Kayvon Beykpour
@kayvz · Co-Founder & CEO, Periscope App
hey guys, Kayvon here. I'm co-founder (along with Joe Bernstein) & CEO of Periscope. So excited to share what we've been working on with you guys. Happy to answer any questions you guys might have. I've long been an admirer of Product Hunt, so I'm excited to have something close to my heart on here finally :)
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Ben Tossell
@bentossell · Community Lead, Product Hunt
@kayvz Appreciate you will get lots of questions today, especially with the live streaming frenzy that is going on recently.... any idea when the Twitter integration will be live? I want to stream an event for my company in 45 minutes haha
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Kayvon Beykpour
@kayvz · Co-Founder & CEO, Periscope App
@bentossell yep, Twitter integration will be live around 7am PST (the original time of our launch). Looks like our app store link was discovered quite a few hours earlier than we would have hoped, hence the delay there :) sorry about that!
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Eric Metelka
@eric3000 · Product Manager, PowerReviews
@kayvz Hi, Kayvon. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about how you and your team is handling the media attention focused on Periscope. It's a very unique situation. Not many apps launch to such buzz and a manufactured horse-race against a close competitor (I don't believe this is a winner take all scenario).
Do you guys talk about Meerkat internally? Embrace the media attention? Block it all out? Is it exciting or scary? How do you keep your team focused and productive with all this going on?
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Brock
@brockneilson · Anomaly
@kayvz will you at some point be able to schedule broadcasts on periscope? One of the biggest complaints I've heard is people have never even seen a live stream because they click a dead link.. (Different since periscope records) I've found its nice to be able to alert followers prior to so they can join.
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Kayvon Beykpour
@kayvz · Co-Founder & CEO, Periscope App
@eric3000 Hey Eric, I appreciate the question. The situation has felt really bizarre. Our preference would have been to stay heads down and under the radar until we launched. We'd rather have our product speak for itself. Having the acquisition be public for even a couple weeks just builds unintended hype and anticipation, which leads to all kinds of judgement, distraction and expectation. It's really weird working on something for a year, and then having people judge it without you having really been ready to share it yet. But given how much media attention Twitter gets generally, it was unavoidable for the press to write about rumors once news of the deal leaked.
All that being said, we really just tried to zone it out as much as possible and remind ourselves that we've been working hard on something for awhile, and that we owed it to ourselves to focus for the home stretch without getting caught up in the juicy dialogue in the media.
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Kayvon Beykpour
@kayvz · Co-Founder & CEO, Periscope App
@brockneilson Hey Brock. Early on in our development we actually had a notion of "scheduled broadcasts". Our theory was that scheduling something in advance 1) solves the "empty state" problem where users could at least see upcoming content even if nothing was live right now and 2) you could build an audience and try and solve for the "nobody is around to watch my broadcast because they didn't have a heads up" problem.
So this existed in Periscope for awhile, but we ultimately decided to take it out for a few reasons: 1) We found that the # of subscribers to an upcoming broadcasts didn't really drive actual viewership of that broadcast, as compared to the # of viewers that would join spontaneously. 2) Simplicity. One less flow to worry about (choosing an upcoming date, subscriber UI, etc)
We certainly may revisit this decision later, especially since our #1 observation could have just been a function of a small sample size (beta!). But I'd say we're even more comfortable with our v1 approach because we found Replays, as a feature, to be a really helpful part of solving the "dead link" problem.
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Dustin LaMont
@dustinlamont · UX Designer at Blue Shield of California
@kayvz great work man. I can't wait to check this app out. So much polish. Well done.
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