The meteoric success of Yo has been applauded by some, rewarded by others and left many agape, wondering if it's all just a joke.
With some friends we were looking for something funny as a side project and hatched on the plan to redo Yo, but for Switzerland. The word "Hoi" is used by many here, especially in the Zürich area of the country as a form of informal greeting, so we took that as the name of our app.
A little late night hacking, with awesome parse.com at our back, and pretty soon we had apps out for Android and iOS plus a website running on NodeJitsu.
Then, thanks some finely crafted mails and tweets and a little luck, we managed to get Hoi some attention on NZZ.ch and 20minutes.ch, two of the bigger German speaking online news channels, plus a morning slot and Radio NRJ Zürich. Enough attention to seed our social experiment with enough users to see whether it would light up or not.
From the initial press spurt of around 300 intalls, we're now up to over 800 installs, right now adding around 40-60 new installs a day with little external pushing, just the invite functionality within the app. Obviously small numbers and very early stages in a country that has only 7 million population, but still encouraging. Left to itself, it seems Hoi might actually continue to grow at a small but steady rate at least.
From talking to people, once they get the joke the reaction tends to be "Well that's going to die out pretty fast". The retention rates we're seeing would seem to correspond with that; 14 days after the first press round we were down to around just 13% of the initial user base. Buuuut... We noticed something else at the same time...
Among those 13% were a few that we using the app every day. Many times a day in fact. Some even seeming to use the app in every spare moment; morning at 6am, lunch time and in the evening at 11pm. Something about Hoi and Yo, as a communication tool, strikes a nerve that a significant minority of users respond to. Respond to very strongly in fact.
Anyone is Mobile is terrified of spamming their users, especially in the app space where getting them to download your app in the first place is so hard. But with Hoi, as a fun side project, we had nothing to lose so with the world cup soccer games in progress - like Switzerland's amazing win over Equador - we had something to make some noise about. So we sent a few push messages out to the entire user base cheering the game.
The reaction? Only positive...
Not only were we unable to find any correlation between Play Store app uninstall rates and the broadcast messages, we had an insanely high (least relative to say ad click through rates) push message opening rates of between 30% and 40% of all the push messages we sent. Not only that, the "spam" had the effect of re-activating the user base, encouraging them to interact more with their friends on the network .
From my day job where I've been responsible for an app that's been dowloaded over 3 million times and sees over 1.5 million users a month, I already have had some experience with push messages, enough to know they are very difficult to get right. The best we could do is an opt-in approach with very low volumes compared to the size of the user base, with no way to scale it up. I'd reached the conclusion that push messages are at best, a marginal tool for engaging with your user base, nothing that can work on a broadcast basis.
Hoi changes that. And judging from their experiments with Product Hunt the Yo team has reached a similar conclusion. Something about this approach to messaging really resonates with users and brings them to opt-in for pushes rather than deleting the app. We're close to the right UI / experience mix to make push messages an experience users want.
Welcome to the world of nanosocial.