I've built an anonymous confessions page on Facebook that reaches our entire campus (Oxford) and scaled it to a network of 20+ pages across the U.K that reach 10 million people a month. Before this I've scaled a campus-wide matchmaking site to 50k+ users - we got 80% of our campus signed up in a week. Achieved 90% open rates on our emails and 30 day retention at nearly 60% - unheard of.
Note: I'm from Houston, but went to school in Oxford, UK, and app is targeted towards UK universities but my hope is to quickly push to U.S universitise once we take the UK market.
Currently we have limited to zero competition in UK (unlike US) so my hope is the US competition will 'cancel each other out' (already observing that in some campuses) so we can come in from a position of strength.
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Why I believe this works? Our audience wants it. Our page gets 100-200+ posts a day - because of our own bottlenecks with FB we can't serve our own community, so I started building the app.
Through 'leaking' screenshots and making it seem that the app is in an exclusive 'invite only mode' I saw dozens of DM's of people asking (begging) for app invites. We built a pre-release hype machine.
Monetization plan is to follow the 'Gas app' example (which was the #1 app on the app store in the US) and offer a monthly subscription to allow users to see 'hints' about who posted what.
My background is in product design and my technical partner is also an Oxford student, who studies computer science, and previously built his own physical clean-tech product and software.
I designed the app with a frictionless onboarding process (3 screens, less than 15 seconds to minimize churn). It's highly gamified, I A/B tested feed designs.
Unlike competitor apps which have raised millions but are essentially duplicates of each other, I've gone for a move novel cross between Tinder/Tik Tok UX as I believe that will increase time spent on the app (user sees one post at a time and swipes through). This should increase engagement per post, increase time, and make the app feel more like a 'game'.
To distribute - we'll be tapping into our already built social media network, and then just blunt-force viral hack our way into campuses. My favorite go-to method from past projects is to create a private instagram account, then just mass-follow everyone on a campus, then put the link to our app in bio, a 'sensationalist/click-baity' type bio, and then mass accept everyones follow requests. I did that before and got 1,000 signups in an hour.
Exit strategy is to sell.
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