My Mobile-Only To Mobile-First Journey Begins

Hi! My name is Dmitry, and I want to tell you about some important discoveries and ideas, as well as about the Slidepage app, where they were implemented.

My business history began in 2015, when I came up with and started successfully developing MyCity, a mobile app builder for city portals. There were many twists and turns, ups and downs, and after 4 years I found myself emotionally burned out. I wanted to sell the project and do something else.

A new idea for a startup began to take shape when I noticed that one of our salespeople was communicating with customers mainly via messengers, and every time he send them a beautiful (but large!) horizontal PDF presentation of a project.

When I analyzed the issue together with my partner, we came up with the idea of vertical presentation so it would be easier to watch it from your phone. We did a test by simply rotating an existent slides and sending them out, and we noticed that more people were reading it all the way through and asking specific questions based on the material!

The next moment of inspiration came after watching Bohemian Rhapsody, when I went to google the lyrics of Queen songs and found a page (https://genius.com/Queen-bohemian-rhapsody-lyrics) on which there was a web story. I was surprised by the implementation: the stories were not in the app, but on the web. A little lightbulb flicked on over my head.

It started to shine in early 2019. While optimizing advertising materials, we transformed a PDF presentation again, but now into a mobile-first website in a story format. This website replaced the adaptive version of our old landing page, and was very successful: engagement jumped up, as did the percentage of conversions (8.2% to the previous 4.8%).

Despite the success, at that moment I was totally exhausted by the long struggle for the growth (and very life!) of the MyCity project, which was probably not destined to become the new Facebook. I wanted to switch as soon as possible and develop my new idea, which increasingly seemed incredibly promising — story landing pages.