Reflections on the Webmaker Launch

With the official launch of Webmaker last week, we wanted to share some early results, talk about our ongoing promotion of the new app and reflect a bit on how we’ll be evaluating success and impact in the weeks and months to come.
CLKuZaEUcAAzTyS
Assessing Product/Market Fit
With this launch we’ll be refining our understanding of product market fit, specifically as it relates to target markets and audiences and future product iterations: Is it a compelling experience for a large number of people, how and what do they do with the app, do they find the app useful over time and do they share it with friends and community? Furthermore, does it have meaningful impact as a learning and content creation tool in support of our goal to get more people reading, writing and participating on the Web?

“It’s now feasible for many people to access the web, but contributing to the web? That’s harder, since you usually need money, know-how or both to create much more than a Tumblr page. Mozilla thinks it can help, though. Its just-finished Webmaker app lets anyone with an Android phone create web content.” –Jon Fingas, Engadget

Initial Results

  • over 21K active users of the app and nearly 31K total downloads since the Beta launch in late-June.
  • users in 188 different countries
  • Top 5 countries of use are India (13%), US (12%), Indonesia (10%), Bangladesh (5%) and Brazil (5%)
  • over 20K projects created and nearly 5K projects shared
  • 69 press stories, in 22 countries, and nearly 5K social media mentions

(snapshot of real-time app usage from 8/24)

(snapshot of real-time app usage from 8/24)



What It Means

We don’t have enough time elapsed or enough feedback – yet – to make any real assumptions about the relative success of the launch. But, it definitely feels like a good start. The buzz was significant, overwhelmingly positive in tone, and thousands of people are downloading and using the app. And our initial focus on a small number of communities appears to be paying off – those are the places where we are seeing the most activity.
To help us answer the core question of product/market fit, we’ll be looking at a variety of quantitative and qualitative metrics over the next 30-60 days:

  • Active users, particularly as it relates to acceleration and week-over-week and month-over-month growth rates
  • 
Retention rates, measured by how many users are still active at 7 days and 30 days, or inversely by churn and uninstalls
  • Engagement rates, by looking at number of makes and shares per user, to evaluate stickiness
  • Virality, as measured by total shares and, more importantly, new users added via shared projects
  • 
Locale-specific growth and retention rates, to evaluate cost/benefit in our core locales and to identify additional locales to focus on
  • Popular content types as measured by makes and shares
  • 
Qualitative feedback from Google Play reviews and support channels
  • Qualitative feedback from community

The Launch Campaign
The secret to our success has been – and will continue to be – an incredible community of Mozillians passionate about the work we are doing and showing incredible effort and initiative in promoting Webmaker. In Indonesia, Bangladesh and Brazil in particular, small teams of motivated individuals have stood up over 40 events (with more planned), deployed social media campaigns and effectively reached out to media to have our story told publicly. There’s a lot more planned in the coming weeks and it’s already clear that we have community-generated momentum on our side.
In support of the remarkable effort by the community, we also deployed a campaign through our marketing and communications channels, including:

  • Launch blog on blog.mozilla.org and blog.webmaker.org, which was quickly translated by many of our communities
  • Global promotion on the snippet
  • Promotion on webmaker.org, mozilla.org and on new tab page in Firefox
  • 
Emails to Webmaker, Mozilla Learning Network and Reps communities
  • 
Heavy promotion on social through @mozilla, @webmaker and @mozteach
  • 
Localized ad campaign on Facebook in ID, BR, BD and KE
  • 
Press outreach in North America, Brazil, Indonesia and Bangladesh
  • 
Webmaker workshops in Indonesia, including more than 40 school visits
  • 
Message testing on landing page, email, snippet and paid Facebook ad campaign

In the weeks to come, we’ll be doubling down on the tactics above, testing additional channels, expanding our grassroots events to more places, optimizing messaging and creative, focusing on onboarding and retention communications and expanding support for community and partner initiatives.


Cool Things People Have Made with Webmaker This Week

The most fun part of the first week has been seeing the incredible things people are creating with the app. We’ve seen wonderful, diverse and creative examples of what’s possible with the app:

This list is just a small sampling of what we’ve seen to-date and we’ll be featuring more of this great content in the weeks to come. Spread the word about Webmaker by sharing this graphic on your favorite social network:
gXQaFhlWPbCPNTkiOJEDJewjZQD99pV6LJ7ET0wDPzs