Laugh is infectious. When you see someone laughing you naturally join them. In a place where everyone is laughing, you can’t resist your laugh, right?. You might have noticed that in most of the sitcoms (both international and national) they mix audience laughter separately to get this impact. It’s the same for standup comedies.

Part 1: Identifying the Problem

One of the problems with product designers is that we want to solve each and every problem we come across. Some of us write problem statements on Twitter and some create prototypes and tag the CEOs on LinkedIn. My enjoyment is in ideating digital solutions. mostly mobile apps. brand it, create screens, prototypes and then move to another idea. I’m one of those who pay quite a lot to ‘Godaddy’ for those immaterialized domain names/dreams. 

As you will agree, It’s the audience response that makes standup comedy events lively and cheerful. Recently I was listening to live standup comedy gigs in Clubhouse. Since the audience was on mute, the comedian was not able to make the connection and the awkward silence was killing the jokes. Just think of those recent football matches in empty silent stadiums. It was worse than that.

Another problem with live gigs was that there had to be a fixed time and that was an inconvenience for most as they had to dedicate this time each day. During the initial days, there were 2k+ people attending this clubhouse room but eventually, the number of listeners reduced to 100 per day and most of them stayed not more than 20 minutes. However, some of the hit jokes started appearing as voice clips in WhatsApp and they were getting widely circulated.

This brought me the idea to create a platform for jokes where anybody can become an instant standup comedian and share their story with the world and listen to others at their convenient time. With the ability to mix audience response to their gigs, it is destined to be the next TikTok. The prophet in me proclaimed it as “democratising jokes”.

I shared the idea with an equally mad friend. Since we had killed a lot of ideas in analysis-paralysis and had seen the same ideas getting built by fresh college graduates, we decided to just do it. Things were super fast from there. Initial paper prototypes took hardly an hour. Did a video call with the friend, identified some missing links, iterated a couple of times and the wireframes were ready.

Visual designs took couple more days and got the interactive prototype of the MVP in Invision. However, I kept iterating it over the week trying to improve the designs and interactions.

We spoke to a few more friends and walked them through the prototype. All of them felt it’s a super idea. One good friend said, “ it’s written winner all over it. Go for it”. The only challenge pointed out was the infrastructure cost due to media files. We didn’t lose hope. AWS was giving $10,000 valid for a year as credit for startups. Since we were sure to get funded by end of the first year, it never occurred to us as a problem. At least I was super confident that it’s going to be viral and VCs will love to fund it.

The next challenge was getting a tech partner. We convinced an older friend from the US to become our tech advisor. Next week was on analysing and fixing the tech stack. Interviewed multiple vendors and development agencies and started estimating the cost. After these discussions, we realised that it would take at least 20 lakhs ($30k)to develop an MVP and to run it for six months. We didn’t have that much capital but we were confident that friends and family will help us. So we kept the money part aside. By then we had finalised our tech partners and they suggested us to do a feasibility study and find how good is our tech stack for audio editing. We found a developer in Fiver and got the POC of the MVP built in Flutter. It was successful and we got thrilled.

While discussing with friends we realised that we need to talk to more people in the user segment and get more clarity on whom we are targeting. Another doubt was on the acceptance of audio format jokes when there is enough rich video content available. It became a challenge for us to prove that it will work.

- Part 2 -

First idea was to send an audio clip to different Whatsapp groups and see how many will listen and how many will forward it. Since WhatsApp doesn't give this data, we decided to create a small web app where we can track the clicks. We planned a different name so that we don’t spoil the original app’s brandname. we called it “Daily LOL”

Our plan was to send the website link to different WhatsApp groups like a general forward message and see the response. The target was 1000 users and the success metrics was to get 300 people playing it and 10% of them clicking on subscribe button to receive more jokes every day. That means 30 subscribers. It seemed easy.

We put another fiver gig and found one freelancer to work on our app. We had a call and I explained the scenario and what are the intentions. The freelancer understood everything and gave the files the next day but they were only HTML files. Spent a few more bucks to add the script to run the audio and then a few more to add tracking. In the end, when we got the files it was still not complete. I should have written every minute detail of the expectations and shared the requirement document with the developer. Luckily my partner‘s friend who had agreed to host the website helped us to fix the bugs and listened to our numerous requests mostly on UI. It was his passion and effort that helped us to release the first version for testing.

While thinking over it we thought of continuing this POC project until we release the actual app. which means we will send one voice clip every day till the original app gets built. In that way, on the day of release, we will have a good userbase to start with.

For POC we took a clip from one of the famous comedy shows in a regional language and converted it to mp3. The joke was good. I had no doubt that we will get at least 50 subscribers on day 1. Who will say no when they get a joke every day on their WhatsApp for free?

It was a Friday evening. We had everything ready and the plan was to send it on the next day thinking people will be in a chill mode and be more acceptable to jokes on weekends. I was so optimistic about the results. My worry was only about sending voice clips to subscribers every single day. As days pass by the number of subscribers will be more and until the app is ready will we be able to engage them?

After a couple of beers, we couldn’t resist it. we decided to do a pilot test right away with a close group of friends. We sent the website link with a small description of the joke. Our eyes were on the database table waiting for the users. We kept refreshing. Slowly the rows started getting added, but it was not at the pace we thought of. The response rate was slow, we started adding it to more groups. The friend who helped us in hosting also shared it in his WhatsApp groups. By end of that night, we would have reached almost 1500 people through WhatsApp. And the resulsts looked like this.

We were not happy with the results. The next day we sent another joke to the same set of people. Some of them replied to the message- “you guys have no work?”

The next day we sent another voice clip for one final time. This time people stopped giving attention. The number of people who played the music reduced and slowly we lost interest and that started showing in our behaviour too. We missed the standup calls, our daily calls got reduced. We were like the directors of a flop movie. But it was not the end. Picture abhi baaki hai!