Honk’s Facebook App
Following our Facebook App – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
From time to time, I’ll write about a specific topic from the start up world of Honk. The goal is to share war stories and thoughts from the battlefield. While the start up world is tough, it’s exhilarating – both the ups and downs. I’ll share whatever is on my mind – honestly and truthful.
We launched our Facebook application in December. As with anything new, there’s so much learning that goes on. While we all hope for some super out of the gate success, we are all realistic on how the game truly works – try, fail, try, fail, try, learn a little, try…. you get it. Our mission is to figure out how to unlock Facebook as a good communication tool for people shopping for a car. We know our long term plan is sound, but it’s excruciatingly frustrating going through the germination period.
Our initial app is called Cars I’ve Owned (CIO) which enables users to share stories and memories of the various cars in their virtual lifetime of garages. The goal of the app is to enable users to see which cars their friends own, have driven, or even dream of owning. The overarching value is clear – once we can establish who owns what, we can enable users to see which cars friends own so they can ask question about them (i./e., “How do you like your Civic? I’m thinking about getting one”). The value is there and we’re out to unlock it.
What have we seen to date?
We’ve had roughly 30K users who have added the app in the first couple of months. The good news is that a good percentage of these folks end up coming to our destination site honk.com and are valuable users (although 15K is a relatively small sample size). More good news is that people seem to be filling out their cars. The bad news is that we haven’t seen a lot of viral-ity to the app yet. Users are checking out friends cars, but they’re not building their own set of cars. We need to do a better job of getting in front of those users to add their own cars. We’ll work on that one for sure.
We added a “Dream Car” feature on the app, but it hasn’t yet fully caught on – at least in a viral nature. While I know the key will be to get into the stream, we find a lot of people who like to post their cars, aren’t really inspired to publish them. We have to crack this code and will continue to test! I wonder if people really do want to share their cars (I would hope so), especially a dream car. There’s no harm in it – but the benefit could be great. I’m just glad Facebook doesn’t ask for more details about users on their profile… it gives us all a chance to fill a void.
I have to believe that Facebook is going to be a great, structured communication platform. People spend way too much time playing games and scanning photos… the evolution has to be meaningful Q&A and purpose-built tools that solves life’s problems by using friend networks. It’s only a matter of time… and FB is the only game in town who can truly enable this.
More thoughts on this to come….
