teams can really work, as long as you have the right people. Even though many advisors told us it was a lot better to work with people close by, our Boston/Tokyo team has really good chemistry and we communicate well through email, instant messaging and video conference.

Looking ahead.

Now that we've learned a lot about what our users want, we're slowing down our web-development and focusing on building the mobile applications. We're releasing the Android application before the end of the year, and the iPhone application will come out in January. Once we have the mobile apps done, we'll start uncovering information about the world that we didn't have access to before.

We're also working on a notification system so that interaction on our site is more rewarding. If someone upvotes or replies to a story you posted, you'll get a notification, just like in Facebook and Reddit. This is the #1 feature requested by our users right now.

How you can help.

Wow! You made it to the bottom! Thanks a lot for being interested in what we're doing. You can help us by letting us by:

Trying out the service and letting us know what you like and what sucks. You can always email us at [email protected]

If you have an upcoming event or you take a picture of something interesting in the Cambridge/Boston area, share it with the MIT community by posting it on http://beta.geosocial.io

Tell your friends. The service gets more useful when there's more people in it.

Just go to geosocial.io on your mobile phone browser.

Here's a of list of updates we made to the site last week : 

Updated markers. Markers for upcoming events are now orange. More popular events have bigger markers

Story thumbnails and event labels look nicer now.

Removed automatically opening bubble for the first story. It was getting annoying.

Added reputation. Now you can see how much people have liked your comments and stories.

Upcoming events are now labeled as 'events'

Fixed bubbles always saying 'posted just now'

If you guys have noticed, each time you visit the page, we have randomly generated inside jokes in the yellow box on the upper left corner. If you guys have any ideas, let us know, and we'll add your phrase on there!

We just added reputation to geosocial.io. This means that you should be able to see how much people like your stories and comments, right next to your username. It's retroactive, so if you've commented or posted before, you already have a score  We've also improved a few more things, you can see what we did on the changelog. Check it out at http://beta.geosocial.io/

Hey guys! Check out our article in BostInno :  http://bostinno.streetwise.co/all-series/geosocial-io-find-out-about-news-and-events-in-real-time/ We also got mentioned in The Tech under "Tuesday: Digital and Software Night" :  http://tech.mit.edu/V133/N38/tequalszero.html

Pretty good week.

From our last UI test, we learned a lot about the importance of website content.  And so, we decided to put together a Content Team of MIT students who are passionate and supportive of our idea to help us with that.  The content on our site has improved a lot since then because there is much more real-time activity.  Our page also includes stories in Boston as well as MIT, since users have mentioned that seeing missing information in Boston is also of great importance to them.

Along with the Content Team, we've also been continuing with UI testing. We are currently in the process of creating an even simpler interface. Some upcoming tasks we have include :

~dragging the pin on the map, instead of dragging the map

~making all the map markers easier to identify by having variable sizes