7 Fundamentals That Can Help Your Startup Grow 10x Within 7 Months — Because It Helped Us

“Arise! Awake! and stop not until the goal is reached.” — Swami Vivekanand

2017 has been an eventful year for the MMR family: The users, the fans and us(the team). Most importantly, we made great strides towards achieving our ultimate goal of existence:

“making entertainment personalised”

The key to our user’s satisfaction and happiness is our core tech methodologies, and customer centricity as key of operations. The success was made possible by pure science. Science of building a product that users are habituated to. Science that puts your user’s need and desires at the centre. The science of loving your users and getting loved back!!
Below are the 7 fundamentals we employed which can be used by any community based startup:

• F01: Getting your branding right— A good branding should emotionally connects with target audience and helps build loyal user base .We wish to be identified not as any next-door web-app which helps you in carrying out your daily chores, but that 3 AM friend with whom you share your life, cup-cakes and smokes. It was time we got creative, and after countless hours of brainstorming, our designer came up with this cool new logo:

MyMovieRack Logo

The three colours represent the amalgam of Code, Feelings and Movies/TV Shows while they also pictorially represent 3 cassettes of “movies” stacked on a ‘rack’, signifying a personal collection. Instead of focusing on communicating our features, we started focusing on communicating our philosophy of existence: ‘making entertainment personalised’

• F02: Build products which your Users want and not what you ‘think’ they want — Now this is iterative and time taking process. If you thing you can collect user requirements by creating a google form. Think again. Its not so trivial. Instead try this approach. Be at places where your target audience is. Listen to them closely. This will help to better understand their requirement and problems. For us, online films and TV shows communities, whatsapp groups were great place to start.
  The first major update this year was a unique & dedicated discovery engine for searching movies and TV Shows using feelings such as #mindBending #christmas movies to watch with kids #bestOfComedy #erotic which capture search intentions more than conventional and stoic inputs such as genres or just the name of the film. Listening closely was the key here, using bespoke analytics and online communications.

“Constant queries and requests for such a feature were a major driving force in launching the above feature.”- MMR

• F03: Don’t plan for perfect platform, make an adaptive one — MMR is not just another web-platform. The lean tech stack and models has made it possible to be highly performant, scalable and extendable which has helped us make changes and ship within hours and serve our users expectations. One example was Integration of web series where we quickly jumped onto a rising trend. Now we are the first and most reliable source of Indian web-series, with features such as new episode alerts etc. We are also helping the OTT players to get their content discovered by our feeling based engine and recommender system.
  In other example, we integrated import from letterboxd feature within hours upon user’s request after they fell in love with #feelings but don’t want to add whole movie collection manually.
• F04: Get the User experience right — A well engineered product is useless if the users can’t use it. We needed to build an user-experience that was not only smooth, intuitive but also was performant and aesthetically sharp and pleasant. This is true especially for a community based startup such as us. We launched the new UI early last year and since have seen increase in average time spent on the website and more importantly, spike in number of features discovered and used by users.
• F05: Personalise the experience, Standardise the delivery: Operating from a small office, we never could imagine that users across 170 countries use our service to help them discover and rate great content. This requires us to do away with ‘one size fits all’ policy and provide personalised experience to all our users across different geographies; such as to our users in USA, Japan & even regional Indian. At the same time we had to ensure to keep our costs low, and the solution has been as always great teach: scalable, flexible and extendable.
• F06: Decrease Time to Value for your users: Even though we are a B2C SAAS, time to value or the time it takes for a new user to realise value from the platform is a critical metric for retention(Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue-Nick Mehta).
  We tweaked our new user experience to make user on-boarding easy and bootstrap without much effort. Importing movie collection from movie folder was one such feature.
• F07: Finally, Connect your product with your user’s passion: We introduced the import feature, which lets user import metadata of collections of movies and TV shows present on their hard disks or IMDB. We witnessed high ROI with this feature, which has gone beyond just a standard api to import metadata but also provides an engine to analyse the imported data. We felt that we should help our users organise their movie collections, maintain an ‘online diary’ of sorts through the import feature. This was something cool which has made possible by some complex engineering, given the scale and reliability benchmarks we intend to support.

The above fundamentals can surely serve as a guiding light for Startups across the world who do not have access to large resources such as money and manpower as the incumbents do.

2017 was an exciting year where we not only rolled out many successful features, we also witnessed our MAU to rise from 10,000+ in Feb to a consistent 200,000+ from August onwards. Not only the MAU, we have seen a constant rise in number of monthly registrations, 7000+ and rising. Our Indian Alexa rank shot up from 100,000 to under 10,000. And the best part, it is all Organic!

Given our recently acquired success with Machine Learning team, and dedicated User Experience team, we are getting a step closer day by day towards realising our next feature of a Movie recommendation bot or more of a close friend who understands you and your tastes, to recommend you stuff to watch.
See you on the other side!!