Increasing user base · c/Spyke

ganesh · 2023-05-21T17:48:34.497359Z

If I may ask, what is the plan to add more users going forward. Of course Spyke is in beta now, but for optimal beta testing, shouldn’t there be more activity, for proper stress testing etc? How is marketting planning coming along?

@esxhan

Thanks for joining us in the early access beta.

Right now we're still finishing critical features like notifications and user community moderation.

We've been in public beta for a month now. From the feedback and usage we have received we can tell that spyke can be a fun app to read, use and post on in its current stage. The only issue is there are not enough users to keep one actively coming for more.

In order to get that viral growth we need to solve an real problem that a user has. A problem that when solved will get a user to tell their friend about Spyke. We are fixing no such problem at the moment and hence aren't getting the >2 viral growth factor that is critical in a project like this. We don't want to spend on marketing until our business model is validated and we can get word of mouth installs.

So in this regard. After interviewing several hundred people. We think people want reach within their local area without adding connections. This is rather usefull when asking for queries like buying specific things that can't be googled, asking about rent in an area or just simply finding local gamers nearby. There are several use cases where people need reach without adding local connections.

Others like Google have already tried to get into this market before.

So far all attempts have tried and failed to create an app that is like the NextDoor app in the US.

Our goal is to get people in droves by offering a solution to this real problem and keep them coming regularly for a fun yet informative reddit like platform. After all, a vast majority of people in India haven't heard of reddit.

Plus the lack of language support on reddit makes it inherently insufficient for a bringing onboard a diverse variety of discussions from users of all backgrounds... Our goal is to bridge that gap in the language barrier and allow discussions across all languages and scripts using our language AI. To a degree where you don't even realise the comment you were reading was written in a completely different language.

But of course, that feature is more of a bonus and isn't going to be what gets us viral growth. Hence our next iteration will allow posts to be sorted within a community based on location. Only if we feel it genuinely gets us viral growth will be proceed.

Stay tuned and do join our discord.

@komalwashere reply

Sounds like you guys know what you are doing, must be a thrill to be able build something from your imagination. Is this your only project at the moment? Do you get anxiety?

@yd reply

Spyke as an app is actually large enough that there are currently multiple projects happening in parallel. There's the front-end, backend, API, gitops, etc. and that's just for tech. Then there's marketing, content moderation, legal, accounts... Let's just say it's overwhelming for the currently small team.

Anxiety to hoti hai, but it's much more fun to make stuff happen.

@letsgohan

Also how do you guys plan on monetizing?

@pkhadgi reply

How are you planning to achieve the target of 20k daily active users? How are you planning to keep a user engaged once they are boarded? Customer acquisition is easy, but repeat customers are difficult.

@esxhan reply

Initially it will be ads served through various providers. From our initial guestimates we would need at least 20000 daily active users to start generating. We also have some side hustle outsourcing ideas we want to work on once we have reached certain milestones for spyke.

@bhai reply

Ikr. Reddit has the most irrelevant ads. I wonder how they earn anything at all.