Getting Users & Growing Your Mobile Startup with Vaidhy Murti
We kicked off our fall series with Vaidhy Murti, Co-founder & CEO at Wit & Friendsy, who shared his journey building in mobile! We discussed everything from early user acquisition strategies, co-founder foundations, building for retention, and scaling your user base.
Here are some ideas, tactics, and insights that we took away from our conversation with Vaidhy:
Vesting schedules. Whenever you give someone equity in your company, it’s really important to have a vesting schedule on that equity (immediate, cliff, graded). This helps prevent any internal conflicts later on between co-founders or early employees (think Facebook’s complicated ownership history). Generally, startups use a “cliff” vesting schedule, an options package that spans four years with a one year cliff. A one year cliff ensures that if things don’t work out within the first year, then you are entitled to no equity. At the first anniversary of your start date, you will have 1/4 of your shares vested. The remaining equity vests over the next 3 years monthly. Looking back, one thing that Vaidhy would’ve done differently with Friendsy, was to set up a vesting schedule with his co-founders.
Early user acquisition. The initial step to acquiring your first 1000 users is to figure out where your market lives—who are these people and where do they live. Vaidhy pointed out that “almost all of you will find that a very large portion of your market lives on Instagram and Facebook.” When Friendsy launched out of Princeton in 2015, it was set to be exclusive to Princeton students with a “princeton.edu” email address. So, their market was the 5,200 enrolled, undergrad students at Princeton. The question was then, how could they reach their market in a non-spammy way. For Friendsy this meant doing unscalable things like writing to the school paper, posting on various Princeton Facebook groups, and working with the heads of influential student groups. After sending a blurb to Princeton’s Facebook Group “Tiger Admirers” (allows students to anonymously submit compliments and declarations of love), Friendsy acquired over 100 users. Another important acquisition strategy was Friendsy’s Anonymous Invites. The early web platform had an invite button where you could enter someone’s email and they would receive an email: “Someone from Friendsy invited you” (aka someone likes you, find out who). By the end of the first week, Friendsy spread to around 1/4 of campus (1000 users) and the benefit of doing this in a closed, contained network early on (exclusive to Princeton), is that people talk—1 out of every 4 people know what Friendsy is.
More on user acquisition (because who doesn’t want more users?) Early Gmail users were invite-only—if you didn’t have an invite, you couldn’t sign up for this cool new service. Friendsy used this strategy when they rolled out at Dartmouth University. Vaidhy recalls printing out business cards with a Friendsy logo on the front, and an exclusive access code on the back. They handed out the cards on campus, slid them under doors, and sent boxes to heads of fraternities and sororities. The power, Vaidy tells us, is that they “basically created an artificial currency; if you don’t have a code, you can’t sign up.” There’s a psychological effect to it. However, when Friendsy tried replicating the strategy at James Madison University (3x the student population than Dartmouth), it didn’t have the same effect. A lot of this has to do with reaching a critical mass. Murti explained that “if you’re launching something from scratch and don’t have any users, doing 5 or 6 things simultaneously—hopefully not spending too much money doing it—increases your likelihood of having synergy between the things you’re trying. It gives you a better shot of hitting that initial critical mass.”
Feeding your network. Friendsy is very similar to a dating app, so the key insight was to have a great guy-to-girl user ratio. Dating apps generally have 70:30 guy-to-girl ratio, but Dartmouth’s student population presented a unique opportunity with more girls than guys (55:45). To gain a competitive advantage, but more-so just do better for their users, Friendsy fed their network based off Dartmouth’s distribution. They ended up throwing sponsored parties with fraternities and sororities, which helped to establish a pretty even split of users. You usually want as diverse of a subset of a population as possible. Overall, Dartmouth was their most successful campus launch.
User retention. Vaidhy believes that “push notifications and email are the two biggest tools you have as a founder in terms of improving retention.” For example, Thursday nights were generally not a great night for Friendsy from a DAU (daily active user) perspective. To increase retention, they would run time-based promos on Thursdays—1hr promotions to find out who liked you, temporarily removing the anonymity. Friendsy was also an early adopter of weekly email recap notifications. “Ultimately, retention is a lot about your product and if people are getting value from using it,” Vaidhy concluded. He also reminded us what Google says when they look to acquire companies… “does it pass the toothbrush test, do you use this twice a day.”
Scaling: it’s a process. Since its inception out of a Princeton dorm, Friendsy only allowed users to interact within their school/campus. After talking to their users, however, they realized that inter-school relationships mattered, so in March 2015, Friendsy led a national push and allowed users to search by school. To spread the initial word at each new school, Friendsy created targeted Snapchat filters for each school (Rutgers Football Snapchat Filter, sponsored by Friendsy). The key acquisition channel for launching at a new school, Vaidhy explained, is that “until the school reached a certain threshold of users, it was in this locked state,” unable to be accessed by the greater Friendsy community. There was a pop up that said: “help get your school to 500 users and your school will be unlocked.” This progress-bar-type feature incentivized users to invite other people at their school and also enabled a personalized approach to reach a critical mass.
Vaidhy Murti is the co-founder and CEO of both Friendsy and Wit. As a sophomore at Princeton University in 2012, Vaidhy founded Friendsy, a college-based social networking platform designed to connect students, enabling them to meet new friends, hookups, or dates on their campus. After building the app out of his dorm room, Friendsy launched at Princeton and strategically expanded into other campuses nationwide, seeing over 3 million matches, 100K MAU, and 300K total users. Friendsy ended up raising a total of $1M from Princeton’s accelerator, Lerer Hippeau, and Slow Ventures. Vaidhy’s latest venture, Wit, is a winner-take-all social video app that has raised $250k from Fitz Gate Ventures. Besides building his two mobile startups, Vaidhy also served as CTO of philanthropic platform DonorUP and founded a successful product development company.