I joined Ilan Rainier and Ethan Frajdenrajch, the founders of OKS, to discuss their change from a mobile app to a web product. We explain how user feedback changed their target audience, product, and business model, and how I supported them through Stellar’s coaching.
Key points
- Cut the scope to the core value: help creators earn money from their content. Remove every feature that is not needed to test that promise. Put the simplest version in users’ hands immediately, then use their feedback to decide what to build next.
- Look at how many followers become paying customers. OKS helped creators sell content to their audiences. Creators with smaller, engaged audiences persuaded a higher share of followers to pay and needed less support than celebrities with millions of followers. Test who gets value before chasing the biggest names.
- Measure the funnel manually before building analytics tools. Collect story clicks, account creations, and paid subscriptions in a spreadsheet. OKS even used screenshots from creators to collect the numbers.
- Check that a mobile app adds value before you build one. Most of OKS’s community features could work on a simple web page. Requiring people to install an app after clicking an Instagram link added another step where they could leave before seeing the content.
- Research the problem before rebuilding the product. OKS moved from a mobile app that took a share of creators’ sales to a subscription web tool for smaller creators to sell digital content. Asking about their current tools and unmet needs helped the team choose what to build and test prototypes before spending time on development. Weekly feedback then helped them improve the product faster.
- When the evidence supports a pivot, change the company as well as the product. Review the business model, team roles, and meetings. Keeping the old structure can slow the new direction.
