Insight into building in-app engagement features, the reasons, why it’s critical to focus on engagement to achieve the scale and hindsight learnings.

A Sneak Peak Into Guest Personality

Introduction

Manas Jaiswal is VP of Product at Noise - India’s leading connected lifestyle, health, and fitness brand. Manas has over 15 years of experience working across industries and organizations such as Paytm, Cars24, Snapdeal, and Olx starting as a developer and progressing to product roles over the years.

Manas outside of work

People may find it weird but since I have been working in the startup ecosystem for over a decade, a lot of my time even outside of typical work hours goes into researching and reading up about what kind of businesses are being built in India.

Outside of this, I think of myself as a very regular guy who likes to travel, read books, exercise, and other similar simple things.

Universal Insight From Working Across Multiple Industries Such as Fintech, Marketplaces And Healthtech

In one sentence - Provide Customer Value. If you don’t provide disproportionate value to the customer, they won’t stay with you i.e. you won’t be getting any business from them. This holds for everyone so whether it’s an enterprise, end customers, or business/vendor partners focusing on providing value is critical.

Of course, the value will be different in an online vs offline ecosystem. What matters is that if the delta of the experience isn’t disproportionately higher than what’s already out there, the business would not survive. If you are trying to provide the same value as other businesses or your competitors then it just becomes a price war.

Nipun and Manas agreed that Delta 4 by Kunal Shah is an excellent framework applicable across formats, industries, and scales. Manas summarised the framework as follows:

Three things happen when the Delta is > 4. One, the user will not go back to the older experience. Second, the user wants to associate with your brand. They want to brag about it because the experience is so good. Third, the user becomes more tolerant and forgiving. One less-than-optimal experience doesn’t cause users to quit using your product or talk negatively about you with others. The key here is to deliver >4 or above delta experience and then keep delivering disproportionate value, consistently.

Watch the video or keep reading to understand how noise has unlocked high level of UGC creation, retention and community led support through community:

The Journey Of Designing Multiple Features To Boost User Engagement

Nipun asked about the thought process behind designing features that focus on user engagement even though the Noise products are physical devices. To this Manas first highlighted how the products, in this context the smartwatch is a utility product.

The fundamental hypothesis was that once someone has a smartwatch, they won’t need to take out their phone for everything. However an important thing for any business but more so for a bootstrapped company is that it needs to cross-sell and upsell.

We started with the understanding that we need an app ecosystem since there are certain aspects and features of the device (smartwatch) that can be activated via the app only. Features such as notifications, watch face changes, and updating weather settings were the utilities delivered via the app. We also knew that even though the user was acquired through the hardware, from a business perspective, software is what would make the user stick.

We can cross-sell and upsell better, faster hardware and services only if a user stays. Building an app ecosystem with engagement-first features such as community, gamification, rewards, etc. revolving around building good habits will make them stay. We realized that we need to activate, engage, and retain to potentially monetize. 

While some may not see the reason behind being software-obsessed as a hardware company, we hypothesize that you can step up the user experience with software and by extension increase the business value from it. We have had over 20 million app downloads boosting our distribution system but the engagement features are what has made the user keep coming back to use the app. We built and have continued to build the app ecosystem with this in mind.

First Feature, Rejections, And The Design Process Of User Engagement Funnel

Right now, we have a step and calorie ring for the user where they set the goal every day and have to close the ring. We stick to this because based on our research these two parameters are the easiest for our customers to understand and relate to.

The first feature that we built though was challenges. It’s well-established that the stepping stone for any fitness ecosystem is challenges. That was the first engagement feature that was green-lit.

A Garmin or Fitbit has 5 watches and they would run challenges for them. What was different and challenging for us was that we had over 100 watches sold to say a user base of 20 million. When you try to run challenges on such a large database there are multiple gaps such as data sync issues, connectivity, frauds, and many other bits that we had to take care of in real time. We had to ensure the challenges were authentic enough because the customer won’t forgive if the experience is subpar. You have to maintain parity, and moderate while keeping things interesting.

If you run the same challenge every month or every 15 days, it’s not exciting. That’s when we also started moving toward community challenges where friends can come together, put in money towards the challenge, and win the reward. We also have done speed challenges. Not all of them have scaled but we see all of this more as V1, V2, V3, and so on because we know that gamification features for a new user on day zero is extremely helpful. The user at that point is looking for something to engage with the product and community and the easiest way is through challenges. Since then we have done challenges in different forms and has worked very well for us.

One feature that didn't work well for us was pushing branded content. Even though the content was premium and by a well-known international influencer, our audience didn’t relate to it. We realized that the content flywheel had to come on much later once we had understood the user, and their behavior and created some User Generated Content (UGC). 

This helped us develop the insight that people want to learn either from a celebrity that they revere or from peers they have seen pushing through consistently on their fitness journey and have built some trust. That’s why we still haven’t done a lot of branded content on the platform even to this date and we plan to do it very strategically in the future as well.

Creating An Intuitive Platform, And Features To Promote UGC

Nipun highlighted the unusual approach Noise has taken by focusing on UGC over branded and curated content even though it increases moderation efforts. He also highlighted the nudges, social feed style UI, and user journeys within the app crafted to promote UGC.

For us, the community MVP was for the users to have the ability to sync contacts and engage with their friends through small actions such as hi5, nudge, chat, react to their activity, etc. We wanted to create a very visually engaging experience for the user so we added small elements such as the reaction flowing out like a bubble etc.

We did not want to build a feed in the initial phase because we knew it would be a massive investment in infra and development. Our MVP was a moderate success which also made us realize that the sooner we build a fitness feed, the faster the network effects will reflect. Initially, moderation was internal (manual). The feed was visually inspired by Instagram since that was the most familiar interface for our users.

We also didn’t incentivize UGC because we wanted the content creation to be very organic. Within 30 days we started seeing the power users post high-quality content as many as 5 times a day. We did a bit of content seeding to nudge users in and it helped set the direction of the community. We also noticed the classic case of the Pareto effect, with 20% of users impacting 80% of outcomes.

We saw this in V1 itself and in later phases, we also incorporated features like Purple tick to build credibility and encourage content creation. With the same thought, we also designed the option to post directly about the content around product features such as workouts, fitness rings, etc since we also wanted to showcase the product utility to shine through UGC. This also helped us remove the risk of spam content by design (to an extent).

Our use case at an overarching level was establishing a lifestyle community. Health and fitness form a subset of it. We have intentionally designed the community for this use case. The power of the community is so strong that even when the hardware has stopped working, and they have perhaps moved to a brand in higher price bands, people stay back for the community adding to the overall LTV of the user.

Manas on creator program - We don’t have a formal creator program for now but see value in it. We have lakhs of users coming in and reading through the content daily. A majority of the people reach out to our power users for help. We call our verified users Purple Tick Army and they are a major driver of in-app user engagement.

Getting to 20K Post Creation A Day And Corresponding Metrics

Over time we have started focusing even more on the quality of the content. We are yet to have complete automation but we utilize a mix of manual and automated efforts for content moderation. We have created guardrails and guidance for content creation. 

When you are trying to run a niche community, the quality of the content has to be absolutely amazing. First impressions matter here. While we track metrics like time spent frequency of posts, quantity of posts, etc. however, everything ultimately ties into the content quality.

We have also done some interesting brand collaborations such as Pulsar, Hero Honda, Lenskart, etc. along with cross collaborations where we try to gamify cricket through Noise Premiere League. Virat Kohli is our brand ambassador, and India being a young, cricket lover nation everything ties together wonderfully.

We haven’t monetized brand collaborations so far but we can easily do so since the reach and engagement are so high within the community.

This is one way a community can add value in terms of revenue and business goals.

Benchmarking metrics is a very tricky business since there is so much nuance based on the business and the use case. We spoke to folks from other fitness community folks but ultimately realized there is no one-size-fits-all for communities. We still look at numbers and test hypotheses but our bigger focus is delivering the value we aim for.

We built the community to have high engagement and high retention. We believe that if these two elements are there the existing user will either eventually upgrade their device and/or refer others which is the final business metric for us.

While engagement metrics for social first platforms are available and there are benchmarked data points, they don’t automatically equate to business value. We are still optimizing attributions to the community in terms of cross and upselling but even with limited attributions, we are seeing community value clearly.

Community As Channel For Product Feedback

The community has been immensely useful in gaining product feedback, especially for hardware improvements. 

Our power users (Purple Tick Army) again play a critical role here. We get on a weekly call with them and they go through a list of product improvements and suggestions that the community has made through the week. We also have an admin account on our feed and users' shares are becoming very vocal there too. We have also added a tagging feature which has further helped users raise their concerns to the right people within the community. 

The feedback even though multi-channel is community-centric and helps us create deeper relations with the users. What I personally love is that all of this is very organic. Being community first has also led to users being more kind and understanding towards the brand as well since it creates a sense of belonging.

Building Feed In-House Vs. 3rd Party Solution: Hindsight Learning And Challenges

To be very honest, we knew from the beginning that we wouldn’t be able to scale easily. Being a bootstrapped company budget allocation is also examined with a fine-toothed comb so paying a vendor isn’t a preference wherever possible.

We also have 1st party data such as HRV, zones, etc. so there has been an apprehension as well as constraints for sharing data. GTM was also critical for us and we were highly prioritizing launching the feed feature at the time. All three criteria collectively led us to build in-house instead since we weren’t able to find the right partner at the time.

In hindsight, we realized that infra cost and scalability is a big challenge of building in-house. There were times when the whole app went down and we had to create independent microservices because being real-time is critical and we can’t control it at an odd hour. Moderation is another challenge because we still need to monitor it. We don’t want a new user to come and see bad content first and moderation during offline hours of the team is still a challenge.

We have figured out ways to manage the infra cost, scalability, and moderation challenges somehow but if we had a 3rd party partner who is an expert like you guys these bits would have become seamless.

Something seemingly simple as tagging is an extensive feature since you need to take care of many smaller aspects. The moment the infrastructure and engineering team came into the picture we moved from building just an experience to the actual feature we had to think of all the possibilities the feature could be used or misused and architect solutions for that. We didn’t realize that privacy concerns such as people not wanting to be tagged can be an issue.

It seems obvious now that we have built it but a lot goes on when designing a feature. We now know clearly that when building community features intentionally ensuring high-quality experience is very very critical.

What’s Next For Noise.Fit Community

We want to bring in more features such as groups, chats, creator programs, and many more. The core focus is still maintaining high engagement and retention without compromising on user value but we would also like to add more experiments including monetization.

Signing Off

We ended the conversation on a lighter note, asking Manas how he would like to be remembered and he answered with “A person who didn’t have regrets”.

About The Host

Nipun Goyal is the Founder and CEO of LikeMinds. He is a tech entrepreneur and a community builder at heart.

Nipun started his professional community-building journey in 2014 when he launched Curofy, a platform for the doctor community where they could discuss difficult patient cases. The platform had about 50% of Indian doctors by the time he exited from the venture in 2019.

For his work in the field of Social Media & Mobile Tech, Nipun was also included in Forbes India's 30 under 30 list of 2018.

About LikeMinds

LikeMinds elevates businesses in unlocking the true potential of their users through their in-app community and social network. Using LikeMinds, businesses achieve higher conversion and retention, by building custom community experiences in their existing platform unlocking community-led growth.

With LikeMinds, businesses get an easy-to-implement and highly scalable infrastructure with a fully customizable UI. All of this with a customization time of 3 days and a deployment time of 15 minutes.

Our Chat and Feed infra have pre-built widgets such as image carousels, PDF slides, short videos, polls, quizzes, events, forms, and more for user engagement and retention along with moderation capabilities to ensure frictionless community operations.