Previously on ‘Failing Since 2012 S01E01‘, Dinker Charak, Founder of Roo Kids app, talked about the first few months of the startup. Now read on …
Failing. Not failed!
When The Going Get Tough (Up To 2013)
The last few months of 2012 and all of 2013 saw us churn out products at an alarming rate.
Curated YouTube Content
Once we decided we would focus on kids (rather than parents), we started with adding videos. Our staff selected these videos and channels. Parents could suggest videos and they would go live once approved by our staff.
This led to something that was not new for us: Parents liked the idea. ‘Finally, there is a site where I can feel assured the videos my kid is watching is safe.’
But this also lead to something that was totally new for us: Kids started using our site. Our traffic grew! And we started to get the cooperation of the parents!
Kids Games
We started putting up games on Gungroo.com. Many of these we sourced from sites like girlsgogames.com. Some like Kill My Time, Diwali Blast, Noisy Nathu, etc were built in-house. This section did very well.
Sketching Apps – My Sketch Roo and Trace My Pix
The idea of a sketching app came in a company meeting where we were brainstorming on what next. Once the idea was on the floor, everyone latched on to it. This was all we discussed in the rest of the meeting.
My Sketch Roo was an HTML5 Canvas-based app where one could draw and save a sketch. The sketch would show up in the public gallery once our staff approved it.
Soon we had kids making sketches and saving them in their profiles on Gungroo.com. Not only were we fun as a product, but we were also interactive and had user-generated content. Over 20K sketches have been made using this app.
Then we built a variant of this web app where you upload an image and sketch over it to create a petty accurate sketch. We called it ‘Trace My Pix’.
As the usage grew, we noticed parents were sharing the sketches on Facebook (Twitter wasn’t that popular). Pretty soon Facebook became a critical part of spreading the content and getting more users.
However, kids were not our only users. Grown-ups started using the apps a lot. The idea of sketching appealed to both grown-ups and kids. There was no real way to stop grown-ups from using it.
The product, rather than the audience we wanted to target, was defining us. “Let us embrace this and see how far we can pull it.” That is when we thought of creating a kid’s version and a grown-up version.
My Sketch Roo as Facebook App
We created Facebook apps for both My Sketch Roo and Trace My Pix.
On Gungroo.com, which we built for kids, we were seeing grownups use our app to make sketches. On Facebook Apps, which we built for grown-ups, we started seeing kids use our app to make sketches!
Kids in India were on Facebook. We had heard about it. But we were seeing it for real now.
Art Contests
You create a sketch and you share it. What next? We decided to hold regular sketching competitions. For every contest, we used to pick a theme and award two prizes. One prize went to the entry with the most number of Likes + Tweets + Up Votes and the other prize went to the staff’s choice.
The logic was simple. The more Likes, Tweets and Up Votes we get, the more people know about us and we get more traffic. But these entries may not always be the best. So staff picked the one we thought was the best. A combination of quantity and quality.
Let Teen Be App
As we came to terms with the presence of kids on Facebook, we realized that many times this was happening with full knowledge of parents. So we decided to create a dashboard for parents of teens on Facebook.
We were worried it might come across as a creepy app meant for helicopter parents. So we presented it as minimal monitoring by parents. Key aspects are: keeping track of who the friends are and what the teen is posting with public visibility. The parent had to send a request to the teen and the teen had to allow the parent’s request for this dashboard to work. This helped in establishing trust with the teen.
We even sent out a press release that got some interesting write-ups. This app became very popular.
My Public Profile
In early 2013, there were many grownups that were not very Facebook savvy, Facebook hadn’t figured out Privacy well and users were never sure what was visible on their public profiles.
We got a couple of queries asking if there was a way for parents to know what is visible on their own public profiles.
We created a variant called My Public Profile. This showed the pictures and posts that were visible to the public. We showed it for the past 7 days. In order to see beyond the past 7 days, the user had to invite 10 more friends to use the app. Once 10 friends started using the app, the user could see public posts from the time the profile was created on Facebook. Due to this in-built virality, this app was very popular.
All our vital we showing good progress. Except one: Revenue. It was time to sit down and think about earning revenue. As they say, fundraised is not the same as the revenue generated.
War of Fascinating Galaxies
I like writing short stories. So when it came to creating a real-world product, I decided to fall back on something I really enjoyed: Sci-fi and Physics.
Taking to parents and other founders, I realised that in India people prefer to pay for something tangible. Eg: They may use an online service, but it will be to buy something tangible like a book, dress or a ticket. So we decided to make something tangible for the kids.
I used to hang around in toy stores and try to figure out what products sell most. And I had to do this without seeming like a creep 🙂
It was User v/s Customer play out all over again. This time our focus was on users. It was obvious to us within a week of these field trips that Trading Cards were big. Kids loved them. Never had enough of them. They came in small packages. They were easy to make. And, not so expensive that parents will think thrice (they always think twice before buying anything).
So we created a sci-fi backstory and some interesting characters. We created a set of trading cards in which 40% of the cards were about the characters from our sci-fi backstory and 60% were about cool Physics stuff. See what we did there? Balance Users and Customers. We talked about the physics stuff to the parents. We talked about characters & sci-fi to the kids. They loved it and the kids absorbed the physics stuff too.
We created games that could be played using these cards and made videos demonstrating those games. Though it was all games and fun, there was also some serious learning happening.
These cards sold like proverbial hot cakes. We sold them in fairs, apartments, etc. If a kid played any of the cards games with us for even just 30 seconds, they would end up buying buy it!
But, we could not replicate this success online. We could never sell them in quantities we would have loved to, without them being an online hit. And we just could not crack that.
Still, this was our biggest revenue-generating product.
We recently added images from these trading cards as stickers in Roo Kids.
Blog For Parents
As the popularity grew, we were seeing some interest from brands for advertising. These brands wanted to advertise to parents. But our site was for kids and we did not want to show ads. Also, it was tough to get ads going on Facebook Apps. So we decided to add a blog section with content for parents.
We were learning a lot about parenting and what kids liked. So we started writing articles about our learnings. We also added articles that were ‘Top 10’ like lists, etc.
We started getting requests for review by founders who were creating apps for kids. We decided to do it for free. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Roo Kids app. Without having to do any outreach, all kids app creators were finding us and contacted us.
We were getting to know what sorts of apps are being created and how well they are doing. This became a very important learning and motivation for creating Roo Kids app.
Chasing Audience
Almost till the end of 2013, we churned out products & pivoted at a rate of one every 2 months. We blindly went where we got more users, registrations, interactions, page views, etc.
We ended up with 14 products. And now it was time to consolidate and refine.
(cont..)
