Haystack’s Christmas Hangover
Our straightforward plan for global domination was to launch Haystack in Australia then move onto the USA and UK before rolling out our wonder App in all 26 languages that dominate world trade. Pretty Easy Really. And boy did we enjoy the first 24 hours of going live and the rest of that first week as it all seemed to be going to plan. But nothing prepared us for the rollercoaster reality of having Haystack out there for real. We launched in our home market of Australia on Oct 21, 2014 after about 3 years of intense and costly development. Nothing had been left to chance in our quest to provide the all singing all dancing business card App.
The first week’s results were amazing (to us anyway). In the seven days after launch, we had thousands of downloads, mainly from our families and friends, the followers we had built up on social media, and our PR efforts. For the next two months until the Christmas holidays we were growing at about 10% each week. A very healthy number that gave us confidence that Haystack wasn’t a total dud. But what then followed was four weeks of nothing. In Australia, Christmas arrives in the middle of summer and business pretty much shuts down for a month as everyone heads to the beach or sits back with a cold beer to watch the cricket. And so I tried to reassure myself and the rest of the Haystack team, that 1% weekly growth over the Christmas holiday season was all we could expect from a business card App in Australia. By the third week in January though, people should have been back at work and although weekly growth had doubled (to a massive 2%), I was getting worried.
With real users of the App came the discovery of a few bugs and a few glaring shortcomings in the Haystack product. Some aspects of Haystack that we thought would be awesome were almost completely ignored and things we thought were not very important at all instead became big issues when functionality wasn’t that elegant. Our customer care team worked on overdrive to manually fix data issues and our core development team worked through the night to make bugs disappear by morning. By the end of November we had released several rapid updates to fix bugs and also add some completely new features. With our development team split across two time zones, we were able to develop and test around the clock and we needed those 24 hours each day as we coded, tested and released several updates.
Things that I thought would be wow factor features of the App have been almost forgotten in the scramble to make sure our core functionality was more robust. At our launch event in Brisbane in October, we had about hundred and fifty family and friends in attendance, all creating their own digital business cards and swapping them like maniacs to try and win that iPad. Some people needed a bit of help though (especially after a few glasses of champagne) and we noticed quite a few had some pretty old phones. Still, on the whole we were optimistic that we had created an inner circle of advocates that would all be using their Haystack digital business card at every opportunity in the weeks ahead (Hah?).
Instead, by mid-January our stats indicated that a large proportion of people that had installed the App were not using Haystack to share their digital cards at all. Some people were scanning lots of cards and a few people were sharing lots of cards but many, many more were doing neither. Something wasn’t working.
We still believed in the Haystack product but clearly the general market was somewhat ambivalent. Our data indicated that 5% of users used Haystack intensively, 25% sporadically and the rest virtually were dormant after the initial installation. In terms of viral growth, we did have one key statistic that was encouraging. 20% of non-Haystack users who received a shared Haystack card from someone else would then edit their own Haystack details and claim their own card. Brian was not as keen as I was about this statistic, pointing out that if 95% of our user base were not sharing their cards, then 20% of not much was virtually nothing. But we did have one part of the viral growth going well – we just needed to sort out the other bit – the bit where people actually used Haystack.
From the first week of launch, we had been receiving lots of feedback from our enthusiastic users and we had been pouring lots of effort into improving the things they seemed to like. This became the source of considerable intellectual debate (late night phone arguments) as we tried to get the balance right between improving things our heavy users liked and addressing things our dormant users didn’t like. Brian suggested we instigate a focus group to get some robust feedback and so we asked ten of our old Consulting colleagues to get together one Saturday morning. None of us work for PwC any more but there was a distinctly no nonsense PwC like atmosphere in the room straight away. My first shock was that of the ten people in the room, only three were using Haystack at all. These were some of our best friends in our key target demographic and what became clear was that they didn’t really know what Haystack was for. Only two of the group had used it to share their own digital business card and only one to share other people’s cards. Most of them didn’t know of Haystack’s core feature – that the contact data on every card was always current. Why did they not know this?
For the next three hours, I listened carefully and tried not to get defensive although Brian told me later that I failed on the not getting defensive bit. I took lots of notes as years of my own and my brothers’ work was sympathetically but forensically pulled apart. I went into the workshop thinking that either our marketing messages were falling a bit short or maybe the App was not as intuitive as we thought it was. As it turned out – it was both. And how could I argue. These were our friends, our very smart friends that worked across corporate Australia and therefore should have been red hot Haystack users. The reality was starkly different. After the 3 hour workshop, Brian and I had another 2 hour session to prioritise what we’d heard. All of a sudden our marketing plan had grown somewhat. Our planned product features had increased in number but the good news was that many of the problems identified involved relatively quick and minor fixes.
And so we redoubled our efforts on the quick fixes while parallel testing a couple of newly requested features. This was hard on Nir and Mataan who had worked long hours seven days a week all through the Christmas period and were now landed with another long set of modifications that were urgently required. Following our focus group reality check, we also started optimising our web page, our App Stores pages and even our App intro visuals to improve the conversion rates of people that actually landed on a Haystack asset. We wanted people to understand what Haystack could do and we wanted to make it easier for them to get started doing it.
Immediately, our new users started scanning and sharing more Haystack cards and we noticed that people were navigating the App for longer as they edited and shared their contact data. By the end of the last week in January, our week on week growth had increased to 5% and even more exciting, the number of cards being shared was increasing every day. The next week we launched the new features on iPhone and our weekly growth hit 6%. This was more like it and that week we also hit a milestone of 10,000 Brisbane (our home town) cards on Haystack. By the second week in February, our growth hit 8% and the number of shares went through the roof. It was real – More and more people were downloading and then actually using the App!
And so it looks like Haystack is back on track in Australia and our planned move into the US, Canada and the UK is now looking closer than ever. Lots and lots of things have still to be done before then, particularly on the social media and PR side. I can’t imagine any of us are going to get much sleep over the next few weeks, but we know it’s going to be a huge adventure. UK, USA and Canada – here we come!