@kstalzer Great idea- can totally see the use case. Curious why you chose the expiration length you did. My friends have been slowly responding to my invites over the past few days, so most of them have missed the window to comment. So it's been hard to get conversations off the ground. Have you tested different lengths?
Also, what steps have you taken to minimize friction in the onboarding process. With these collaborative chat apps, there are so many potential points of failure. Do you have any lessons in regards to optimizing the friction here?
@radiocurea Thanks Adam. As far as lengths go, we hear about equal weighted feedback that the hour is too long, and that the hour is too short. And we also hear from a surprising number of people who like the hour.
So our guess is any length will have supporters and detractors. Accordingly, we are exploring more autonomous solutions. For instance one idea is the person who Squad's Up can set the expiration manually (or if they leave it, defaults to the hour). Another idea is you just expire statuses when everyone in the squad sees the post. We still need a fallback default in either scenario. You don't want everyone in the Squad waiting on that one person who doesn't check in as regularly.
As for the onboarding friction process, I think still too early to tell. The adage is true that nobody is ever happy with their metrics, even if they are good by comparative standards. So I think we have a lot more testing to do to see what our optimal levels of first time engagement vs Churn are. So we are just collecting data right now.
@kstalzer Thanks for the response. Yes, seems like the activating moment is having that first group experience with some percentage of invited friends responding and/or some number of responses. There are several terminal points: I have no friends using the app, I sent invites but not enough or no one has responded, I invited mostly Android users and don't realize it, I haven't gotten enough responses, the time has expired. Just thinking through how you can optimize the onboarding, since I haven't been able to have conversations yet, even though I really want to, and have invited 15 people. Could be demographic thing, too, FYI: 32 male in the tech industry.
I've been using Squad with my closest friends for a while -- and it's a super-fun way to keep in touch with them. Think Snapchat married GroupMe and had a kid. That's Squad. It's a good kid. ;-)
This is a really fun consumer app that helps you share updates with your closest friends. The user experience is pretty slick and has a bunch of cool unique views and interactions.
Like the product. Really don't get why each squad is time limited. And why when you feel all the dots you can't do anything else for the remaining of time
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