Documents some of the customer development, product decisions, and technology choices that I made while building Bloon

1. Brief Overview
of Bloon
Edison Zhang
July 2014

2. Table of contents
I. Introduction to Bloon
II. Customer development
III. Product decisions
IV. Technology
V. About me

3. I. Introduction
A quick overview of Bloon

4. Introduction
My goals
1. Build a product from scratch,
starting with just a problem
2. Learn:
a. Product management
b. Engineering
c. Design
d. Marketing
3. Build sustainable business
6 months later
Built Bloon from scratch, starting with
just a problem
Learned and gained experienced in:
✓ Product management
✓ Engineering (Rails)
✓ Design (UI, UX, front-end dev)
✓ Marketing
Didn’t build company
✓
✓
✗

5. What’s Bloon?
1. Invite friends to
activity that needs
critical mass of friends
2. Friends respond
to poll
3. If enough join,
attendees are added
to group text to
finalize plans
4. Have fun!
Bloon makes it easy to organize group activities
Activities organized with Bloon only happen once a critical number of friends respond
that they are interested, and attendees are then put in a group chat to finalize plans

6. Friends receive
invites and
reply ‘Y’ to join,
all via SMS
Create Bloon:
Dinner Friday &
4+ friends
needed
Login with
Facebook
Invite friends
How Bloon works
1 2 3 4 4 5
Do activity with
friends!
6
Once 4+ friends
join, they’re
notified via group
chat that activity
is “on”

7. II. Customer development
through interviews and user studies

8. “It’s really annoying when people who say they were
going to join are late because they forgot, or even
worse, flake”
“ ”Organizing social activities is way more time
consuming and stressful than it should be
The problem
“Don’t hang out with friends as much as I’d like”“Sometimes it’s too much of a pain to organize, but I
would still like to hang out”
“I would rather spend more time socializing in person
than on social networks”

9. Service that helps
with organizing
frequently done
activities with
many friends
Opportunity
Understand the market and
discover the opportunity & use case
Frequency of activity
# of
attendees
Social Activities...
by # of participants and frequency
Birthday
party
Event /
show
LTR
date
coffee
catch
up
Team sport /
gaming
Nightlife
Dining
Movie
Watch TV
show
BBQ
...and services used to organize
them
by # of participants and frequency
Email
FB events
Group
messengers
SMS / IM
Frequency of activity
Birthday
party
Event /
show
LTR
date
coffee
catch up
Team sport /
gaming
Nightlife
Dining
Movie
Watch TV
show
BBQ
# of
attendees

10. Existing services (SMS, group
messengers, email, FB events) are the
least helpful for organizing
activities in this area
Understand the market and
discover the opportunity & use case (continued)
Services used to organize Key insights on opportunity
Frequently done activities means:
● Little to no customized selling to each invitee needed
● Allows for spontaneous, little-planning-needed activities
● Frequent activities means frequent use of Bloon. More
virality, less marketing needed
Many friends invited means:
● Existing solutions are non-scalable in terms of personal
connection. Organizer either has to fragment the
invitations and ask people individually to get responses, or
risk no one responding to an email
● More difficult to organize over non-specialized
communication services (email, SMS, group text, IM)

11. Goals / motivations: Regret minimization, Hang out with only
people he cares about, Have a good time
Frustration points: Making a decision, Regret, FOMO, Turning
down other friends' offers
Scenarios:
1. Invited to go out on Friday, but must be compelling
enough to not just stay in
2. Compelling activity, joins
Goals / motivations: Satisfaction from successfully organizing
something where everyone has a good time, and gets to do
what she wants
Current methods: Text, email, facebook messenger
Frustration points: response time / not responding, flaking,
gaining momentum, figuring out friends’ availability, splitting
costs
Scenarios:
1. Something she really wants to do: Gain momentum by
getting yeses individually first
2. Something she wants to do: Send out invitation to
everyone at same time
3. Plans for the weekend on Mon/Tues/Wed
Develop personas through interviews
Age: 24
Hangouts / week: 4
Main points: Socialite, single, extroverted,
always planning her weekend, won’t
hesitate to quickly join anyone in her close
circle no matter what the activity is
Olivia the Organizer Ivan the Invitee
Age: 23
Hangouts / week: 2
Main points: Indecisive, more introverted,
socially awkward, wants to know who else is
going before deciding (doesn't want
awkward situation with just 2 people), wants
to evaluate all options before deciding

12. Invite rest of
friends, let them
know who’s
committed. Get
availability and
coordinate
Understand the organizer’s planning process and
pain points
Build
momentum
Identify a couple
friends who are
influential and
most likely to join,
and individually
ask / sell to. Get
availability
Pain
Level
Time
Services
used:
Real time, 1-on-1
comm.: IM, SMS,
phone, in person
Remind
friends
Check in with
friends to make
sure they still can
make it. Last
minute changes
Group comm.:
email, group
messenger
Repeat events,
Sosh, Eventbrite,
content media
Post-activity
tasks. Share
photos afterwards,
split costs
Momentum
attained (critical
mass has
committed)
Do activity
Get idea for
activity
Bills: Venmo /
Paypal; photos:
Dropbox, FB
Pain
points:
Real time
comm.: IM, SMS,
email
Get responses,
uncertainty, face
rejection / failure
Find activities
friends want to
do, cut thru noise
Get responses,
coordinate
logistics
Lateness, flaking,
last minute
changes to plans
Get people to do
non-urgent tasks
Details finalized
(time, date, location)
using Doodle, Yelp,
Opentable, maps, cal.
Step 5
Step 4
Step 3
Step 2
Step 1
Olivia, Organizer
Organizer’s
biggest
pain points

13. Question Difficulty Notes How to make it easier?
Time
conflict?
Low ● Check calendar (if the time for the activity is set)
● Not everyone keeps their calendar up to date
● ideally: know invitee’s complete schedule
Automatically check calendar
Interest in
activity?
Low ● If interest is high, invitee will respond “Yes” right away
● If interest is low, invitee needs to answer questions 3 and
4 before responding, leading to a long response time
● Key insight: people care more about who they’re doing
the activity with than the activity itself
Propose activities that invitees
are very interested in
Who else is
going?
High ● Invitee has to take time to ask other invitees, who also
have the same question (becomes a circular). Getting to
group consensus takes even more time
● Emotions triggered: FOMO, loneliness
Get everyone else to commit
quickly
Opportunity
cost?
High ● Respond at the last minute if no better option appears
● Key insight: If enough close friends join, opportunity cost
is not a big issue
Once friends have committed to
an activity (bc of above), other
opportunities aren’t as attractive
Why is getting responses so difficult?
Let’s understand the invitee’s decision process:
1
2
3
4
To get a faster response, make these
questions easier for invitees to answer
Ivan, Invitee
Invitee’s biggest pain points

14. Discover, create &
socialize activities
Value prop: content to figure
out what to do, one player
mode
Critical mass for
your activities
Value prop: lowers the barrier
to organize and join activities
Product concept iterations
derived from organizer and invitee pain points
● Recurring is less of a problem to schedule because most
people are committed already
● Still need convo to plan (corner cases every time)
● Many recurring activities have the logistics set already
● Not many people have >1 recurring activity
● May be easier to just have a group chat or email thread
● Lowers the bar for friends to organize and join activities
● Eliminates the need to socialize activities with friends
● Needs to be personal, don’t want to be told by a computer
what to do. Need a leader to make exec decisions
● May already have a group chat / email thread with relevant
circle of friends in it
Key takeaways
● Provides a 1 player mode
● Content is fun to browse
● Difficult to match people’s interest with right content
● Most people just do recurring activities (vs new ones)
● Don’t need another service to socialize ideas, will socialize
directly immediately via direct channels (email, text)
Mock up & testConcept
Auto schedule
recurring activities
Value prop: save time / pain of
organizing recurring activities
Go?1 2 3 4
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CONCEPT
A
CONCEPT
B
CONCEPT
C

15. III. Product decisions
driven by data

16. Product decision example I
Getting users to organize more spontaneous activities
AFTER
2.65.8
BEFORE
Casual, spontaneous activities plays to Bloon’s advantage (more real time, less selling / planning needed).
Email, Facebook events, Paperless Post are good for planning larger, more complicated activities.
Why?
Days between =
[ Date of activity - Date organized ]
(smaller is better)
● Removed date, time, and
location fields (date field had a
popup that showed a whole month’s
range of days to choose from)
● Removed ability to send calendar
invitations
● Eliminated 7, 8, 9, and 10 options for
“minimum friends needed” selection
● Improved copywriting on landing page
Reduced the
time between
organizing the
activity and
doing the
activity by
over 50%
(grayscale)
(grayscale)
METRIC

17. APP PUSH NOTIFICATIONS
● Best user experience
● Need to build app
● Invitees need to install app
EMAIL
● Easy to implement,
universally accessible
● Easily mistaken for spam,
not as real time
SMS
● Most real time (~⅓ of texts
are planning related)
● Universally accessible
● Harder to get numbers,
unless native app
OTHER OPTIONS
● Phone, group messengers
USERS (INVITEES)
● No need to download
another app
● Works within normal
flow of communications
● Creates sense of urgency
so invitees will respond
faster
● The fewer steps to join
the better
BLOON
● Easy to onboard users
● Universally accessible to
all potential users
● Easy to build (for an
MVP)
● Reliable communication
channel
● More real time
Considerations Options
BLOON
INVITEE
Product decision example II
Choosing the right medium for sending invitations
1. Push
invitation
2. Confirm
3. Notify
that critical
mass has
been
reached
1. Simple
response
2. Group
chat just
like
normal
group
texting
1 2 Solution: Send invitations over SMS3

18. Product decision example III
Improving invitation response times
Invitations come from
ONE phone number
Why? One phone number would
give user an ‘invitation feed’ to join
Feedback: Like simplicity, ease of
responding via SMS
Data: 51min median response time
Conclusion: Confusing to users
what activity they’re responding to
Sent link to website for
activity details & response
Why? Can provide more activity
info on website than a single text
Feedback: Users miss the simplicity
of responding to SMS to join
Data: 20min median response time
Conclusions: Responding through
SMS is more effective than website
New invites come only
after responding to
current one
Why? Incentivize invitees to respond
faster with FOMO
Feedback: Time sensitive invites
may be blocked by other invites
Data: 311min median response time
Conclusion: Invitees missing activity
invites doesn’t make for a good
experience
Why: Organizers want to know as soon as possible
whether there’s enough interest
Metric: Median response time for an invitation, in
minutes
Each invitation comes from
a new phone number
Why? Simple, dedicated lines will
lead to less confusion
Feedback: More user friendly, but
have too many phone numbers
going on at same time
Data: 5.1min median response time
Conclusions: Best results, good
enough to focus on other things
A B
C D
A
51 min
C
311 min
B
20 min
D
5.1 min
(Smaller is better)
Multi-threaded
SMS invitations
get the fastest
response

19. User feedback
Data
Conclusion
Bloon would be more useful if let organizers poll their invitees
● Users were already doing it afterwards in the conversation
● pain point brought up by users
Hypothesis
Why
Metric
Product decision example IV
Adding a voting feature
● Voting makes organizing on Bloon too complicated, liked the simplicity of
no voting / responding to invitations via SMS
● Remove voting feature. Made Bloon more complicated and did not bring
much benefit for group organizing (didn’t want to compete with Doodle)
● Groups converge on a time, date, and location through a dialog
● Figuring out logistics is a secondary issue to figuring out interest
PRE-IMPLEMENTATION
POST-IMPLEMENTATION
[ # of Bloons using the voting feature ]
[ # of Bloons ]
The feature drove users to use Bloon for 1 on 1
meetings (where this feature was used), which
drove this relatively high usage rate
Utilization rate = 37%
Utilization rate =

20. IV. Technology

21. Technology overview
Ruby on RailsMixpanel & GA APIs
HTML /
CSS
Responsive
Bootstrap
jquery
Twilio
API
Facebook
API
Postgres
● Built Bloon’s MVP in < 1
month on my own. If Bloon
took off, I would then invest in
building native mobile apps for
optimal user experience
● Learned Ruby on Rails
● Integrated Bloon with APIs
including Twilio (SMS) and
Facebook (login and friends)
● Collected and analyzed data
using Mixpanel, Google
Analytics, and spreadsheets
● Hosted on Heroku
Technology Stack

22. Responsive layout that’s optimized for all screen sizes
Used a single code base and layout design that works well on
desktop browsers as well as mobile browsers

23. Setting up SMS group chats most cost efficiently
Background: Once enough friends join an
activity, the participants are put into an SMS-
based group chat to finalize plans
Why is efficiency important? Twilio charges
$1/month per phone number. Inefficiently
assigning numbers to each concurrent activity
leads to high costs, is a non-scalable solution
Solution:
● Assign each invitee in an activity a
number instead of assigning an activity
a number
● The total phone numbers that need to
be purchased from Twilio is equal to
the most number of concurrent
activities the most active user has,
which is almost always <10 (activities
expire after 1 week)
Friend 1
Friend 2
Friend 3
Friend 4
Number A
Number B
Number C
Number D
Bloon
via Twilio
Activity I:
Friend 1
Friend 2
Friend 3
Friend 4
Number B
Number C
Number D
Number A
Bloon
via Twilio
Activity II:
Bloon assigns a number to each friend, and the same numbers
can be assigned to different people in other activities

24. V. About me

25. Edison Zhang
Experience
Bloon Founder & CEO
● Learned Rails and built web app, integrating Bloon with APIs and
frameworks including Twilio and Facebook
● Mocked up many prototypes based on user feedback and tested them
with target users to see what resonates and doesn’t
New Enterprise Associates Venture Capital
● Worked with and invested in startups including Pulse, Houzz,
Cloudflare, Blue Jean, Nicira, and others
Credit Suisse Tech Investment Banking
● Modeled detailed financials and analyzed market data for tech
companies
Duke University Biomedical & Mechanical Engineering Double Major,
Economics Minor
● Graduated cum laude and with Distinction from robotics independent
study