Hi friends, welcome to Chillsy's 11th monthly update!
Chillsy exists because we are frustrated at the lack of practical opportunities to make meaningful connections, and subsequent missed events and activities.
In these updates, we'll share what we've been up to, and our progress towards our goal of helping people overcome various barriers including time, opportunities, confidence to do things they enjoy and feeling less lonely.
Our Focus in September - 2 months into app!
This month our focus has been understanding how we can better serve users in their mission to make friends, and take ourselves from local Auckland friendship app, to “global friendship platform that’s cooler than Meetup & less sketchy than Facebook” status.
At a glance, we’re at 361 (+79) app users and 43 (+18) events created. Implementing our key learning from last month, that the value is in the people a user could meet, and this should be highlighted, we added a few things.
Weekly group matching
Every week, users on the app receive the profiles of 3 other users on the platform. They can opt-in to meeting them by creating a group event, which automatically invites the matches to a specific place/time. Other users on the app are also able to RSVP.
Shifting from our earlier 1-1 matching experiment this proved significantly more effective for connecting people and producing viable public events.
An improved pre-signup landing page
One thing we noticed post launch, was the high degree of drop-off after users entered their email. To be fair, there is an 8-step signup process. The problem was, we weren’t communicating the value of the app early on. We addressed this by changing the sign up flow, so once users sign in, they first see events, and other users (and are pushed to sign up to access the user accounts/events).
Bonds
We learned early on that while people are keen to go along to events, accountability is a major challenge. That is, people flaking on events last minute, because they have nothing to lose. We have added bond payments for certain events, to ensure high levels of attendance.
Now that things are relatively settled on the app, and we know it is something people will use, we have a bit more confidence in our ability to look further ahead. As a result we’re taking some time to pause major app development and think more slowly about the business and what it will take for us to build from a local friendship app that works in Auckland, to a platform that helps people all over the world make friends.
To start we’re developing a deeper understanding of “belonging”, “friendship”, and “loneliness”, as well as defining our high-level end goals. Work here is challenging but is extremely valuable.
Good, Bad and Ugly
Good
Group matching success! People are converting to event creators with their groups
Developing deeper understanding of problem etc.
The app continues to work, and provides a frame for new ideas and experiments
Bad
Janky chat feature made for a bad user experience - messages displaying totally out of order 🥲
Ugly
Not enough user interviews! 🤦🏽♀️
Our Focus For Next Month
Developing our strategy and road map for the next 10 years
Navigating towards more frequent use and organic repeatable growth!
Kudos
Mahesh! The strategy session was super motivating and helpful😁
Ourselves. It’s been a hectic, stressful time. Especially when things go wrong, or it feels like everything can fall apart. But, we’re staying persistent and making decent progress
Asks
Remember… “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”