Rapid-Fire Feedback
Gain some perspective
I spoke to a mentor at the Small Business Association and got some good news and some bad news. The good news is, they really like what I'm doing with my app and want to introduce me to some of their connections who work in the media research field. The bad news is they connected me to an intellectual property attorney who volunteers with the SBA. After a very quick trademark search on the USPTO website, he discovered that a prominent news media agency has a podcast with the words 'Pulse Check' in the title which they have trademarked. The SBA doesn't give legal advice per se but they strongly suggested I find another name for my app and save myself the trouble of potentially getting into legal trouble with a big media company.
This is a bummer because it took me a long time to come up with the name Pulse Check Media but it will be much easier for me to re-brand now than it will be when I'm further down the road. I guess it will only take a minute for me to check in with my 1 follower on IH and let them know that I'm changing the name hahaha.
If you haven't met with mentors from the SBA in your town - I strongly suggest it. They're super experienced, knowledgeable, and eager to help... and it's a free resource so what have you got to lose?
So long "Pulse Check Media"
... Coming soon to iOS and Android:
"Rapid Fire Feedback"
After spending way too much time going off my gut to build this product I am excited to be in a position to share the app and start gathering feedback! Right off the bat we identified a few bugs with our registration flow that we're working to update ASAP.
The big take away so far has been that users - even friends of mine and people who know me, are really shy when it comes to exploring and participating in a new social media app. For example - several of my first users created their profiles with Pseudomonases and instead of a photos of their faces - used photos of the floor or something random for their profile photo. In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense. My initial users are testing the app because they're friends of mine and want to be supportive but they also are afraid of putting themselves out there for others to see. To ease the transition, I'm taking a cue from TikTok and am creating a guest user state for the app. This allows users to jump right into the app and start exploring as an anonymous user before (hopefully!) creating a profile.
The next iteration will be available in a few weeks. Let me know if you are interested in taking a look - I'd love to invite you to participate in the beta!
After spending way too much time going off my gut to build this product I am excited to be in a position to share the app and start gathering feedback! Right off the bat we identified a few bugs with our registration flow that we're working to update ASAP.
The big take away so far has been that users - even friends of mine and people who know me, are really shy when it comes to exploring and participating in a new social media app. For example - several of my first users created their profiles with Pseudomonases and instead of a photos of their faces - used photos of the floor or something random for their profile photo. In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense. My initial users are testing the app because they're friends of mine and want to be supportive but they also are afraid of putting themselves out there for others to see. To ease the transition, I'm taking a cue from TikTok and am creating a guest user state for the app. This allows users to jump right into the app and start exploring as an anonymous user before (hopefully!) creating a profile.
The next iteration will be available in a few weeks. Let me know if you are interested in taking a look - I'd love to invite you to participate in the beta!
-Alex
OK so surprise surprise, the dev phase took a lot longer than expected 😅 ... even with my badass prototype and my book of user stories!
There’s been a few aspects of this which were more technically comped than initially suspected but the vast majority of the reason this is taking so long is 100% because of me... scope has creeped a bit. OK it’s creeped a lot but for a lot of really good reasons! The team at QServices sends me a build just about every other day and I can use this to share with people and get feedback. What I’ve realized is that there are a few features that need to be in scope for my MVP that are table stakes for a social media app. Things like allowing members to search for and connect with other members! (headslap!!) and also a light weight moderation feature that allows users to flag posts that are inappropriate or offensive.
Anyway... we’re at a point where I am ready to share this with more people and get feedback on a larger scale. I am particularly interested in sharing this with journalists, social media mangers, politicians, and people looking to do market research... like people here on Indie Hackers who are working to validate ideas! The good people at scoops.io that I mentioned I worked with to conduct surveys have since pivoted so I think PukseCheck Media might pick up where they left off.
Next steps are to wrap up the MVP and submit the app to Apple Test Flight.
If anyone has any suggestions for a similar platform for testing on Android- please let me know! As a lifelong iPhone user, I am admittedly pretty naive about the Android world.
I spoke to a few candidates but am happy to say that I’ve got a fixed rate contract in places with the super talented people at QServices.com - a full service app development agency based in India. They specialize in .net / Xamarin development so my MVP will be cross platform. This was an important requirement for me because I don’t have a lot of money so I only want to develop this thing once.
This was a really fun part of the product design phase. Although I’ve been working in Product management for a few years now, most of my experience was ind documenting requirements while designers create the prototypes. So this was a chance for me to learn something new and I really enjoyed it. I spent a lot of time learning a prototyping tool called proto.io and after iterating on it for weeks and getting feedback from friends and family, I was able to come up with a prototype that I felt was everything I dreamed the app could be.
With this complete, I also banged out a small book of user stories and acceptance criteria. Because I had already finished the prototype, the documentation piece actually went really fast.
I can’t code, but I recently sold a 1989 Jeep Wrangler that I had recently rebuilt and have a few thousand dollars burning a hole in my pocket. So I’m off to Upwork to find a developer!!
I found a company on Product Hunt called scoops.io that, at the time had a product that allowed me to survey anonymous groups of people, 100 people at a time. I asked questions with the intent of validating my idea. I asked things like... what’s the best way to find out what people think about news and media and the #1 answer was to read the comments section. So my follow up to this was - do you enjoy reading comments on news and media? And people responded with adjectives for the comments section such as... “toxic” and “cesspool”
Around this time I also learned about the 1% rule. It’s a bit dated at this point but it basically states that content on the web is created by 1% of people who surf the web. 9% of the people who died the web are not creating but are ‘editing’ the web... which includes actions like leaving ‘likes’ and ‘comments’. The other 90% of users are consuming content but are not creating or editing... just ’lurking’.
I also surveyed people about social polling. I asked:
How frequently do you come across polls on social media?
Answer: Rarely
If you see a pool on social media, how likely are you to respond?
Answer: Frequently
I took this as motivation to move forward with the idea for PulseCheck Media.
When we go live- I’m going to be laying close attention to the percent of users who are creators and editors. If responding to a poll counts as ‘editing’ then I think an app like ours can blow the 1% rule out of the water.
Believe it or not I created my wireframes in PowerPoint! At this stage I just wanted a tool that I was really comfortable with so that I could get my ideas out of my head and iterate I’m them as quickly as possible. It wasn’t sexy, but it was just what I needed to share my idea with a few friends and start getting feedback.
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