7 Lessons App Developers Should Learn from Flipboard
By: Hillel Fuld
This Flipboard thing is a true phenomenon. If you have an iPad or are interested in the wild success of this new computing platform, you have most likely heard of Flipboard. Flipboard is the first “social magazine” as it is being called. It is a free app that enables users to access their various social streams and RSS feeds in an interface more magazine-like than most magazines. Flipboard became the first of a lot of different categories when it comes to iPad apps.
It is the first time that Apple ever got a late night phone call asking them NOT to feature the app, since the Flipboard servers were already buckling under the pressure. It is also one of the first apps to get an invitation system integrated into the App Store mechanism. The official numbers are not public yet, but something tells me it will break some sort of record as far as how many downloads it got within the first five minutes of its launch.
I have completely shifted the way I consume information and interact with friends ever since I first installed Flipboard. From what Mike McCue, the founder says, we can expect some serious enhancements in the near future, the primary one being caching abilities, which will ease the pressure on the servers and make the experience a lot snappier for the user.
App developers trying to make it in this space have so much to learn from the Flipboard launch, its founder, and from the app itself, I thought I would list some of the many lessons to be learned:
- Simplicity: Notice the lack of almost any buttons/options in Flipboard? Yes, that is because there are none. The app could not possibly be more simplistic. I come across hundreds of apps that make me wonder what the developer was thinking. Seems some people still think that if they jam pack their app with hundreds of complicated options and features, people will like their app more. That could not be farther from the truth. Make sure your app, whatever type it is, fills a need of some sort. That can be entertainment, a utility, whatever it might be, as long as people will want to use it. Then keep it as simple as humanly possible. If you are in doubt whether to leave out one more customization option or to put it in, always leave it out. Keep it simple. If a user does not understand how to use your app within 20 seconds of first opening it, chances are it will be deleted. That is the life when you are one app of 300,000.
- Scalability: This is something Mike learned the hard way. When they were going to launch the app, he asked his main engineer how many servers they would need. When he gave him that number, Mike said “OK, now double that for the launch”. Yet, somehow thanks to the unprecedented hype Flipboard received from the online community, that was not nearly enough. Their servers crashed within minutes, and they had to put an invitation system in place, something that was new to Apple and unexpected on the part of the Flipboard team. Here is the lesson to be learned. If you, an app developer, believe in your product and believe that others will love it, expect the downloads to come by the thousands within seconds. If you do not believe your product is that good, don’t release it.
- Creativity: I am not even going to talk about the creativity behind the app itself, that will come later on in the Inspiration bullet. I am referring to the creativity it took to figure out how to solve the problem of millions of downloads and a resulting poor user experience due to server side issues. The invitation system put in place was creative and done in a way that would not piss off their user base, while providing incentive to users to stick around. It took a lot of creativity to come up with this solution being as it had only been done once before. This is of course magnified by the fact that I can only imagine what kind of pressure the team was feeling as they watched their servers melt within minutes.
- Improvisation: This is in continuation to the previous bullet, but it does deserve its own mention. Take the massive amount of apps submitted and downloaded daily, combine that with Apple’s annoying policies, and you have yourself a recipe for disaster. There are so many different possibilities of things that can go wrong and in Flipboard’s case, the wrong was very right with too many downloads. The point is, as a developer, you need to know how to improvise when met with technical challenges along the way. Another great example of this is AppsFire and the resulting Appstream, an app in the top 5 most popular iPad apps for the past week (it even surpasses Flipboard.) You can read about that story here.
- Consistency: Flipboard has been consistently releasing updates and new streams within the app since its original introduction. This is something many people might not take into account. You don’t just develop an app, get it approved, and sit back and count your Dollars. You need to engage your community, keep them interested, and constantly innovate. Like I said, a new Flipboard version is coming out soon with caching abilities, something I wanted from day one. This keeps me here, interested, and loyal.
- Explosiveness: I don’t think anyone could have predicted how this app’s popularity would explode. I have personally never seen anything written about by so many key Web influencers. If you did not write about Flipboard over the past month, it’s like you had not written about Old Spice, and we all know that everyone who is anyone wrote about Old Spice. The Flipboard team cannot be blamed here for not being prepared because what this app launch experienced, no other app has ever experienced, but if you are going to be releasing an app, there is a lesson to be learned. Never underestimate the viral capabilities of the worldwide Web. Expect the worst, than multiply that by ten, and you should be OK.
- Inspiration: This is by far the most important point to be learned from the Flipboard phenomenon. If you are in this game to make a quick buck, keep walking. This is of course true about most things, but it all has to come from inspiration. Mike told over the story of how he thought of the concept, and let me save you the time and tell you, it did not involve a business model. To summarize, he had left (sold) his last company and was now travelling a lot. He found himself on planes reading lots of magazines, at which point he thought, “Why not bring this experience to the computer?” It was first intended for the Web, maybe using HTML 5 since there was no iPad then. The day the iPad was announced was as Mike describes it “like a holiday in which we were wishing each other a Happy iPad Day”. The iPad was obviously the perfect platform for this product, they decided to go ahead with it on that very day, and the rest is history.
Flipboard has raised $10 million dollars in its first round of funding, and after speaking to some lead journalists and bloggers who interviewed Mike prior to the launch, they say his personality (and eyes) have a lot to do with it. Now, I was not going to add personality as an eighth bullet, but putting apps aside for a second, the person raising funds for your venture, whatever it may be, should definitely have the people skills to accomplish what Flipboard has accomplished. Hypnotizing eyes, as Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal told me Mike has, obviously do not hurt either.
In terms of the business model, Mike said some pretty brilliant things about the online advertising industry and how it compares to the magazine industry. To sum it up though, online ads compete with content for the reader’s attention. That is not good for the publisher, the advertiser, or the reader. Magazines have clear and structured advertising methods that make ads pleasant on the eyes and easily consumable.
To sum it up, Mike points out that if one were to offer two types of the popular Vogue magazine to Vogue readers, one with ads and one without, they would generally opt for the one with. People like to read ads in magazines, they are interesting and appealing. On the Web, they cause pages to load slower, they distract the reader from the content, and just annoy people. Mike says he wants to bring the magazine advertising concept and model to Flipboard, and I for one, am excited to see how he will do it.
I am in touch with Mike and we are working on organizing an interview in the coming weeks. From reading the various things he has said, I have to say, I am very excited to pick this guy’s brain a little because I think he took an idea that he had in the spur of a moment, and successfuly carried it out and implemented it with near perfection.
We all have a lot to learn from Mike Mccue and Flipboard.
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter. You can find me here.
