Bollyverse Product Preview
The subsequent section outlines the major screens of the Bollyverse app & the rationale for each of them!
Disclaimer: I designed these screens in Microsoft Powerpoint - before I picked up Sketch (design tool) that I used in my two subsequent startups - Limitless & L'occul; so please excuse the low fidelity design.
Splash Screen
The splash screen serves as the welcome screen for Bollyverse each time the user logs in across any device.
Welcome Screens 1-4
Welcome screens 1-4 are only shown to the user until they sign up for an account. While an unregistered user might be able to use the app, we have tried to make the onboarding process as simple as possible.
Signup Screens 1-4
The signup process comprises of two parts:
- Personal Details
- PreferencesWhile we could circumvent the Preferences - and select everything by default for each user - building the user's preference graph greatly enhances the content that can be curated for them.
Tour Screens 1-3
The tour familiarises the user with the product and how it works. The tour can be viewed again from Settings and as such is only showed once after a new user signs up.
Home Feed
This is where the user lands after the splash screen on subsequently logins. The home feed has been simplified to provide easy access to search and discovery.
Gamification 1-3
We ask users to link their social media accounts and invite their friends & family to unlock additional movies on the platform. We also reserve three unlocked tiers for additional signups referred by the user.
User Profile, Settings & Preferences
Users can control their profile, settings, and preferences by just a single tap on the top left corner of the screen. The call to action button on each page encourages users to try a PRO account for FREE.
PRO Plans
All PRO plans come with a 30-day FREE trial and can be canceled at any time. We offer users a range of single language and bundled plans. Once they save their cards to the app, they can instantly purchase additional premium content directly from the app.
Followers & Following
Users can follow other users and also view who's following them. Once we start programming user-generated content, this will help artists get discovered and build a following.
Bollyverse's Ten Commandments
The 10 key commandments we wanted to adhere to while building the product at Bollyverse
#1: Virality
Thou shall make this viral - viral beyond Beyonce's bum
This prototype has been built to enhance virality and leverage network effects from Day 1. On a steady-state, our goal is to have each user, refer at least 3 back to us. While this might sound ambitious, we have carefully crafted the product strategy with gamification to ensure this is exactly what happens. We have dissected and learned from 100's products across the content and e-commerce spaces to encourage and reward virality.
#2: Gamification
Thou shall engage in petty games with thy users to keep them comin'
While we currently have a library of over 4,000 films - we are deliberately reserving the unlocking of these via gamification. Users unlock the Bollyverse and are rewarded for each additional sign-up they bring in. After the beta phase, we will add a kicker to the gamification, which will let users share the benefits of their 'growth' actions with everyone within their networks and vice-versa (ie: a user will be able to share a movie (or other premium content) unlocked by him for a limited duration with everyone within his network). This has been planned for after the beta phase because a mechanism such as this requires a certain number of users in each user's network on the platform to leverage true network effects. Moreover, this strategy ties in well from a business perspective given that currently only a fifth of our library is accessible to users.
#3: Growth Hacking
Thou shall hack thy way to growth - by hook or by crook!
Growth hacking is a fancy term that's been thrown around a lot since it was first coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis but basically, it refers to the art and science of getting products to scale incredibly fast. One of the best growth hacks, is probably that employed by Dropbox - that rewarded users with the core utility that they came to Dropbox for in the first place (eg: a friend signing up would unlock an additional 250MB of storage). We have built gamification into the product to do just that - give users access to premium content and additional movies (the core utility provided by Bollyverse) for helping scale the product through network effects.
#4: Video Search + Discovery
Thou shall finally enable video search and discovery on the same platform
Video discovery is broken. Despite multiple, multi-billion dollar platforms for all other types of media (Pinterest for pictures, Soundcloud for music, etc) and even products (Wanelo); video discovery remains a fable at best. We are building Bollyverse to be able to serve not just search (as it currently does) but also the discovery of new content - triangulated using their interest and social graphs and learning from a single tap they make on the app and outside of it (our marketing efforts). This is critical to our business strategy that aims to leverage transformational content through a transactional model.
#5: Entertain
Thou shall always entertain thy users - come hail or storm, in sickness & in health
While we are a technology company, our core value proposition remains to entertain our users. While often its easy to get bogged down by adding product features and various bells and whistles, we use this simple yardstick (in addition to data) to evaluate where we should add something or not.
#6: God like User Experience (UX)
Thou shall provide a God like, seamless and pleasurable UX to thy users
We strongly believe that user experience is the single, most important factor in defining the success of a product - especially in a market where users across the globe have access to a consistent and extremely high level of competition. We are certain that the sheer simplicity and pleasure of using the Bollyverse app will keep users sticky. We believe in extensive and iterative user testing and will not ship additional features until we are first addicted to them ourselves!
#7: Emotional Intelligence
Thou shall recognize and leverage the emotional traits of thy users
We live in the age of IWWIWWIWI - I Want What I Want When I Want It. The product has been built to subtly yet surely influence user behavior keeping in mind multiple emotional traits. Features such different color codes for regular and PRO accounts - and your network knowing which one you are is one of them. Another example is offering users a FREE 30 day trial to all our PRO accounts to get them to link their cards and instantly use it for purchases on the app without being redirected to anywhere. Our algorithms and machine learning is being designed in a way to track premium content consumption when it is offered and after enough giving, giving, giving - to build the habit of consuming premium content, we will take - just a little. Then give, give, give again.
#8: Data Driven Marketing
Thou shall have faith in the power of data and let it guide your marketing
Marketing in 2014 is driven by data. We have built the platform to track every micro action of each user and we believe in the power of data to optimize our marketing spends, minimize our Cost of customer ACquisition (CAC) and maximize the user's Life Term Value (LTV). We will provide detailed analytics of our funnels, drop offs and marketing tactics - which in turn will drive business decisions.
#9: Deep Learning
Thou shall learn using machines through algorithms in AI & NLP
We want people to be able to access Bollyverse from wherever they are, through whatever type of device they have. We are working towards creating an intelligent recommendation engine based on multiple user categories as well as novel techniques of indexing and recommending videos. Whether it be developing a method for producing video thumbnails and sliders so users can get a better sense of what they're about to contain or ensuring that we can provide a seamless viewing experience to users by drip feeding video content over an extended period of time to them; we will continue to leverage the latest in science and technology to offer our users the best experience possible.
#10: Revenues beyond Ads
Thou shall diligently seek and build the product for monetization beyond thy ads
We are building an entire ecosystem around content creation, consumption, and distribution and while we might be taking a phased approach to this - we are congruous of the fact that user habits and actions need to be built from Day 1. It is exactly for this reason that we are built various features that might not serve a lot of apparent purposes today - but will allow us to get to our goal. Followers, watch lists, storing your card details have all been subtly built into the product to get users to engage and interact more with the existing as well as upcoming offerings; while ensuring that they will not be able to wait to try them out once launched.
