For this final blog, I will be looking at a hypothetical social
platform, Fit Achieve, and the various strategies it would use as a start up.
The Platform
Fit Achieve would be a platform which sets daily or weekly
exercise goals for a user based on their current abilities and activity amounts,
as well as overall goals. These overall goals can be hours of exercise per day
or week, and / or based around weight loss, muscle gain, or an increase in
overall fitness. Users would use the platform to track their exercise history,
see how close they are to achieving their personal fitness goals, and motivate
themselves to reach their goals. Fit Achieve will also encourage users to add
friends, allowing them to motivate each other, compete, or show off.
Stage One Benefits
Stage one benefits are those that are not related to social
benefits that earlier users will still gain before they have a large number of
friends on the platform. It is very important that all social platforms have
these benefits so that users are encouraged to continue using the application
until they have gained a significant social group based on that platform. Fit
Achieve would do this by helping its users track what exercising they have been
doing and showing what goals they have achieved. Therefore, the platform would
still offer benefits to users, even if they aren’t friends with anyone on the
platform.
Start Up Costs
As with any business, Fit Achieve would incur some start up
costs. Obviously, one of the major ones will be server capacity. This would be
reduced by outsourcing to a platform as a service provider, such as Google or
Amazon. This would allow the application to scale to suit, as well as reduce
initial investment costs. Another major area of costs will be gaining users.
Fit Achieve would do this by avoiding using traditional advertising, and
instead opt for online ads and utilising social media. Once the application has
begun to gain a user base, by encouraging users to promote the application to
their friends and linking to their other social platforms, network effects and
word of mouth will also help the platform gain momentum and eventually reach
critical mass.
Early Adopter Benefits
Early adopter benefits are put in place in many social
applications to encourage users of the new platform to stay until the social
effects take place and the platform reaches critical mass. Fit Achieve would
encourage early adopters by displaying when a user has been a user since, and
therefore giving them more authority within the community. The application
would also display how many of their generated and self set goals someone has
achieved. Therefore, those who have been members for longer would have had more
time to complete more goals, and again, would appear to have more experience and
authority within the platform’s community.
Thank you for reading my blog posts. In the comments, tell
me about how you would do any of these start up stages in your own platform.
