@rrhoover
Clarification:
There is a strong 1:1 angle once a user responds/starts a conversation, but focus is also on letting you reach out to your mobile app users using:
a. A powerful segmentation tool (for announcements, promotions, re-engagement, soliciting inputs, etc.)
b. Our API (for event triggered, and transactional messaging)
On your question:
Here's what we are doing today:
1. Category focus: We're focusing on categories where the product is a painkiller (real need) as opposed to where its just a nice to have. We've figured apps that have transactions (mobile commerce, apps with in-app purchases, apps for availing services[taxi apps], etc) are good targets for us. Apps in early beta can also really maximize use of such a product.
2. Things that don't scale: We're working on doing trials with some well known apps in India, reaching out to them individually. We're finding that they are excited by our product's features and are willing to try it (the pipeline is looking good!). We believe can make strong case studies out of them.
3. We're integrating with some of the existing CRM products for the 1:1 part of it to reduce friction with respect to managing communications.
Got any ideas we can use?
Nice! As I mentioned over email, @srikrishnang, Konotor has similarities to PlayHaven in that it's a platform for developers/marketers/etc. to communicate with their users directly in-app (although you've taken it to a CRM, one-on-one direction). I love what Intercom has done as well. So I like the direction. Now for an honest question...
One of the hardest challenges, especially for new and "unproven" products like this, is that developers need to integrate YET ANOTHER SDK and use YET ANOTHER dashboard to manage their communications. The integration and ongoing management overhead is a huge friction point for many. How are you planning to address this and get adoption?
@srikrishnang - smart, you've thought this through very well. Many other SDK-driven startups I've talked to underestimate this challenge. Let's talk through this more when we chat on the phone next week.
I'm curious to hear how you came up with the idea for Konotor? Of all the things you could be building, why this?
@rrhoover
At my previous job leading the product function at Jigsee, we reduced month on month churn for new users from an insanely high 90% to around 70% just by understanding our users' needs better by talking to them.
Our last product was a voice messaging app called PhonOn - and we introduced a conversation thread allowing our users to interact with us. We marketed our features through this conversation thread, and heard back a lot from our app users.
We saw how it could be super useful for app owners to be able to talk to a subset of their users right inside the app - sort of like a Whatsapp within your app. So we built Konotor!
@rrhoover - quite a few surprises already actually :)
Its been a big surprise to see how immature mobile products still are as compared to web.
Even the bigger companies are still experimenting, figuring out their communication strategies and metrics/analytics for mobile, while they seem to have it working smoothly for them on the web+email front.
Thanks @rrhoover and @liveink !
Short intro:
I'm Srikrishnan, co-founder of Konotor. MBA, Product Manager (Verizon, Rediff.com, Jigsee) turned iOS developer :) .
I last was heading the Product function at Jigsee (acquired by Vuclip), and have spent the last few years building mobile products.
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