Immediate Lessons From the Gameplan Launch
So we launched Gameplan on Monday at around 1400SGT on Twitter and Facebook after three months of pretty hard work. Andy and I gave ourselves a small round of applause, but we both realise the hard part is only beginning. We followed up the Monday launch with some bug fixes and tweaks to the user experience based on feedback from our friends (lot of whom I'd like to point out are from the Singapore Ruby Brigade, reinforcing my belief that it is a kickass community and probably the best developer community in this region). Yesterday we launched our email campaign (powered by the awesome Campaign Monitor service), which led to more signups yesterday.
What was apparent within a couple of hours after launch, was that people were signing up and creating competitions, but there was no matches-generation happening, which in turn meant that there was no scheduling. We'd learnt from Echelon 2010 that automatic fixture generation and scheduling was a pretty impressive feature which would entice many oohs-and-aahs from users, so we were puzzled by users not trying it out.
Lesson Learnt: Reduce Friction (especially when people are trying out stuff) An interesting feature that we have is when a league manager adds a team to his league, he 'appoints' a person to be the manager of the team. The reason behind this design decision is that we want responsibility for data-entry (adding results to matches, etc.) to be delegated further down the league-chain to the team managers. What was confusing a lot of users was that we were sending out an email immediately to the team manager inviting him to create an account (and his club). This proved to be a stumbling block as users didn't want to send out emails - they just wanted to try out the service.
So while our idea was great in theory (in terms of network effect and virality), it was discouraging users from trying out Gameplan. We brainstormed a bit on what would be the best way to continue to have this feature and yet not make it intimidating. We quickly rolled out a tweak which was to make the sending-out-email an option which you can set.
What we saw over the next two days was more matches being created and more scheduling being done, which leads us to believe this fix worked.
We've documented the other improvements we've made over at the Gameplan blog.
Many thanks to everyone who's given us feedback - it's been fantastic and please keep em' coming.
Stats from the First Three Days of Launch Until about a minute ago, we've had 123 signups since launch. 107 organisations have been created, 94 leagues have been created, and 307 matches created of which 299 have been scheduled. While we are quite happy with these numbers, the small lessons that we've learned from the launch are even more interesting.
