Building Swyf: Beta week 4
Journal entry on Dec 1, 2022
It’s 7:02pm on Thursday, Dec 1, 2022 and I’m writing this live. I want to give a tactical update on beta so anyone in product can see how I’m running it, and how I am performing.
Outline:
User count so far
Summary of my learnings so far
The tactics I’m using to communicate to users
Overall outreach progress
Swyf beta users: 149
Learnings so far:
Our app is much simpler, and easier to use than Venmo & Cashapp, but still not ready for market launch. As expected, we’re missing two core features.
KYC is a drag. Not surprised from my experience at Divvy but:
We don’t get enough data from our partners to make good decisions here. I’ve requested more and they’ve committed to exposing that data via API in Q1.
Our KYC logic doesn’t work well enough for our target user demographic. Example - we are targeting users 18-25 years old and these users often have a new address that KYC providers don’t have on file. That makes sense since people in this demographic move frequently. We shouldn’t treat them the same as a 35 year old, yet the KYC logic does.
I’m doing all the KYC reviews myself and emailing users for more information, it’s not a scalable process.
Onboarding needs to be improved & simplified; but users find it simple and easy.
I’m increasingly confident in our strategy. Our target demographic and product focus align well with user preferences and behaviors.
I had expected more pushback on our color scheme and designs. However, users seem to like what we have.
Beta communication update
I have a spreadsheet that has every user in it, and tracks if they’ve viewed/opened the emails I’ve sent. Mind you, these are users already signed up, so different from my invite campaigns.
Welcome emails
Users get a welcome email as soon as they pass KYC. I might want to send a different welcome email if they don’t pass KYC, but haven’t done that yet. Here’s what that email looks like
First impressions
All users get an email to fill out a “first impression” survey their first week. So far I’ve had a 78% open rate and a 20% clickthrough rate on these emails.
I’ve emailed 110 users the first impression survey link, and I have 19 responses so far. So ~17% conversion rate - not as good as I’d hoped.
Weekly challenges, surveys, and cash giveaways
Now that we have notifications in-app, I send weekly notifications to users to get them to interact with the app and fill out the weekly survey.
All users are entered once for the giveaway, filling out the survey gives them 8-10 additional entries.
I also send a notification and have each user perform a product challenge. Last week it was request money from me. This week it’s change your profile picture and then request more money from me. They get 5 additional entries for completing the challenge.
I run the giveaways in a spreadsheet where I paste in user usernames and run a formula that picks a random entry from the list. Pretty easy actually. I run the formula 10 times and whoever is listed in the box is the winner. I then go pay them and send an announcement to Jared to post it to everyone in the app’s notification center.
Beta invites campaign updates
Text message campaigns:
Have sent 6 campaigns so far
Clickthrough rates: 6.3% → 18.2% great improvement!
Email campaigns:
Have sent 6 campaigns so far
Open rates: 42.2% → 42.8% (avg ~52%)
Clickthrough rates: Flat around 1%
Text messaging is much more effective to reach and convert users.
Here’s a view into all the campaigns I’ve run so far and metrics (open/click rates).
Conversion still around 1%.
So that’s it! If you recall, this program is not far off from my original ideas back in October before we launched. I’m happy with it’s progress and excited for when we can have beta users start sharing the app and they start using it for it’s value rather than weekly bribes lol.
✌️
-dal