We launched!

After these few weeks of preparation work - design, development, market research, countless hours doing focus groups and more importantly, market study, we have finally launched the app with some core features that could kickstart a social network.

The beginning wasn't easy as we had to make plenty of assumptions, e.g. People will have no problem Singpass for user verification or that privacy will not be too big an issue for users amongst many others. Our team has to make these assumptions based on gut feel instead of data (as much as we hope to be data-driven, we do not have data at this point of time to make a good judgement call what should be done, what shouldn't).

I remember a few quotes from Reid Hoffman

"I’ve often said that starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down. Blitzscaling is like assembling that plane faster, then strapping on and igniting a set of jet engines, while still building the wings."

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.”

It is exactly what we are feeling right now - assembling together the critical core infrastructure of the app as fast as possible, then based on inputs from the users and market feel, make the adjustments accordingly. Putting out the fire that is burning down the core pillars, ignoring the smaller ones for the time being.

Our app first launched with the following features:

• Newsfeed

• User able to post text and photos

• User able to follow other users

• User able to create and join groups

• Registration and Login via mobile OTP

• Singpass verification

• Manual verification by allowing users to submit picture of their address for manual verification from our end

• News segment for HiLife admins to post general news and information

Our team felt that this was MVP release for our users after the feedback that we have gathered so far. Of course, more updates to come and we are committed to churning out new releases every 2-3 weeks in order to enhance the app and finetune it towards a better product and user experience for all our users.

It initially took alot of courage from everyone in the team to start jioing their family and friends to download the app and try it out - of course, in fear of backlashes and negative comments such as

"Eee, your current flow not good, it should be like this and like that"

"Why is it not like this? It's so user unfriendly right now?"

"Facebook does it this way, you should do it that way too"

It certainly takes alot of courage to accept criticism, especially from your closest friends and connection but as I was telling the team, this is part and parcel of entrepreneurship and as a matter of fact, the more negative feedback we are getting, the better it is for us because we will know exactly which and what to fix / prioritise fixing. We are still a very new app in the market and definitely need a great deal of patience from our early adopters.

End of the day, our very first report card for launch - 500 users, not too shabby a result considering it has been a very controlled launch in specific areas and plenty of feedback from users. Many more things to consider and get back to the drawing board on. :)

-D