Adit Gupta

On Startups, Design and more.

[mwj-blog]

Free messaging apps didn’t have a business model until along came stickers and games platforms. This post looks at the options for messaging apps to monetise.

1. Paid for/subscription

Of the leading messaging apps WhatsApp is unique in charging for access. Although after a...

[outboxmail]

Dear loyal customers and Outbox supporters: We announce today that we are ending the mail service, shutting down the Outbox brand, and focusing our team and resources on a totally new product. In a related post we explain what this means for our current, loyal customers. This is...

[rrhoover]

Web-first, mobile-first, tablet-first, etc. etc. etc. All startups start somewhere, evaluating several factors (product, market, team, timeline, competition) to determine the right strategy. One of the less common approaches is the email-first startup. Email-first enables startups to:

Validate ideas quickly.

[blabfest]

Four reasons Biz Stone’s ‘Jelly’ bit the app ratings dust

Inferences on what their users really want! 

[tarkeshwarsingh]

An analysis of the ground realities of Biz Stone’s vision of building ‘the Search Engine’ for the current world!

Much has been written and spoken about Jelly and Biz Stone’s vision of building the next world’s search engine and an empathetic world! Some have criticized it heavily, others...

[blabfest]

Why Frontback is the new Instagram!

FOUR reasons I think Frontback is the next killer app!

My Blog on Medium!

[rrhoover]

Web-first, mobile-first, tablet-first, etc. etc. etc. All startups start somewhere, evaluating several factors (product, market, team, timeline, competition) to determine the right strategy. One of the less common approaches is the email-first startup. Email-first enables startups to:

Validate ideas quickly.

[blabfest]

hmmm.. Interesting thoughts!

[blabfest]

4 reasons Biz Stone’s ‘Jelly’ bit the ratings dust!

Jelly has been Biz Stone’s hush-hush project for some time now.

The Twitter/Medium co-founder finally took the wraps off the project just 4 days ago. Essentially, Jelly is a Q&A platform where people can ask each other for help.

Before you guys roll your eyes and think, “Not another Quora-clone!” - Here’s the twist, you need to add a snap before you ask!

Personally, I think the concept of adding a picture before you ask anything is great. Simply because images explain what you couldn’t in a thousand words! (Also, it makes these Jelly questions livelier, unlike Quora, but that’s just me! :) ) 

I played around with the app for a couple of days by asking or answering many questions. Then, when I went back to look at Jelly’s ratings and reviews on appstores today, It had plummeted to as low as 3.5!

Shocking to say the least.

So, I set out to carefully study those reviews, and drew some interesting inferences on what exactly were a user’s expectations from Jelly.

I have condensed my thoughts to 4 simple problems with Jelly example in the order of severity

1. Personalisation was weird

I felt lost inside the app because questions from my Twitter second connections were coming to me! I also did not have the option to help people in topics I’m really good at or I’m passionate about.

2. Curation was sloppy

I believe in Quora’s “Carrot and Stick” model to guide users towards creating valuable content. Plus, curating becomes tough when you only have a “GOOD” button.

I would have absolutely loved to see the top voted answers on many questions, but this version of Jelly did not have it!

3. User Experience needs another look

I must admit I loved the way they show exactly one question per screen so I can focus more. But the image has a question overlay on top with a translucent background. You need to tap to see the entire image. Thus making it impossible to see the entire image and question at once! I wish they would correct this soon (image below).

Also, scrolling horizontally one answer at a time is not my favourite way of browsing too many answers. This made my experience less, ummm - What's the Technical word for it?... Sticky!

4. Search  Optimisations

I can’t even begin explaining how difficult it was to search this app by just typing “Jelly” on Android or Appstore. A ton of game apps have the word “Jelly” somewhere and pop on top (courtesy Candy Crush)!

I think Jelly has a tough app search engine battle to fight! They have even posted a hack to find them easily, which is kinda hilarious!

If your friends are having a hard time finding Jelly in the Apple App Store or on Google Play tell them to search for Jelly Industries.

— Jelly (@askjelly) January 8, 2014

All in all, I love the concept of snapping something and asking questions but they have a long way to go before users truly find value in them! These issues are things that I believe Jelly can solve easily within a couple of weeks tops! 

I hope these insights may be useful to other entrepreneurs who (like me) are trying to understand simple things that would make users fall in love with their idea!

Find me on twitter @blabfest and discuss startups with me in real-time!

[lifetymapp]

Holiday More in 2014

This is time of the year when we make all kinds of resolutions for the things that we want to do in the next one year! At Lifetym we feel travelling around the world and spending time with close ones should be the top most resolution! After all, these are the moments that form our Lifetym! So here we are with the list of 10 different places around the world that we feel you must go to!

Here is the complete list:

Paris, France

New York City, USA

London, U.K

Rome, Italy

Barcelona, Spain

Venice, Italy

San Francisco, California

Florence, Italy

Prague, Czech Republic

Sydney, Australia

Source: Trip Advisor Ratings

[blabfest]

Paris is on top of my list !

[blabfest]

5 posts! Woooooot I hope this Tumblr milestone actually is rare!! :P

[tarkeshwarsingh]

Too many blog posts have been written on how Facebook is dead for the teens in U.S, on how it has lost its charm! People have gone on to compare the behavior of teens on Facebook to that of adults on LinkedIn!

A simple search ‘Is Facebook Dead?’ results in more than 1.38 billion results with most...

[blabfest]

Private experiences are really key now for younger audiences!

[blabfest]

A quirky new 404 screen I had some fun designing for Lifetym!

[parislemon]

The First App You Open In The Morning

You wake up. You grab your phone. What’s the first app you open?

This sounds like a silly question — or worse, an insulting one.1 But I find it’s a rather enlightening question. Depending on when the question is asked, the answer can either be telling about the current state of apps or the current state of you.

Personally, right now, the first app I open in the morning is Twitter. But it hasn’t always been. A year ago, that app was Path. A year before that, that app was Instagram. Before that, it was probably Twitter again. Or Foursquare. Or Techmeme (technically, the web browser). At some point it was Facebook. And way back when it was probably — shudder — email.

Read More

[blabfest]

Well, the app that I turn to the first thing in the morning is FB Messenger or Whatsapp. Maybe that’s an indication that I feel the core function of my iPhone is giving me some private and intimate notifications first, rather than other social banter!

[lifetymapp]

We are really excited to announce that the beta version of Lifetym will be available in a few weeks. Lifetym makes it fun to plan hangouts with friends! It’s like a private hangout planner with Path like timeline!

When we started working on this a month back, we observed the way people plan hangouts with their close ones and realized that few things have been done that makes it easy to plan these. Each of these real hangouts form a very important component of our life or as we say they form our ‘Lifetym’.  We want people to have more fun and spend more time with their closed ones and this beta release will be the first step on the way.

Some of the problems we heard from users that we are trying to solve:

Planning takes forever using messaging apps: The back and forth arguments on what to do and where to go is a very painful experience especially on messages. And calling people to finalize just doesn’t happen because everyone has their own opinion.

Collecting photos from everyone is such a pain: In each hang out there are multiple photos that people take and each of those have captured a precious moment. But the real pain comes when we start collecting the photos from everybody after the hangout. Whatsapp downsizes the photos and not all the photos can be uploaded onto Instagram or Facebook. Current optimal solutions like Dropbox make it all look like files and folders and sharing the folders and uploading them is a separate pain.

So we looked at these problems and thought about building a product that solves both of these problems. Something where to start planning all you need is to choose the friends! Where the entire issue of collecitng photos is automatically taken care of! Sounds exciting and unbelievable? The only way to find out is by signing up for our beta!

Have some interesting thoughts? Drop your inputs in comments below!

Happy Planning!

Team Lifetym

[blabfest]

This is totally true!

[lifetymapp]

We are really excited to announce that the beta version of Lifetym will be available in a few weeks. Lifetym makes it fun to plan hangouts with friends! It’s like a private hangout planner with Path like timeline!

When we started working on this a month back, we observed the way people plan...