Several successful Facebook app developers shared their experiences at the recent Community Next gathering. After listening to the early F8 cohort, here are the strategic lessons that stand out:
1. Launch quickly. Really quickly.
The one universal comment made by the first class of developers was
that they should have pushed out their applications almost as quickly
as they threw it together. Free Gifts
has 7M users, with 40-50K daily installs and 4 - 5K daily uninstalls.
Free Gifts developer Zachary Allia launched on the first day that
F8 was available, and believes that the application grew quickly
because they were
a first mover.
2. Promote both active and passive user engagement.
Why is Quizzes viral? Friends have to participate in order to enjoy the value; it doesn't work passively. Why is Food Fight viral? No one needs to download a widget before they can be hit with a tomato, so it easily spreads passively. The lesson here: you can develop viral growth either actively or passively, and ideally you will take advantage of both mechanisms in your application's engagement model.
Grow-a-Gift developers Mike Mangino and Keith Schacht think it's important for apps to drive engagement by being as dynamic as possible. Gifting isn't an original idea; the team wanted to develop around a general concept with demonstated traction, but introduce it with a twist. Grow-a-Gift allows people to give potted seeds that grow into different types of gifts, and drives engagement by introducing progressive levels. Users can send a basic gift anytime for free or cheap, but in order to send an unlocking gift you need to send three basic gifts. The concept of engaging users with progressive levels is well-known to game developers, and it makes a lot of sense inside social communities as well.
3. Anticipate growth issues.
Hosting bandwidth. Grow-a-Gift was using 60 GB/day in bandwidth originally, and then started serving them by uploading all of the images to Schacht's personal photo album and serving from there using the F8 image tag. After that the bandwidth requirement dropped to only 1 GB/day, with barely any hosting cost. Many developers maintain a similar tension - though Facebook-hosted content is somewhat trapped inside the walled garden, the cost of hosting it is negligible. Make sure that the benefit of freeing content is worth the costs.
Rapid scale. Honesty Box enables users to send messages to another user on the network, and the recipient can reply without knowing who the initial sender was. After a week languishing in the directory, it erupted from no users to 1M users. There was even one day during which 300,000 people joined. So even if Facebook is just your app sandbox, have an emergency plan in the event that the masses converge.
Sustainability. Honesty Box developer Dan Penguine is very focused on preventing removals, since it is so easy for a Facebook user to do. As a result of his support for community policing, over 30,000 users have been put into the penalty box - a troll is ignored by the entire system once a certain number of individual users have ignored him, but the troll doesn't know that his messages are going nowhere.
4. Leverage what's unique to Facebook.
Socialmoth
is a forum for anonymous personal expression with 850,000 registered
and 65,000 active users. (Developer Paul McKellar also has a dot.com
site, but it doesn't scale nearly as well so he's
not investing further time into it right now.) McKellar pointed out
what's best about Facebook by humorously pointing out his own mistakes:
since Socialmoth was designed to be anonymous, he misses out on
newsfeeds,
notifications, and the social graph. He's now having to code
double-time in order to get around this single flaw, seeking ways for
people to sign their
secrets and to access user-to-user interaction.
A few other handy tips: McKellar notes that he uses EC2 because you can just load a new instance when you want to start a new app, and a single instance of EC2 will support up to 50,000 users safely; the one big problem is a loss of memcache.
Quizzes developers Eric Diep and Joe Winterhalter like F8 as a platform because of the comment wall. This allows very direct feedback that otherwise their users wouldn't bother to give; e.g., "how I delete these freaking quizzes?"
Free Gifts uses Facebook extensively to scale (fb:ref), and since sending a gift is an invite in and of itself, there's no real need for an invitation page. And hence, Free Gifts avoids one of the major turnoffs for Facebook app users.
5. Build niches, then aggregate.
Quizzes started with just one application, which appealed to one demographic. The developers then discovered that it works well to build related applications that appeal to different folks, and then create a bridge between apps in order to join those separate demographics.
The Grow-a-Gift team has had a similar experience. Developers Mike Mangino and Keith Schacht noticed that users with one gifting or card game application installed will often have all of the gifting or card game applications installed. To capture more users with this interest, Mangino and Schacht expanded demographics horizontally by adding gift-like apps such as Hatching Eggs.
The best quote of the day, though not quite a lesson, comes from McKellar: "Make your apps about sex. A lot more people are thinking about sex than about computers."
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