URL:invengine.io
Purpose: open up the contact book as a channel for apps to increase their growth
Technologies Used: http://stackshare.io/patrickxie/invengine-app#
The motivation behind this app is that there isn’t a strong distribution channel for invites in the address book. the early days of social networks were very effective in growing apps, but it was mostly due to the ability to spam. However, we all soon learned that spamming while effective, is devastating and hindering to growth and retention. So the natural course of action is to give users the right to not be exploited as a tool for your spam, and optimize their contacts by using smart recommendations instead as a growth method.
This way you will still retain all the rights to invite whoever you wish, and there will be no spamming on your behalf if that’s what you are worried about, because I do believe in the long term, no matter what you do, spamming will catch up to you, and you will lose hard earned users due to it.
Based on this concept I have made a prototype version of what my vision of the complete product is going to be, it is mostly built with flask-python as backend and reactjs as front end.
I thought about doing extra work and add additional feature in order to polish the app. Then I realized that delaying release based on queued features isn’t the best way to do this, because the list of features to add just keeps increasing, and it never end. So instead I had to prioritize what the focus features and the basic is, and also take a "If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late"
approach, and then iterate from user feedback to prioritize on what features to implement.
Since this is the minimally viable prototype version of the minimum viable product. I would like to firstly apologize if the app seems lacking in the user experience, and secondly point out the auxiliary features that are currently missing.
This app is optimized for desktop, for mobile i plan on using react native to get optimized native experience, so for those of you who are checking this app out with mobile, it might be a bit suboptimal because it is made with web-app technology.
Breakdown of the app:
As of now, only email is currently working on the invite page, because I want to test out the viability of the idea only, so I have not spent the technical man hours on enabling twitter/facebook/pinterest/instagram etc.. but they are features coming soon!
A key feature added for this this app is the ability to add generated pictures to your contact list. The reason I included this feature is so that I wanted to test a theory that if you add features which doesn’t make business sense but in a way would increase app engagement, you can leverage the data from said features to derive conclusions to drive business logic.
as a example for this app, granting users the ability to tag random stock photos to their contacts, I believe users then will utilize this feature mostly for contacts they actually know and care about. Whereas a contact entry such as a broken email, duplicated entries, customer service number, invalid number, and contacts that you added at some random socializing event whom you forgot the next day are not going to make the user utilize this feature for.
Therefore I can have a basic dataset to leverage that will give me a base point of entry for possible machine learning to at least find who are the contacts I WILL NOT recommend first, and then build upon from there. Or the alternative would be meeting a chicken and egg data problem, where no data -> no recommendations -> no users -> no data -> no recommendations -> no users…. and so on
The purpose of fake people/fake contacts:
I understand it could be troublesome for newcomers to be FORCED to sign up for an account and login password in order to unlock the ability checkout your service/application, so instead I
limited the complete necessity to REGISTER, and added the ability to create fake contact personnels that you can use to play around with.
I apologize for the the suggested section at the moment is being disabled at the moment, this is where monetization and core business will come in the future once this app validates the idea, the preferred method to monetize is to sell recommended invites spots on top of who you are inviting.
The vision for this app is of course using smarter recommendation, which I haven’t implemented yet, I know this is getting ridiculous the amount of things that are missing, but my thought process is, if this idea/concept doesn’t even have any demand, then what’s the point about worrying about machine learning since you would never have the appropriate training dataset. Hence why the recommendation feature is yet to be implemented.
If you are interested in working on this together shoot me an email patrick.y.xie@gmail.com.
If there is significant interest, I am wiling to convert this into a functional distributable react component for people to implement in their own apps.
Purpose: open up the contact book as a channel for apps to increase their growth
Technologies Used: http://stackshare.io/patrickxie/invengine-app#
The motivation behind this app is that there isn’t a strong distribution channel for invites in the address book. the early days of social networks were very effective in growing apps, but it was mostly due to the ability to spam. However, we all soon learned that spamming while effective, is devastating and hindering to growth and retention. So the natural course of action is to give users the right to not be exploited as a tool for your spam, and optimize their contacts by using smart recommendations instead as a growth method.
This way you will still retain all the rights to invite whoever you wish, and there will be no spamming on your behalf if that’s what you are worried about, because I do believe in the long term, no matter what you do, spamming will catch up to you, and you will lose hard earned users due to it.
Based on this concept I have made a prototype version of what my vision of the complete product is going to be, it is mostly built with flask-python as backend and reactjs as front end.
I thought about doing extra work and add additional feature in order to polish the app. Then I realized that delaying release based on queued features isn’t the best way to do this, because the list of features to add just keeps increasing, and it never end. So instead I had to prioritize what the focus features and the basic is, and also take a "If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late"
approach, and then iterate from user feedback to prioritize on what features to implement.
Since this is the minimally viable prototype version of the minimum viable product. I would like to firstly apologize if the app seems lacking in the user experience, and secondly point out the auxiliary features that are currently missing.
This app is optimized for desktop, for mobile i plan on using react native to get optimized native experience, so for those of you who are checking this app out with mobile, it might be a bit suboptimal because it is made with web-app technology.
Breakdown of the app:
As of now, only email is currently working on the invite page, because I want to test out the viability of the idea only, so I have not spent the technical man hours on enabling twitter/facebook/pinterest/instagram etc.. but they are features coming soon!
A key feature added for this this app is the ability to add generated pictures to your contact list. The reason I included this feature is so that I wanted to test a theory that if you add features which doesn’t make business sense but in a way would increase app engagement, you can leverage the data from said features to derive conclusions to drive business logic.
as a example for this app, granting users the ability to tag random stock photos to their contacts, I believe users then will utilize this feature mostly for contacts they actually know and care about. Whereas a contact entry such as a broken email, duplicated entries, customer service number, invalid number, and contacts that you added at some random socializing event whom you forgot the next day are not going to make the user utilize this feature for.
Therefore I can have a basic dataset to leverage that will give me a base point of entry for possible machine learning to at least find who are the contacts I WILL NOT recommend first, and then build upon from there. Or the alternative would be meeting a chicken and egg data problem, where no data -> no recommendations -> no users -> no data -> no recommendations -> no users…. and so on
The purpose of fake people/fake contacts:
I understand it could be troublesome for newcomers to be FORCED to sign up for an account and login password in order to unlock the ability checkout your service/application, so instead I
limited the complete necessity to REGISTER, and added the ability to create fake contact personnels that you can use to play around with.
I apologize for the the suggested section at the moment is being disabled at the moment, this is where monetization and core business will come in the future once this app validates the idea, the preferred method to monetize is to sell recommended invites spots on top of who you are inviting.
The vision for this app is of course using smarter recommendation, which I haven’t implemented yet, I know this is getting ridiculous the amount of things that are missing, but my thought process is, if this idea/concept doesn’t even have any demand, then what’s the point about worrying about machine learning since you would never have the appropriate training dataset. Hence why the recommendation feature is yet to be implemented.
If you are interested in working on this together shoot me an email patrick.y.xie@gmail.com.
If there is significant interest, I am wiling to convert this into a functional distributable react component for people to implement in their own apps.