Product updates

Its been a while since I’ve posted about product updates, so here we go.

First up, we have a new nav courtesy of Twitter Bootrap. Its clean and has everything I need.

A common feedback we got from test users was that they didnt really ‘get’ the site until after they’ve completed a bunch of votes. So our first attempt to remedy this issue was to add a short description/tag line on the front page, and also add a most popular summary section to the top of the home/votes page so they kind of get whats going on. We still have not added the tag line 😛

We added the ability for users to favourite recipes, a feature that’s been lacking compared to other food porn sites.

A couple of bloggers had mentioned that they would like to see who’d favourited or voted for their dishes. This could be a good starting point to initiate exchanges among our users, which we think can improve retention and is also the direction we want to move towards. Having Knapkins become more of a community site than a content site. This feature is also another differentiating factor from our competitors.  The send thx feature will be implemented later on (just tracking the clicks for now).

We’ve automated our drip campaign emails, new photo added emails, and tweets. The emails have been very effective in terms of bringing users back, and twitter surprising has been a good source of traffic for us.

We finally added real ads from Adsense, as opposed to the fake manual ones we had before.  It actually took a lot less time to setup the real way! Lesson learned. Fake and implement later is not always the quickest and best way to do things.

I’m apparently a target for vidcaster and airbnb.

Finally, we’ve added mixpanel to our analytics arsenal so that we can better track our cohort retention. I like them so far. We’ve also made some additions to our app so that we can better track retention from our own data as well. More fine grain things that is outside of mixpanel, but hopefully, their app can cover most use cases as pulling manual reports from our db is not the funest thing to do. The game plan though is for us to really step up the analytics side of things and tie it directly to our product development. Have it drive and also validate/measure our development efforts.  Christine will talk more on this subject soon.