Recently, Meta's team responsible for developing experimental and innovative apps, the NPE team, launched a new product called Move, and it is a to-do app. What innovation can NPE do with such a seemingly uninviolable track? In the past two years, according to the author's incomplete statistics, NPE has shut down more than a dozen apps of all sizes before and after. Whether there is innovation may have to be seen again, but there are indeed many pits for the majority of entrepreneurs.
Move, a social app of a list tool that gets together by a group of alpacas
Move is a to-do list product, and in such a mediocre-sounding product, NPE mainly makes some differentiation in the incentive part.
In some of the to-do list apps that we will use in the past, the functions are much the same, and the sense of achievement mainly comes from the tasks that are crossed out, or the "report" column to see their own achievements, and then go one step further, such as the "focus list" App that the author is using, there will be group functions, such as "career learning", etc., but it is a list, according to the week's focus time to do user rankings, the usage rate is extremely low.
The key thing Move does here is to take motivation as a constituent element of the avatar, use the gold coins obtained from the completion list to buy goods to decorate their "alpacas", and then make everyone's achievements explicit, the image is the achievement, and rely on the atmosphere of the team/group to make the image have a display scene. So unlike the traditional focus checklist, which is more of a personal time management tool, Move adds a team collaboration checklist to this basis.
How to say it, the NPE team is still more in line with the company's ideas, the biggest differentiation with a clear "metaverse" style. But such an app, can find what kind of high-frequency use scenarios, I can only continue to observe.
Starting from Move, based on the observations of the past few years, I summarized the apps that NPE has shut down in recent years, although it is not dare to say whether it is innovative or not, but some of the "pits" behind the shutdown are worth inventorying.
Let's start with NPE
NPE, short for New Production Experimentation, is Meta's team founded in 2019 to develop innovative experimental products. At the time of its inception, Facebook said that npe's focus is on "experimentation", the team will continue to develop innovative apps, and constantly do update iterations, in order to test the preferences of current users, if the product is not good performance in time to remove the shelves, if the product is successful, may continue to operate as a separate app, may also be merged into Facebook's main app. Therefore, for the NPE team, the income of an app is not the most important, but more important is whether the app can be recognized and used by users and survive.
The NPE team also launched an official website where the team publishes a description of the team's newly launched products and product updates. On the homepage of the site, a blog post was also posted last December about what the NPE is doing. In the blog post, the NPE team expressed their views on innovation, saying that "in this age of innovation, they want to meet the needs of a rapidly changing global society by building new products and investing in external startups." ”
Screenshot of the NPE official website
At the same time, NPE also said in the blog post that those things that are generally accepted by the public tend to appear from the niche market, such as before the emergence of WhatsApp, people in many countries around the world could not freely use mobile phone text messaging, and the emergence of WhatsApp just filled this part of the gap; for example, due to the vacancy of the traditional payment system in East Africa, the emergence of mobile payment in East Africa was many years earlier than the rest of the world. The goal of NPE is to cut through the points that users have not yet been satisfied by developing innovative products, so that there is an opportunity to promote an innovative and niche product to the public and become a product that is universally used by users.
However, in the case of more and more robust Internet product functions and fewer and fewer unmet needs of users, it is still very difficult for NPE to create a product that can survive for a long time.
According to the data I retrieved from App Annie, NPE has launched 13 experimental and innovative products since its inception in 2019, of which 11 have been shut down. (A few only shut down the iOS version, and we are also included in the ranks of the shut down products here)
However, although NPE is mostly a failure case, from another point of view, npE shut down which apps, why they shut down, from these shut down products we can summarize the characteristics of overseas users and markets, and may give some inspiration to overseas developers.
What apps have the NPE team shut down over the past two years or so?
As shown in the table above, according to incomplete statistics, meta's NPE team has shut down a total of 11 experimental apps since 2019.
From the perspective of launch time, 8 of the 11 products shut down by NPE are launched after 2020, and it is likely that the arrival of the epidemic has stimulated the demand for online entertainment, which has promoted NPE to launch more products that meet the needs of users' home entertainment. From the function of launching the product, this can also be proved from the side. For example, Collab, which remotely forms a band between friends to record music, and Hotline, which remotely asks questions and has real-time conversations with KOLs, etc., are all restoring offline scenes to online.
From the perspective of product shutdown time, the life cycle of NPE's products is not long, and the social App Whale, which may have the longest life cycle, has only lasted less than 2 years, and there are many apps that have been maintained for no more than 1 year, and there are many apps that have no relevant reports even when they are shut down, disappearing quietly. From this perspective, it is indeed in line with the previous NPE's plan that "the team will experiment a lot and update iterations quickly".
Among the 13 apps listed in the statistics, 10 belong to the social app, and it can be seen that meta, which started socially, still wants to take social as the focus direction. There are three main points of strength, college students, music socialization, and following the trend.
Facebook, which started socially on campus, has failed one after another in the college student community
Although it has been renamed Meta, people will not forget that today's meta-universe company was once a social company that started from campus social networking.
Judging from several products developed by NPE, the group of college students is still the focus of attention, especially the two products developed by the team in the early days, AUX and Bump.
Bump is an anonymous social app for college students. However, unlike YikYak, a purely community-based anonymous social product, in Bump, users interact 1-on-1. Users can start by posting interesting questions in the community, such as "What do you think is the coldest place on campus?" and "Do you like geese?" Etc., users who see the problem and are interested can have a one-on-one conversation with the user who asked the question, and the anonymous question is equivalent to breaking the ice. However, Bump adds some restrictions on the way it chats, such as users can only chat with one user at a time, and the maximum time to reply is no more than 30 seconds. After the chat, the app will ask whether both parties will continue to contact each other, and if they agree, they can chat again, these restrictions are to bring a good chat experience to the user.
At the same time, in order to allow users to make friends with alumni of the same university as much as possible, Bump will also give hints at the top when there is a problem with college classmates on the user's homepage.
Bump
AUX is a music social app for college students. Every night at 9 o'clock, users in the same university can get together to open an online party, there will be students standing in the "C position" to act as a DJ to choose the songs in the playlist, the listeners will give "applause" to the DJ, and NPE also introduced a leaderboard in AUX, the more "applause" the audience, the higher the ranking of users.
The above two social products are aimed at the college student group, on the one hand, because the college student group has special attributes such as curiosity, time, and group living, so that they theoretically have a relatively high acceptance of new innovative products, on the other hand, Facebook is also from the campus social background, and it also has a certain gene in the campus social products. But the results were not ideal.
Facebook rose to prominence because it filled the need for users on college campuses to connect them with a social network. But social media is much more advanced in today's era than it was then, and various apps for Gen Z users are emerging, such as Yubo, such as the needs of various Snapchat friends. For college students facing various "temptations" and rich social scenes, one-on-one anonymous social networking looks beautiful but not efficient, and for AUX, at the time of 2019, it is not more fragrant to go directly to the party.
This is further illustrated by the recent closure of the Campus section that was only added to Facebook's main app in 2020. Facebook embedded Campus in the "More" section, where users need to create student personal information, and there are groups, information flow and other functions in the section for alumni from the same university to communicate. But Facebook eventually found that people did these things in the Group and were more efficient.
In fact, since the second half of 2019, China has also begun to want to do campus social networking, such as Ali launched "Real As Me", Renren also launched the App version, but both products were offline after a period of time. Domestic college students have WeChat Weibo, foreign college students have TikTok, snapchat, it turns out that it is difficult to appear the next Facebook in such a situation.
The big factories are all working on music social networking, and the positioning is slightly awkward
"Music Social" also occupies a very important position in the products developed by NPE, and with the AUX for college students mentioned above, NPE has developed a total of 3 music social products. The reason why music social networking is so important, I think on the one hand, is that TikTok's global popularity has verified the role of music in social media products, and Facebook has been trying to develop products that can compete with TikTok, such as lasso, a short video app that has been shut down for more than a year before.
Although The NPE's attempt at Collab and BARS is also combining short videos with music, it can be seen that this time it is no longer blindly imitating TikTok, but trying to add some innovations, and raising the threshold to narrow the target user to a more vertical group.
Collab's product was released by Beluga Whale before the "Plate of Recently Fired Social Products" What can be left after the epidemic? Collab was just launched, and its main function was "Cloud Band", because friends who could not get together during the epidemic could use Collab to play a song with different instruments and shoot videos to upload to the community.
Collab
BARS was launched in February 2021, the design of this product is obviously not only for people's epidemic home considerations, it is aimed at a more professional rapper group, in this app rapper or rap lovers can record singing videos and upload videos to bars community, while according to the introduction in BARS also provides users with hundreds of professional beats, and there are melodic prompt functions, that is, after users write lyrics in BARS BARS The user will be prompted for the melody that best matches the lyrics.
Overall, BARS is a more professional app than Collab, finding a vertical fan group in music, so it is easier to produce professional content, and under the influence of American rap culture, BARS is more likely to get a good audience base. In contrast, Collab does not limit the target group, but the threshold of instrumental performance itself is higher than rap, although it is not so hanging, but it is actually more difficult to promote.
However, although BARS is more clear for the group, and at present, this product has been "insisting" for a year, which is one of the few products that NPE is still alive, but the author believes that the positioning of BARS is still very embarrassing.
In the U.S. market, there are already rapper-oriented platforms such as Rap Fame and BeatStars, which offer similar features to BARS, such as professional beats for rappers, the ability to suggest melodies based on lyrics, and a community of creators. Several of these products came online earlier, and on platforms like BeatStars, rappers are also offered services such as trading works and obtaining copyrights. These copyright- and transaction-related services are equally, and perhaps even more important, for creators than rap songwriting, and are an important part of monetization for music creators, and BeatStars, which offers a more comprehensive service, is clearly more competitive than BARS.
Compared with these platforms with some rapper incubation attributes, BARS's innovation may lie in its short video community, although rappers can't sell their own works on bars platforms, but the short video community also provides them with a space to show themselves. From this point of view, NPE is an idea with Kuaishou, cutting from the tool, and then making a short video app, but limiting the content to the rap category, it has become a vertical short video community. Therefore, short videos are an innovative point, but not necessarily an advantage.
From the perspective of short video products, this is a user interaction depth is relatively lower than the live broadcast, but the content richness requirements of higher product types, the user's work on the above is to brush brush, as big as vibrato, even brush 2-3 days is almost repetitive content, not to mention a vertical short video App. Some people may say that this is a good app, but this is also doomed to the product can only be self-deprecating. Therefore, the author privately believes that vertical live broadcasting, vertical e-commerce, such platforms with a deeper degree of interaction, more immersive experience, or more rigid demand are all opportunities to come out again, but vertical short videos may be more of a pseudo-proposition. Readers are also welcome to discuss this point of view with us.
Leaving aside Facebook or NPE, the recent music market has ushered in new players, such as byte to enter the music distribution, and Amazon is in a stress response to do music social Amp, this product can be understood as a Clubhouse that can play music from various backgrounds, and it can also be said to be a community like TikTok's early track to do content, but the content is not recording video, but real-time audio, interested readers can read " Byte stirred up the global music market, amazon forced to do social? 》。 In fact, the thinking of each family is the same, with the help of music to make more widely disseminated, or more user sticky products, and even the ever-changing creator economy is adding fuel to this track. After all, BARS is still in operation, and there is no paradigm for what kind of products can run out, which is also the charm of social networking. Regarding music social, Beluga whales will continue to track the latest developments when they go to sea.
What hot does, but failure is a high probability event
In addition to valuing the college student population and potentially throwing out another TikTok music social, another important attribute of the NPE team is to chase hot spots. In 2021, NFTs, creator economy, clubhouses, etc. are all hot topics on the global Internet, and judging from the several products launched by NPE last year, they have been closely following the trend.
One of the products npe launched last February called Super is a product that mimics the development of Cameo. Cameo is also known as the "celebrity shouting video platform", on this platform famous actors, athletes, influencers, etc. can clearly mark the price of online orders, after the user places an order, they can record birthday greeting videos for the user who placed the order, call them, help them send gifts, etc. Cameo is a prime example of the creator economy that emerged last year.
Cameo
However, compared with Cameo, the interaction between KOLs and fans on Super is more like a "show", celebrities will book the time of interaction, in the process of an interactive event, there are only a maximum of 8 places to interact with KOL, and users without quotas can only send gifts as bystanders. And, compared to Cameo, there is only real-time interaction. That is to say, from Cameo's multi-dimensional interaction platform for celebrities and fans, it has become a real-time platform for celebrities to interact with fans regularly.
In addition to the difference in interactive mode compared to Cameo, Super's UI is also designed in a cartoon style, which looks more vivid.
Another npE product, Hotline, is an imitator of clubhouse, which in short is the "expert/elite version of the clubhouse." Hotline went live in April last year, at the time when major manufacturers launched "clubhouse-like" products. Like Super, Hotline has also made some changes to the clubhouse, such as the interaction between users and KOLs on Hotline is actually more focused on the Q&A format, with the "stage" on the left and the audience and the questions asked by the audience on the right. KOLs answer one by one, and when answering a question, the user who asks the question is invited to the "stage" to communicate with the KOL.
Hotline
Compared with the more casual communication style of the clubhouse, hotline's style is more serious and formal, in Hotline KOL can also choose to show his face, and during the communication, Hotline will also record in real time, and send the recording file to the host after the end.
Hotline and Super are imitators of creator economy-related products, although both products are trying to make their own innovations, but for this type of platform, the operation of KOL is the most important, there are enough celebrities to interact with fans is the most critical factor in the development of this type of product, and obviously as an experimental platform, NPE does not pay attention to this.
In addition, the product is too focused on the elite group, and the lack of grounding may also be one of the reasons for the failure of several products. As mentioned above, Hotline is more formal than clubhouse, and this model may attract some elite users who like serious discussions, but most users use Internet products for entertainment, so a style like Hotline can only cater to a small number of users.
In fact, from these 2 products, it can be seen that the NPE team's idea is to find the most core functions or the most promising vertical application scenarios from the products that have been verified by the market to try to start quickly, but may often ignore the underlying logic of a product being recognized.
For example, Cameo first started because celebrities will record videos as gifts according to the needs of users, the most fundamental thing is to let fans enjoy a unique treatment, real-time interaction is a function added after real-time audio and video is on fire. Super, on the other hand, has made a "walking" style, where professionals answer difficult questions and break the original scenario of such needs, but there is no efficiency improvement or cost reduction.
epilogue
The above summarizes the characteristics of the products developed by NPE, but the products are more unable to be said clearly at once, and in the end, I want to summarize several important points in the observation of NPE products.
1. On how to cut a small number of groups first, and then expand the user scale of the product. As can be seen from the original words in the NPE blog post quoted at the beginning of the article, NPE hopes to cut to the point where some users are not satisfied, and then promote the product to the public, but the final result is basically a failure. The problem here is sometimes that some product designs can expand the user base at a later stage, and some cannot.
2. Explore new ways of social interaction or focus on relationships that aren't particularly valued. The most successful product that NPE has developed so far is a couples social app called Tuned, which not only has not stopped yet, but according to App Annie's data, this product has reached 20,700 ratings on the App Store, which is already much better than other products. In the previously released "About couples, not about the wind and moon!" Facebook finally has a product out of the circle again" article to introduce this product. Couples can share their favorite music, their emotions, important moments in the process of getting along, etc. with each other in this product. There are still relatively few apps that are really for couples, which should also be an important reason why Tuned can go out of the circle. And what other relationships need a product to maintain are also worth thinking about.
In addition, NPE is also trying to interact in the social process, such as dating app sparked in the form of a 4-minute video dating chat, if both parties want to continue to date for another 10 minutes. Although it was eventually shut down, we can see that NPE is also experimenting with the form of social interaction, which may find new breakthroughs in the increasing homogenization of social products.
3, NPE has developed a number of products with the popularity of some concepts, but it has not been maintained for a long time. In addition to the Hotline and Super mentioned above, there are also Emoticons, GIF Maker App E.gg inspired by the concept of NFT. With the help of heat is indeed a way of rapid growth, but what should be considered is to remove heat, what is the user demand that the product can meet? Like the previously reported "meta-universe social platform" Octi, after quickly topped the US iOS list, the ranking quickly declined. NPEs have a strong purpose for experimentation, but developers need to think through it before rubbing the heat.