Facebook Apps the Coolest Platform on the Net

Excited to see 3 cool Facebook Apps Developers in a panel, everyone has been talking about Facebook Apps all day long at Community Next Conference. (live blogging to share their experience, which is my summary of a lively discussion)

Joe Green’s Facebook App is Causes, raised $200K. Built on Ruby on rails, $100K on servers.
Joe Suk ’s site is Mychurch.com, social network for churches, 6 apps , besthas 200K users. 3-4 days per App, 2 weeks for one with deeper integration to Facebook.
Adam Kalamchi 225,000 uses for his App launched Boozmail 2 weeks ago.

Booze-mail, Adam says he knows nothing about users, he is the coolest guy in the whole conference by his attitude in he panel!!! I will take the risk of sounding like a web2.0 geek will say I find Adam more promising, letting the market drive, because I can see how it is so aligned with Facebook users to just use Booze-mail to communicate with friends like poking your friend on Facebook.

Adam can scale it later adding any kind of features.

Alec Peters (audience) asked has anyone monetized their Facebook App? Cause is the only app thats making revenues.
Facebook makes it easy to scale Facebook Apps adoption without thinking of revenue models. Everyone is focused on growth, which according to Joe Green’s is the best strategy to grow Facebook as a palatform with smart developers building on it.

I can’t agree more, there will be a phase when the developers will develop a revenue strategy once they have a userbase.

moderated by Noah

Viral Marketing Scaling to Million and Beyond

I am at Community Next at Sunnyvale, one of the best

Sitting at a panel session “Online Communities To a Million and Beyond”

Joe Greenstein of Flixter, Jim Squires of Ning, Ramu Yalamanchi of hi5, Jonathan Abrams of Socialilz (earlier founder of Friendster), moderated by Dave Feinleib of Mohr Davidow Ventures.

1. The repeat theme of the day has been to know your users – product-market match.

- Know your target user, whats the emotional element if why they use your product.
- Your product has to be really good, provide value to users. For viral play it needs to have a viral element as part of the product, not forced send-to-friend emails.
- Get your ideas to market, feel the response, users may use it differently, different type of users may adopt it. Listen and adopt.

This topic is dear to my heart because I have been hearing lot of talk about “getting users” or getting a “facebook strategy” etc, which turns me off. Real marketing is about building a relationship of trust with your user. So viral is a tool, so hearing thus know your user is heart warming go me.

2. Is Hiring and Virality Inversely Proportional – How to Hire Teams to Make Viral Happen

Jon of Socializr shares his experience saying its not by super resumes, because he had the experience of firing bad performers in a past startup Friendster, who got hired as VPs because of Friendster’s brand name.
His advice is to hire really hungry people and give them a chance.

3. Invite-Onlys is thats a good idea to create viral play.

Friendster had an open site, then closed it to fix bugs and opened it again. Ramu of Hi5 says they did a live beta where they fixed bugs and responded to market, they did not do an invite-only beta. Everyone agrees

4. Scaling Issues of viral user play

Jim squires of Ning says Spam was the number 1 issue and had to build controls to keep their site usable for real users.

5. Money needed to build a real good growing site

Jonathan says $500K is enough to build, test and figure out if its viable.
Ramu says he got $250K and ran for 2 years and says being frugal in early days teaches fiscal discipline which helps once you scale.
Joe of Flixter has build with raising $30K only.

Jia Shen of RockYou at Community Next talking about Viral Grow-the-business experience

RockYou is a 14 people company, builds widgets for self expression. All spread virally with their widgets, which they promoted in Forums. Now they are on all major social networks and now seen by 1 in 4 net users daily today.

Zombies seems a cool one, worth checking out.

Jia Shen co-founder of Rock You is speaking at Community Next’s viral marketing experience. Ro Choy (bizdev guy) is ready to talk to any startup interested in RockYou building widgets (ro at rockyou.com)

RockYou – Launching Viral Widgets
1. Know your User:
– Understanding your users is No.1. Founders are all guys, social networks are lots of females.
– Go Online and surf at where your target demographics interact online. Subscribed to all teen magazines like Cosmogirl.
– Do not think of the guy next to you as your user, thats the biggest mistake by many Silicon valley startups.
– Facebook is 50% guys and 50% females.
– Took us a year to get into the mindset of our target users.

2. Make a simple Use Case to replace something that exists.
– Quiz are huge on Myspace, find low hanging fruit.
3. Create Viral Channels
– Myspace – user bulletins, In page profile
– Facebook – Minifeed, Invite (only 10 a day now), 14 effective viral channels found by experience
Think of what the users are doing, make it easy to send to the right people with right messaging.

How do you market test?

We do lot of user studies. Find active users and get their feedback. We are grassroots and find users from our database. Do a Webex on how they are using it and see understand usability. We got 9Million users in the last Month and half.

Ben Pashman of Gigya has joined him, as Gigya has been RockYou’s partner that helped them scale. Perfecting technology for widget distribution. Started with consumer focus then focus to become the services for widgets as an intermediary. They have partnered with 200 companies, have more 300 partnerships waiting ti go live.

It takes 30 minutes for startups 30 minutes to embed your content into Wildfire to be live with their tool. Competition is Cursemind, Stickbox. Wildfire is platform agnostic, fash or javascript or anything you choose.

Slide, Rockyou, PictureTrail, Photobucket, BunnyHerelabs, Poqburn Brightcove, Musicplaylist.com – all the top content sides are their partners.

Their product is called wildfire which gives users an interface to use simple code which will embed embeds into multiple social networks, keeping users to just focus on sharing content. It is a piece of Javascript or Flash.

Ben Flashman’s viral experience is B2B so a different experience.

1. Keep it simple, super simple.