Speech from Sean Howell, CEO Hornet Networks Ltd, the gay social network built for chatting, dating, and keeping in touch.

1. LINKAGES!
Hornet Networks Ltd.!
Dec 2015
The gay social network built for
chatting, dating and keeping in
touch.
!
Sean Howell, CEO
sean@hornetapp.com
!
@Hornetapp
https://hornetapp.com
!
!

2. Privileged and Confidential
Hornet
2
!
• Hornet 8M users worldwide,
• 5.3 Billion Sessions, 2.46 Billion Messages,
140 Million Photos
• 60 Million Messages exchanged each
week
• Most international: Offices in Cape Town,
Hong Kong, Chiang Mai, Sao Paulo
• #1 Market Share in Russia, France, Brazil,
Taiwan, Thailand, etc
• 25 Languages for Users

3. Know Your Status
5Privileged and Confidential
Build a Social Network to make a difference for gays
• Hornet was founded by three LGBT activists and entrepreneurs
interested in use mobile for intervention.
• Launched in 2010
Hornet is the first to introduce the "Know your Status" KYS campaign
to mobile social networks for gay people. In their profile, positive or
recently tested guys will get a special marker, so that users are
prompted to enroll in this purely voluntary campaign for a safer
environment. Once a test comes up for renewal, Hornet reminds
people to get tested again, or their KYS status lapses.

4. Product Vision
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Test Locations added after KYS
The gay community has made great
progress in reducing HIV infection rates,
but new trends among young people is
that HIV rates are increasing once again,
132.5% from 2001-2011—a much higher
increase than older gay men and a
significant contrast with the drop
amongst the general population. This is
in part because this generation didn’t live
through the AIDS crisis.
We continued to find ways to expand
offerings. Our Aids.Gov feature sends
you your closest test locations and how
to schedule your test.

5. PrEP
9Privileged and Confidential
Two new options that now appear in the Know Your Status (KYS) section of
members’ profiles: Positive, Undetectable”. This option is for those who are
HIV Positive, on successful Antiretroviral Therapy, and when tested for viral
load register undetectable. Studies have shown that this type of treatment
can reduce the likelihood of transmitting the virus to their HIV Negative
partners by as much as 96%. The second new option is “Negative, on
PrEP”. A recent survey of gay men in the US found that only 1 in 4 knew
about the existence of PrEP, yet it can be greater than 90% effective at
preventing HIV infection.”
We also translated the PrEP health information into 17 languages (From
‫,ﺍاﻟﻌﺭرﺑﻳﯾﺔ‬ Pусский, to 한국의and included Prepwatch.org info! )

6. Fighting HIV Stigma
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– Stigma is one of the leading causes for people not
getting tested.
– Hornet created an HIV+ community. Users who
select HIV+ are able to talk to other POZ
community members. This is not available to HIV-
users.
– To HIV+ Members resources are send via direct
message, welcoming them, offering additional
information encouraging thier own health advocacy.

7. Privileged and Confidential
Hornet
3
How you define Social media (but wrong):
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RSS,Blogs,Wiki, podcasting, media sharing,
widgets, forums, online chat
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8. Privileged and Confidential 4
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Social Media is really?
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A trend: “a social trend in
which people get use
technology to get the things
they need from each other
rather than institutions

9. Privileged and Confidential
Hornet
5
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It is really about relationships and innate human desire
to connect, not the technologies
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Social Media not a channel or broadcasting tool
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And the HIV/STI conversation join on out there right now
is big
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It is more influential than mass media
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NGOs and Governments are peripheral to it. Public
service announcements don’t fit the format.
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A choice not to engage is a choice for irrelevance

10. Privileged and Confidential
Hornet
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Myths Fill the Void on Social Media

11. Privileged and Confidential
Interruption Marketing
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The average person is exposed to 3,000
advertisements a day!
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90% of people skip ads if they have a choice
(TIVO)!
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Your message is lost. Attention spans are
short. How do you teach science? You’re
wrong. Be ok with that. Multivariant. No One
Knows. (Obama campaign)!
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12. Privileged and Confidential
Mobile
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Location based marketing is the ultimate tool for nailing time and place: allowing businesses to promote
their products and services in order to find the right market placement, and for their customers to receive
tailored treatment based on their interests and needs. These include geo-targeting, geo-fencing and the
newest player on the field, beaconing. Through push notifications and promotional pop up messages, these
services allow businesses to leverage their strongpoints to enhance their consumers’ experience and boost
their revenues

13. Privileged and Confidential
Cohort Analysis
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All mobile users have a lifespan, and these lifespans express a trend that you can manipulate. When you try
to identify changes in user behaviour from tweaking or optimizing your various channels and features, you’ll
often find that the trends or changes are too weak to draw any conclusions. This usually occurs when your
user base is varied, with different levels of engagement and at different stages in a user lifespan.
!
Cohort analysis is designed to solve this problem. A cohort, in its strictest definition, is a group of users who
share some common criteria. In a cohort analysis, you then compare these groups, observing their
performance over days, weeks, or months, enabling you to observe the trends and movements that are
otherwise hidden.
!
Your campaign
could look
effective but not
for your target.

14. Privileged and Confidential
Big Data in Real Time
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15. Privileged and Confidential
Data in Real Time
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Hornet makes data decisions to improve
the lives of our users
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-we track our KPIs in real time
-every change we make is multi variant tested,
-we consider a worthwhile test group to be at
least 10,000 data points. How about that for
scope
-We’ve run billions of sessions, billions of
messages.
-Cohorts talk to each other, HIV+ to Neg, Neg on
prep to pos, power users
!

16. Privileged and Confidential
Data in Real Time,
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US Negative, on PrEP 2256 VN Negative, on PrEP 23
TH Negative, on PrEP 319 KZ Negative, on PrEP 18
BR Negative, on PrEP 233 NL Negative, on PrEP 18
RU Negative, on PrEP 227 IT Negative, on PrEP 17
AU Negative, on PrEP 136 SG Negative, on PrEP 17
CA Negative, on PrEP 115 CN Negative, on PrEP 17
GB Negative, on PrEP 105 AR Negative, on PrEP 15
FR Negative, on PrEP 98 MA Negative, on PrEP 14
MX Negative, on PrEP 85 TW Negative, on PrEP 14
ID Negative, on PrEP 77 CO Negative, on PrEP 13
TR Negative, on PrEP 65 IN Negative, on PrEP 11
MY Negative, on PrEP 58 ZA Negative, on PrEP 11
PH Negative, on PrEP 42 BE Negative, on PrEP 11
ES Negative, on PrEP 31 CL Negative, on PrEP 11
EG Negative, on PrEP 28 IR Negative, on PrEP 10
DE Negative, on PrEP 28 JP Negative, on PrEP 9
UA Negative, on PrEP 27 VE Negative, on PrEP 8
AE Negative, on PrEP 26 SY Negative, on PrEP 8
VN Negative, on PrEP 23 PT Negative, on PrEP 8
KZ Negative, on PrEP 18 NZ Negative, on PrEP 7
NL Negative, on PrEP 18 BY Negative, on PrEP 6
IT Negative, on PrEP 17 HK Negative, on PrEP 6
SG Negative, on PrEP 17 JO Negative, on PrEP 6
CN Negative, on PrEP 17 IQ Negative, on PrEP 5
AR Negative, on PrEP 15 SA Negative, on PrEP 5
MA Negative, on PrEP 14 PR Negative, on PrEP 5
TW Negative, on PrEP 14 CH Negative, on PrEP 5
CO Negative, on PrEP 13 QA Negative, on PrEP 5
IN Negative, on PrEP 11 SE Negative, on PrEP 5
ZA Negative, on PrEP 11 UZ Negative, on PrEP 4
BE Negative, on PrEP 11 LA Negative, on PrEP 4
CL Negative, on PrEP 11 AT Negative, on PrEP 4
IR Negative, on PrEP 10 PL Negative, on PrEP 4
JP Negative, on PrEP 9 PE Negative, on PrEP 4
VE Negative, on PrEP 8 GR Negative, on PrEP 4
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Total 4,890
!
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Data Pulled
12.03 pm today

17. The Future of HIV Intervention
11Privileged and Confidential
– Big success often happens when we give support to the local / regional
organizations. These are often the least able to pay. For us, a lot of costs are
involved in the setup time needed to implement a campaign and the requests are
innumerable. Local needs major donor support.
– Largest frustration is that we see the big flow of ad dollars coming from campaigns that
have low sophistication, weak success metrics. Long development time increases
cost factors.

18. Privileged and Confidential
EMERGING MARKET is mobile, Growth
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South America 53% Africa 52.00%
Chile 30.00% Egypt 45.00%
Colombia 29.00% Morocco 35.00%
Argentina 45.00% Reunion 31.00%
Peru 57.00% Tunisia 120.00%
Uruguay 266.00% South Africa 33.00%
Paraguay 150.00% Ghana 60.00%
Ecuador 95.00% Algeria 81.00%
Venezuela 28.00% Libya 22.00%
Bolivia 57.00% Nigeria 120.00%
Brazil 55.00% Kenya 79.10%
!

19. 14

20. Privileged and Confidential
What Does the Private Sector Need
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what do we deal with daily:
-threats, hackers, internet freedom
-Spam: for-pay sites redirecting traffic
-1,000s of commercial accounts selling anything from sex,
drugs, to organic dog food being created each do to use
profiles
-photo approvals of users
-200 million ad impressions
-LGBT film festivals, social justice campaigns, lgbt refugees,
trans causes, housing, marriage
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In short, lots of competing interesting vying for attention
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21. Privileged and Confidential
What Does the Private Sector Need
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Paid Advertising: Better ads
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22. Privileged and Confidential
What Does the Private Sector Need
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Paid Advertising: Better ads
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23. Privileged and Confidential
What Does the Private Sector Need
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Pro Bono:
-Make a difference. Impact excites us
Don’t be self-serving (Your org being paid to ro run
someone else’s campaign or the opportunity to
collaborate with another org and you don’t ask)
!
-Plan. Often we are approached for one-off
campaigns after they are developed. One-offs don’t
make a difference. “Test Week”
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-How are do we fit into the regional strategy… How
does your campaign fit into it? There is no strategy
is there.
!

24. Privileged and Confidential
Discussion
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• Surveys in real time, first survey completed same day, followup
survey same day, PSA- Multivariant testing, Obama
Campaign / Upworthy test, don’t send
• BlueRibbonBoys.org, might the largest advocacy campaign of
its type. We gave a 500,000 advertising budget and 100,000
engineering contribution to MSMGF to build something
innovative. Just launched agile, meant to evolve based on data,
localize
• Protecting Data is important especially and because my users
don’t have full rights. We need to partner to change this.
Reform at the State level is needed over 70 countries. None of
our campaigns can reach. We must protect gays and minorities
around the world. #netneutrality
!
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25. • Try Hornet:
– http://bit.ly/askhrnt (iOS)
– http://bit.ly/hornetandroid (Android)
– Available in: English, Afrikaans, Arabic,
Bokmål, Norwegian, Czech, Danish, Dutch,
Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian,
Japanese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese,
Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak,
Spanish, Swedish, Korean, Thai,
Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese
• Contact Me:
– sean@gethornet.com
– skype: seattleseanhowell
For More Information
12Privileged and Confidential