Our first product, a 3D chat world
One of the trickier points in a startup’s life is knowing when to pivot or when to keep on your current path. Often, the decision is easy: you launch a minimum viable product, lets say a butterfly spotting app, and get zero traction — not even your girlfriend, mum or random butterfly lover in Romania wants to use it.
Easy decision.
But what when your original idea has gained users and revenue, but isn’t growing fast enough. Then what?
That was the situation I found myself in with my own startup, Frenzoo. We’d taken time to build our first product, a web 3D chat community. We had awesome technology and starting from a 2009 launch at Echelon (go Singapore!) had quietly grown to hundreds of thousands of users in US, Asia and around the world (read: SGE’s coverage of Frenzoo).
Yet things weren’t all that rosy.
As a destination site it wasn’t easy to quickly scale into millions of users or get a critical mass without larger marketing spend — and not being venture-capital backed, that wasn’t going to happen.
Without a real-world identity link or mobile play we didn’t have the word of mouth virality that would have made the LTV versus CPA equation swing into positive territory. We thought (and still do!) the product had real potential but to get there would take significantly more resources, which we didn’t have.
Making the decision
Dress Me Girl, the first of our new mobile products
After spinning our wheels and and doing some soul searching, we knew we had to change direction. The question was, to what?
Luckily in our case, something big was blowing up around us – mobile gaming. In the train all I saw were kids flinging birds on the iPhones. We figured out we could re-use most of our 3D technology and assets if we decided to make the leap.
We saw minimal competition in the field we had planned (3D fashion and lifestyle) and decided to go for it. The chat site was put into maintenance mode ( fixes and small updates only) and the team jumped into the new development.
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