MY ROLE
As a product person and co-founder of the project my role was to define the product vision, strategy and a roadmap to build the MVP.
PRODUCT
The vision was to build a set of tools that will give users all the metrics related to their keywords in one place to help them plan and create great content.
EVOLUTION
We started off imagining we have already built the product by writing down what the product does and why it exists. That helped each team member to envision the product. We called this document product manifesto and it had the following core features:
- User centricity- the manifesto was designed with the users problems at the center
- Take feedback from users on the document
- Be precise
- Make sure everyone on the team shares the vision
After that we worked backwards to add clarity and definition to the vision of our product.
We started working with multiple content creators and we realized that maintaining a strong content pipeline was the biggest challenge faced by content creators. The solution was designed by offering niche specific keywords around which content can be created.
When the users entered the niche they are interested in, the software will search for similar content in the web and find out the best contents to extract associated keywords for the niche.
This will allow the users to have a list of keywords for which they can create content.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The product soon gained popularity and at one point it reached 1000 MAU within 3 months of launch. However, the trial to paid conversion was low possibly due to the audience group targeted by the product. It resulted in high server costs because the content analysis API needed high processing power (and cost) to maintain a good response time. The lesson was that the app should have been launched with a limited user base focus should have been to increase conversion rate. Only after hitting a certain rate of paid users the trial usage could be expanded to manage the burn rate.