SayWhere.co - An experiment

I’ve been gathering feedback and data on my first product, Seeu.at, since launching previews in mid-2012. One of the major pieces of feedback given is that people often weren’t comfortable signing-in with Facebook. It was difficult to tell if this was just a segment of the internet who were less comfortable with Facebook (early adopters, those that work in tech) or if it was a wider issue.

We checked the data gathered, which backed up the assertion that Facebook sign-in can be a problem. There was a significant fall-off in the number of people going through the Facebook sign-in funnel. We adjusted our permission requests, and monitored for a while longer. Still a problem.

So what to do? Well, we could change Seeu.at around – but that would require a fundamental re-write of the way we handle the user model and permissions.

Instead, to test, we have launched SayWhere.co to provide a similar tool – but this time using the principle of gradual enagement and anonymous usage. We hypothesise that people will be more likely to use the service and engage with it once they see what the functionality of the site does. We can compare this to Seeu.at usage, to run simultanous tests, tackling the same problems from a different angle.

Our key metric will be the level of sharing. Are people engaged enough to want to pass it on? One people have created a poll to share and vote on places to go – do they go on to share it with friends? Do their friends click through and interact? We have the data for Seeu.at – now we’re gathering data for SayWhere.co

We launched a few days ago – with a quick posting on Reddit to get some traffic. The feedback has been positive. People are stepping through the plan process – and giving us valuable data on our funnel of engagement. We have already make some tweaks to our process – and will continue to do so as more data arrives.

So please do take a look at www.saywhere.co – and feed back on Twitter to @saywhere

We will update RookieOven with details of our funnel tweaks, and the comparison between the two sites.