Launching Mixer: What Worked, What didn't

Launching Mixer: What worked, and what didn’t

Wednesday, 9 January 13

Introduction

We wanted to build a service that would help
us better connect with the people around us.


Theoretical Foundations
• Recognizing the important concept of shared
identity in communities
• Providing opportunities for individuals to
interact with one another around a common
theme: location
• Understanding communities require a dynamic
where each person is able to communicate
with all others in the group (George Homans;
1950)


Launching


Approaching the press
• Focus on an inﬂuencer
• Meet them whilst out networking and have a conversation
• Pre-brief them by giving a heads up
• Negotiate
• We’ll launch when you’re ready
• Get to the point
• Have a story
• Send images in web ready format
• Details about competitors


Marketing is really important

• People often wrongly assume apps will market
themselves.

• Other apps we’ve built have done well with no
marketing, we assumed Mixer would be the same.
• TechCrunch got us 500 installs on the ﬁrst day
but not core users who didn’t stick around.
• Marketing strategy is as important as the app
itself!


Post-launch


Monitor everything
• Growth and user acquisition most
important.
• Identify why some users stick around and
why others don’t.
• App Store analytics and rankings.
• Listen to feedback.
• Be prepared to iterate.

App Store challenges
• Know what matters (App name, Developer
Name, Keywords, Title of in-app purchases)
• Get in top 100 = organic downloads
• Easier to rank in some categories over
others.
• Pick the right keywords.
• Localize app store listing.

What did we learn?
• Focus on the things your app does differently
to others
• Narrative is important
• Needed a new way to distribute
• Proﬁles were weak
• Need for niche focus
• Needed to encourage more engagement

You can always build on an
MVP
• Focus on one key feature
• Well built
• Well designed
• Don’t build ‘nice to have’ features until
users demand them
• Must be compelling

Technical


What did Mixer need?

?


[PFFacebookUtils logInWithPermissions:permissions block:^(PFUser *user, NSError *error)
{
    if (!user) {
        NSLog(@"Uh oh. The user cancelled the Facebook login.");
    } else if (user.isNew) {
        NSLog(@"User just signed up through Facebook!");
    } else {
        NSLog(@"User logged in through Facebook!");
    }
}];


Use the rights tools

• We used Parse (Parse.com) as our backend
to increase simplicity and decrease
development time. (it’s practically free!)


Use the rights tools
• Problem: we needed to identify mutual
Facebook friends and interests (Likes).

Mutual Friends (Graph):
https://graph.facebook.com/me/mutualfriends/?user=USER_ID

Mutual Interests (FQL):
SELECT page_id, name, pic_big FROM page WHERE page_id IN (SELECT page_id FROM page_fan
WHERE uid = USER_ID)


RTFM (or “read the docs”)

• Problem: we needed users to spread the
word about Mixer; share out your Mixer
posts to Facebook and Twitter.
• We already had a easy way for Facebook
access (and fetching Twitter credentials is
easy enough since iOS 5).
• For Facebook, Open Graph was perfect,
but read carefully to really see what
Facebook’s API can offer.

RTFM (or “read the docs”)


Keep up to date
• Mixer development started before iOS 6
and before Facebook iOS SDK 3.
• Over 40 Parse SDK updates since 1st July
2012.
• Keeping up to date is key - permissions and
sessions changed dramatically in v3 (and
then again in v3.1) which we could have
planned for.


Consider your edge
cases early on
• We found large milestones easy to
accomplish.
• But we did not account for our edge cases.
• What if users invalidate sessions?
• What if users change their proﬁle picture?
• Consider solving these problems early on.

Mixer
getmixer.com

@connellchris
chrisconnell.me

@rossbeale


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