Just build my first muse, here's how it's going..

[Velgud]

Hi guys, I found this board about one month ago while reading Tim's absolutely excellent book. For the last 6 weeks I've been building my first muse which is an application for Facebook.

I've quit my job and am 100% focussed on making this a success and taking my first steps on the 4HWW journey.

The plan is to get the application popular asap and start earning revenue through selling advertising space, affiliate commissions and a few other quirky ideas that I will implement soon.

I have a lot of web design experience, but Facebook development was new to me so I have been working with an outsource team acquired through Elance.

I currently have no idea if this is going to be a success as only launched the application to the public today.

I thought I would chart my progress on here so you guys can see how it unfolds - I think this is currently the first Facebook muse on here so hopefully it will provide you with a few insights.

I've literally just sent out some invitations to my friends now asking them to invite their friends, I also contacted administrators of related groups asking for their support and have also just setup an advert campaign to promote it on Facebook.

Anyway, I'll post in here every couple of days to give you an update.

The link to the application is here, but you need to be a Facebook user to access it: http://www.new.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=34890497576 (http://www.new.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=34890497576)

The application is an Agony Aunt (UK) / Dear Abby (US) application for Facebook where users can submit their personal problems and have their friends compete to see who gives the best advice.

I plan to build around 6 applications for Facebook and this is my first.

If you do like it, then I sincerely need all the support I can get, so if you could write a positive review, become a fan and/or invite your friends, it would be massively appreciated!


If any of you are interested in getting involved in Facebook Application development then please feel free to post your questions here and I will be happy to answer them. I've learnt alot about it in the last 2 months so should be able to provide some assistance!


Hope you like it!

[sammy]

Pretty cool app. Created a facebook account to try it out. Very simple and easy to use for someone that never used facebook before :-).

Very cool and I can see this getting pretty popular. Everyone loves to complain or get advice and everybody has an opinion on how they can solve their problems.

Great muse!

How much time did it take to create that app (total of yours and your elance'ers)?

[Velgud]

Hi Sammy, thanks for the postive feedback, it's really great to hear that someone found it easy as a first time Facebook user - that's great news!

Yeah, I'm certainly hoping it catches on! What you mentioned "Everyone loves to complain or get advice and everybody has an opinion on how they can solve their problems." was literally 99% word for word my main marketing pitch when I recently pitched it to Facebook as part of the New Application Development Competition, see this link (http://developers.facebook.com/fbFund.php) for more info on that, although the current competition is now closed but there will certainly be another within 6 months.

But really, that was almost word for word! I could post a video elevator pitch to prove it but it's currently residing on a password protected area on Vimeo and I don't really want to publicise the password.

The ads have been running for about 3 hours now and the first impressions I have is that the CTR (Click Through Ratios) on Facebook is ALOT lower than Google. I'm currently seeing 0.05% whereas in my previous job managing major brands, we would be up around 35%! So huge difference there. I've so far had around 3600 impressions and only 2 clicks. However, such is the ability to highly target traffic, of these 2 clicks I have managed to get a user install the app and actually post a comment which is great.

Because the ads are PPC (Pay Per Click) not CPM (Pay Per 1000 Impressions) I've only paid $0.36 and gained 1 active user.

I'll post more info on this as I learn more myself.

Perhaps the mods could sticky this thread and we can all use it as a Facebook App case study?

[Velgud]

How much time did it take to create that app (total of yours and your elance'ers)?


Sorry, I missed this, it's kinda hard to say really.. but here's a rough idea:


2 months brainstorming/shortlisting all my ideas for an application, working out pros and cons and measuring competiton etc..

2 weeks designing the site architecture, writing the full specification etc

2 weeks on conceptual and graphic design

2.5 months coding (2 full time coders for 6 weeks)

1 week setting up various tasks


Also it's worth noting I have around 12 years web design and project management experience and subsequently have a good knowledge and alot of contacts.. I'm not really sure how long this would have taken as a beginner.

[willdriven]

I'm a web developer and project manager myself so I'm curious - how much was outsourced and how much did you do in house? What were your costs like?

[TinaD]

Cool idea! I will definitely check it out.

I am using Facebook for advertising....I have a Fan page and once I get my website live I plan on using Facebook as my first foray into advertising.

Tina

[Velgud]

Hi Will, it's kinda hard to give you tangible figures, I'd say about 50% of the work was outsourced. Depending on the skill requirements, tasks have generally cost between$15-$50 per hour.

Tina, please do check it out, the more the merrier! If you do need any specific help then please feel free to ask me. I'll help out where I can.


It's now 1am in the UK so I've had my first UK day (not global day as the US is still going strong) and now have 57 users signed up, of which, around 40% are from people I don't know.

My target is to achieve 100 users before Monday morning so we're on target which is great news! On Monday, I plan to analyse the performance of this first weekend and tweak according to our most common user profiles. Today has brought our attention to a few bugs we didn't previously know about so will also spend some time on Monday sorting those out.

Will keep you posted!

[Caesar_X]

Hi Velgud,

I just installed the app and it looks interesting. But I'm getting "Error while loading page from Agonymous" messages. Is that a server overload problem?

Look forward to checking it out when it's up!

[Velgud]

Hi Caesar,

Thanks for showing an interest :)


This is our first weekend so we expected quite a few bugs. Could you please describe the problem further, for example, did this error occur on a specific page? It sounds like you saw part of the application, so where was the error caused?

I doubt it's a server over load as we only have a small number of users at present - last count was 72 so we're on target to get our 100 for the first weekend which is great!

It could also be an error with the Facebook API which isn't the most stable of platforms.

The more info you can provide on this error the better chance we have of fixing it.

Thanks!

[Caesar_X]

Hi Velgud,

I had encountered the error yesterday after clicking on one of the private agonies to view it.

But I am not seeing the issue today, so good news!

[Velgud]

Thanks Caesar, I'll look into this more tomorrow, I really appreciate your feedback!

I'm about to go to bed now as its 1am in the UK. My goal for this weekend was to get 100 users and we just got our 110th so I'm delighted !

Later this week I will analyze the traffic and advert performance and post any interesting findings in here.

:)

[Velgud]

Hi guys,

A quick update on how things are going and a tip on achieving a critical mass which is absolutely vital when working the user generated content model.

TIP: Do not spend all your money on development! Save at least on third for marketing!!

This may sound straight forward but you wouldnt believe the number of entrepreneurs that have approached me as a web designer saying they have the next great idea and have a budget of £x to build it. The site gets built and then the client tells us the budget is all used up and they have no money left to drive traffic. This is suicide. Never over spend on your development if it means eating into the marketing budget!

Anyway, so keeping that in mind, after achieving our goal of 100 users in the first weekend, we setup an advertising campaign aimed to generate 60 new users a day for 10 days. The logic behind this was that we noticed on Monday that of the 100 users, we achieved 7 new users based on viral growth (i.e. invites, notfications, messages, etc sent to friends of users).

So we set a goal of achieving a 7% viral growth per day per 100 users.

The 60 new users a day generated through advertising, after 10 days should give us the critical mass we require to then have enough users to generate 60 new users a day through viral growth by Day 11. Hence we can then stop buying traffic as the app will grow sufficiently quick itself.

Monday was a day for bug fixing and analysis and so the campaign started yesterday. We needed 167 users to stay on target and achieved somewhere around 180. Today we need to reach 237 by US midnight and at 5pm GMT we're on 220 so it's looking good :)

Targets are 4000 users 30 days after launch, 25000 users after 60 days and 200000 users after 90 days. But broken down, as long as we keep achieving 7% per day per 100 users, we can achieve that. It's worth noting that this isn't a linear growth as many viral nodes will become saturated, however we haven't accounted for boosts in traffic via various PR methods, so hopefully this is an achievable target.

Anyway, just wanted to keep you posted on progress, it's certainly started well!!

If anyone has any questions regarding Facebook development, please do ask away and I'll try my best to answer!

[sammy]

Hi Velgud,

Nice advice on the traffic and marketing!

How do your numbers look now? Also, did you follow a plan from thirtydaychallenge for traffic, or any other plan you can direct us to for boilerplating our traffic marketing plans?

thanks,
Sammy

[LivetheDream]

Hey Velgud,

I don't want to rain on your parade, but where's the value? This is just yahoo answers on facebook (i.e. through a second portal rather than just going straight to the source). Not only are there several answer services on the web, but also they are already populated.

Good luck, but it seems like a 'me too' with no real differentiation.

Regards,

Dreamer

[steubens]

Velgud,

I just set it up on my facebook account, pretty cool idea, I like it.

I was wondering, and this is probably a stupid question, but how do you intend to make money? Is it simply from users clicking on Facebook ads that are presented next to your app? Is there another revenue stream? does facebook put ads there and then pay you, do you please the ads with another service? :confused:

-Scott

[nghs22]

How does this thing make you money? Am I missing it? Online ads?

[TinaD]

I don't have a FB app as a muse, however, I participate in a very popular FB application. The basic premise of the one I belong to is that any facebooker can be a basic (free) member. This allows you to participate and be part of the community. If the community is a thriving one, you will probably get hooked...once you are hooked you add extra features that people pay in order to get.

The feature I belong to has 45 groups of about 50 people each (this is a rough estimate of users)...there are two levels beyond basic (free) that a subscriber can upgrade to. The first costs 5$ a month to belong the second is $20 to belong. Mind you there are very big incentives to join the $20 bracket.

I believe that the creator of this application has several applications on FB and that he spends the majority of his life playing golf.

FB has 100million members and growing, if you are still on myspace, leave now:D Plus, FB attracts a better educated, upwardly mobile and wealthier base.

If you would like to know the application to check it out, feel free to PM me.

T

[TinaD]

Oh, and though I don't have an application on FB I do have a "Fan Page" that I will eventually advertise to drive sales to my muse. I have been speaking with people who do this and are VERY happy with the results and prefer FB to Google adwords due to your ability to highly target your ads.

Feel free to PM me with questions, and no, I do not work for FB:D

[TinaD]

EDIT: There are 2,500 "Fans" of the application I mentioned....these are likely to be paying users, cause who else would care? Additionally, I checked the total numbers on the servers and it squews WAY higher. Factor in that not all paying customers are "Fans" and a little basic math points to a pretty good muse generator.

Just saying:D