August 2018
Summary
⇾ For a small community of people, Jot became one of their most intensely and frequently used daily apps, but it failed to motivate users to share the service with their friends
⇾ Our focus with Chalk was to achieve viral growth while maintaining Jot’s instant chat core
⇾ By making Chalk user vs. topic-centric and shifting our target audience, we unlocked viral growth for a time
⇾ Unable to attract further investment, we doubled down on live video and discovered a nascent “live selling” behavior in the process
The beginning
Jot developed into a community of people who talked for 30+ minutes each day on the service, self-organized offline meetups in New York, Berlin, San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington D.C. and built relationships that persist today. Despite the intensity with which this community enjoyed Jot, the service did not grow as quickly as we needed it to.
We attributed Jot’s slow growth to there not being a compelling reason for people as to why the service would be demonstrably better with their friends on it, not to a deficiency in the core interaction. As such, our goal with Chalk was to experiment with the surrounding mechanics.
Product
Broadly speaking, the changes we made to Chalk were intended to make users’ experience with the service better, the more friends they had on it. To encourage this kind of behavior, we thought about Chalk as a game wherein the users who were able to create the biggest conversations, were rewarded with the broadest exposure on the service, the most interaction and thus, inspire new users to strive for the same.
Our first step in creating this cycle, was to bring more attention to existing Chalk power users. We did this by introducing profiles (which would evolve into user- owned chat rooms) and performance metrics (“Chill” and friend totals) to signify their skills for starting and carrying big conversations. Furthermore, we changed how chat rooms were ranked in the feed to prioritize the rooms that had the most people in them at any given moment. Chalk was big, real-time conversations.
At this point, the majority of Chalk’s active user base was made up of Jot’s most active users. But, despite the above structural changes, these users’ behavior didn’t change in the way we intended it to.The people who were on Chalk did just as they did on Jot: carry on great conversations with each other without bringing new people onto the service.
This led us to wonder: Who were people that would value a tool to help them host big, real-time chats? Maybe there were people with existing audiences who were overwhelmed by inbound requests from their followers to talk, but lacked a space where they could do so at scale without the commitment of needing to be on camera? And if we were able to find people like this, how would their audiences respond? Would the chance to interact live with their "senpai" be enough incentive for them to sign up for a new app? Would the interaction be fulfilling enough for them to continue using a service like this?
These questions led us to Owen, a teen Instagrammer with 30,000 followers who, in March, 2016, hosted his first live chat on Chalk. With one Instagram post, Owen brought on 60 new users in a matter of minutes.
Owen’s success in bringing new users onto the service was a turning point. It led us to start experimenting with Instagram influencers across a variety of subcultures (net artists, Art Hoe Collective, self-care, makeup, body positivity, travel photographers, food bloggers, trans, LGBTQ, etc.) to see if other people could replicate Owen’s outcome. And they did. Over the next 6 months we worked with 400+ teen Instagram influencers who helped drive 75,000+ new users sign up. In the process, we built a series of internal tools to automate the entire process: from identifying influencers on Instagram to onboarding them onto Chalk.
As Chalk’s userbase grew, so too did the number of people participating in conversations. To help room owners better manage these conversations and inspire new users to start their own conversations, we started rolling out tools to make conversations more manageable for hosts and compelling for participants. Tools like Freeze, pictures, recorded video and Shaking.
What changed?
Ultimately, our topline growth was not enough. Despite cultivating a group of highly engaged users who would spend multiple hours on Chalk everyday and send, in some cases, 30,000 messages / week, we were unable figure out a way to convert new users into daily users at a high enough rate. Our DAU/MAU suffered as a result. And without a growth or retention story compelling enough to overshadow the deficiency in the other, we struggled to attract investor interest. So, we shifted our attention from fundraising to product. Chalk stood for big, live conversations and with text and images already accommodated for, we shifted our attention to brining live video to the service.
In the end
Our belief had been that if we were able to attract enough users to the service through influencer-hosted chats, a big enough percentage of those new users would be compelled to aspire to become power users themselves. Ultimately, this did not happen with great enough frequency.
Users acquired through influencer chats did not convert into power users frequently enough to maintain Chalk’s 5% - 10% week-over-week growth rate. To remain competitive as a service for live interaction, we knew we needed to support live video and for the live video experience on Chalk to be markedly different from that on other services (i.e. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Musical.ly). Our quest for differentiation in live video would lead us down the live selling rabbit hole that would eventually become Baskets.