Stories, the app for social storytellers
My participation: Founder, UX designer.
In 2013, I took about an hour to go to work. I used to take the subway and then the bus to get to the office. It was an everyday trip, so I got used to seeing situations, people, moments that inspired me to write stories, and I wrote them into my iPhone block notes.
I also realized that people were telling stories to their friends at What's App, or even when they posted a picture on Instagram, and I thought:
"What if We build an App for telling short stories, to be easy to write and read to be short to read while people are in their leisure time, inviting everyone to use their imagination in every moment writing stories."
That's how Stories did come true.
How did we kickstart?
When we started, We were a team of four: two designers and two developers.
We focused on building an iOS app at first since We had the idea to launch internationally.
We built an interactive prototype to get the "Geekcamp" competition. It was the contest to get started with an Incubator in Chile.
We got funding from Corfo (Chilean Gov), and we finally launched the MVP later in 2014.
Our user acquisition strategy was to bring in users from Twitter, writers, journalists, and amateur writers.
Once we got some early adopters, we connected with some of them to ask for feedback. We interviewed them about their motivations, their inspiration times, and how we might build a good product for them.
We used our social networks to invite people to join us.
Francisca Solar, a Chilean writer, invented the challenge of writing 100 stories in 100 days using the hashtag #100DaysStories, and tons of people who followed her at Stories and other social networks started the challenge.
After she finished her 100 days of writing, she launched a book full of stories written in the App.
She was a great ambassador and early adopter, so we interviewed her currently to check the usability and desirability of features.
To increase the adoption and engagement of the App, we created Writing challenges too for Christmas, Halloween, and every other occasion.
We also created beta tester groups for iOS and Android through social networks like Facebook and Google+ groups.
Cool hack in San Francisco
MatÃas Arce (co-founder) and I moved to San Francisco to try luck.
We wanted to make people get to know Stories. We opened a Tinder account, created a profile for the App, and used the pictures to communicate features and benefits.
It was fun until our profile got banned for Tinder. We got to get a lot of matches. People asked us for information about the App and even about job offers. It was a great experience.
We participated in Google cloud for Startups, and We shot a video with them.
Learnings
- Building a Startup is not a game, and it comes with a lot of responsibilities with the team, the users, the community, and potential investors.
- Getting feedback from users from the beginning of the product existence is the best we did. We prioritized features with their knowledge of writing and social media uses.
- By that time, We didn't know much about product metrics. Personally, this was the experience that made me become a UX designer. I learned how to build a product based on qualitative data, and after, I learned the importance of product and experience metrics.
"Defining KPIs and Metrics to understand the use of the product and how to improve it, it's a must."