They say the best time to invest in growth is when you don’t need it. So starting mid-2015, with our flagship product VWO growing well, we decided it was a good time to pursue new growth opportunities. We had the money, resources and mental bandwidth to pursue new products. We also thought it was a good time to dabble outside our core domain of SaaS marketing products, as long as we could experiment and course correct rapidly without spending too much money. Over the next 18 months, we would go on to build 10 new products including B2B products, consumer apps and a hardware product.

In this two-part series, I will take you through products we built, why we built them (oftentimes why not) and how they turned out.

We want in on mobile

Mobile was still hot in mid-2015, and people were still developing apps hoping to become the next big thing on the phone. We wanted in on the space as a mobile marketing automation vendor which sounded like the most logical step for us as a marketing SaaS vendor. The big idea was to come up with a new way for app developers and their users to communicate with each other. Push notifications to send out updates and offers were not working as well as the earlier days, in-app popups asking for ratings were known to cause anger management issues and getting support over email (if at all) was just weird. We wanted to create a new communication channel, The Feed, where all communication with the user would be centralized and would be much more pleasing than in-app popups and push notifications.

The Feed

The Admin Dashboard for conversations

The plan was to give this out for free to indie app developers, whom none of the other vendors like Urban Airship, Appboy and Localytics focused on, and then figure out how to make money once we got to 50,000–100,000 installs. There were 3 million apps on the App Store and Google Play put together, most of them by indie developers, so this made complete sense.

And just to add to the adventure, we decided to outsource the development of this to an agency. We had to get the agency model to work at some point in time, so why not now.

Once we spec’d and designed the product over 2 months, we handed it over to an agency who promised they will deliver the first version in 2 months. Now that the work on the product side was done, we started work on the marketing side. We wanted to own the space on mobile growth, so we created a community, a blog and a podcast on the topic. We even spent a couple of thousand dollars to buy a domain for it called Upquire. And just because we still had some time on our hands, we also decided to reach out to some potential users and get their feedback on the product.

We talked to about 12–15 people, 4–5 of whom agreed to try out the product when it was ready. But another thing struck us during these conversations. Most of the indie app developers were building these apps on the side spending very little bandwidth and money on it, because the chances that their app will succeed and make them money were minuscule. In fact, the entire app industry is the like the Hollywood model, where the top 0.01% of apps make 99.99% of the money, so if you had to succeed as a vendor to these apps, you really should focus on the top apps, which is what all the other players in the industry were doing.

While we were grappling with this reality, it also turned out that the development agency had spent a month just trying to “understand” the specs only to conclude that it did not have the expertise to deliver on the product. We realized that working with an agency was very different from working with our own internal teams and that it would require a lot of micromanagement, something we are just not good at doing, so we decided to shut down Upquire and move on to the next opportunity.

The todo app of the mobile world

In our quest to build a mobile marketing automation solution, we had got a good understanding of the mobile app space. We understood what makes for a good app and the key growth challenges, so we thought we were well placed to build mobile apps itself. The battle for being the next big social, entertainment or lifestyle app in India was still hot back then.

We had also opened a new office in Pune. We didn’t know a lot of people in the city, so we had to rely completely on Facebook, BookMyShow, Zomato and other apps to find fun things happening in town. Juggling between multiple apps to find the best thing to do and then actually planning it with friends over Whatsapp was painful. Why couldn’t all the fun things to do be in one single app itself?

Let us build it, we decided. The vision was to make a smart system that understands your taste and recommends you the best thing to do with your time, whenever you are free.

However, having learnt our lessons from the previous debacle, we didn’t want to go all in on the idea before we had validated it. We decided to do a small pilot on Whatsapp recommending the best things to do in town every evening. The response from the thousand-odd users we had was great. People loved our recommendations, asked us to help them with their birthday or anniversary plans, some even wrote to us asking for an update on the days we decided not to send one.

Whatsapp pilot with handpicked events

Core concept validated, we decided to product-ize it. We made an app that would bring events, restaurants and movies all in one single place. Just like Tinder, you would be presented with a list of options that you could then swipe right to shortlist. And later, you could share the options on your shortlist with your friends to make plans. It would be called Firi.