Question everything. That someone who cleverly planted this notion in our heads; left me inquisitive and intrigued to challenge almost everything. And most importantly, left me more confident about finding ideas and solutions. This is exactly what we have applied here! It started on a random day when, Vipul Agrawal (my partner in crime) and I were wondering how we could crack distribution of any idea we wanted to work on. Everybody always said distribution wins over product. How about we can make a formula for building things which have more probability of going Viral?
Before starting off with our ideas, we decided to make a list of specific questions we needed answers to-
And the list goes on…
We dug deeper into this. We did the necessary research by going through almost 1000 Apps on the Play Store asking ourselves, ‘why those Apps topped the charts on the Play Store?’
We were amazed to notice that when we started listing our hypothesis/research for each of those questions and began experimenting, we witnessed the magic. And that became our framework to kick start the idea we wished to work on next.
I fixed a day to meet my go-to person- Anurag Daila. I pitched my idea to him and asked if he would like to be a part of our plan. As usual, he was more than happy to jump into it and help us develop the Apps. Within 8 months, our Apps got approx. 10M downloads growing at a rocket pace.
Start-up Framework Evolution
Earlier framework
What’s the problem statement?
Is there a solution for this problem?
Has anyone tried it earlier?
If yes (which is the most likely case), why did they fail?
Does the present solution have better possibilities?
Do you think you will be able to execute better?
Having clear answers to these questions would mean that we were ready to kick off a start-up that would solve this problem statement.
New Framework
Does this problem cater to a huge market?
Do you have a clear distribution strategy in place?
Can you execute it well?
Can you foresee the issues that you will face while executing 1 year from now?
Did anyone try it before?
If yes (which is the most likely case), why did they fail?
I decided that as soon as I will get a few reasonably clear answers to all these questions, my new start-up baby would be ready to be born.
This led to the origin of Randomly Club — A club that was home to some young, weirdly crazy hackers, hungry to do something innovative and impactful with
their lives.
Before I discuss, how were we able to develop and reach this extraordinary number of downloads, I think it is necessary for you to get a quick introduction of the people who work behind this project.
🦄 So, What is Randomly Club?
Randomly Club is the Wolf of Wall Street for product managers, engineers and growth hackers. We work on multiple ideas which can potentially be $$$M businesses aiming for a higher success rates.
Our growing team structure looks like this:
Core team (10–15 people)
a product and design team, to ensure user-friendly, beautiful products
a marketing and communications team, to ensure growth and user acquisition
a Founders Family office to ensure smooth execution among multiple team members
a technical team led by our CTO to build core multi-level infrastructures of the entire organisation
an operations team, to get their hands dirty
a financial and administrative team, to bring structure and processes
Responsibility of core team
Dedicate all their skills to support our startups operationally — acting as true co-founders — but who also care to share their knowledge with each startup’s own team
Keep collaborating and sharing their experiences and thoughts
Keep building the knowledge base of their individual verticals
Tools & Community
The core team of Randomly Club build tools & frameworks for the Founders Club to help them scale quickly. These tools are mostly for various resources like PR, media, blogs collection, etc
Building a strong community is at the heart of our company. The community is crazily gamified via various rewards in various forms.
🔥 Building Founders Club
People having a strong product-business mindset
Data & results driven
Responsibility of the Founders
Build their own team of Engineers and Designers
Ensure we achieve the desired results in a specific time frame to validate the idea.
Our core belief is to invest in people who
eventually produce results for the company
and for themselves. Here, input is directly
proportional to output which means the amount
of effort you put in, results in the work
satisfaction, money and rush for numbers
that anyone in the start-up world is aiming for.
If you go through our framework, you will find
that we try to approach everything in our
company through first principles and lay out
the plan accordingly to achieve higher success
rate.
🔦 Story Behind App Evolution
We listed all the answers to the above questions and decided to build a unique chat Application (both video and text version). And why’s that? Well, our hours of research concluded that messenger is one of the top keywords that people look for on Play Store. We took this as a challenge to launch the product with a clear focus on go-to-market strategy. After checking out all the pointers we listed in the new framework, we successfully launched the App in exactly 1 month and 20 days.
Here’s the interesting event that happened- the naming ceremony of the App! We made a list of 97 potential names for our App. After all the brainstorming, we finally decided to go ahead with the most simple solution-
😲 Surprised? And, why?
Let’s go back to our new framework. Vipul did the research and he concluded that messenger as a keyword had a huge volume of downloads on Play Store.
Later, we decided to go with a basic philosophy.
In the early stages when we do not have the reputation and approach of a proper brand, how do we get ourselves discovered on the Play Store?
This led to the question- how do people discover Apps on Play Store?
Which led to another question- what would people search for while discovering similar kind of Apps on the Play Store?
There we had our answer. Pretty basic, isn’t it? Well, that was just first move. What we were more excited was to see what would happen next.
2 weeks post the launch, we observed that we were getting approximately 200 installs per day which kept increasing exponentially. That was a good start for us.
With constant feedback and suggestions coming from our users, we frequently shipped updates. As frequent as sending updates every 3–4 days. The framework here was simple — Pick up one funnel and improve the CTRs to achieve competitive numbers.
With few hacks around the design copy, we were able to increase the engagement time by 306%. This helped us focus on one funnel at a time and do our best to achieve extraordinary numbers.
We overachieved on our target of 1L downloads in a month and
got 1,26,890 downloads instead.
After achieving our target, the idea was to keep on improving the engagement metrics. Hence we started experimenting new things, like introducing games. We launched an engaging addition on our App which allowed users to show more interest in calls and in turn, increased the duration of audience engagement in calls by 63%.
🤔 What did we do which was so significantly different from what we usually would have done?
We did a thorough research regarding the App before the launch. The research included:
What’s the market size?
Is there a current demand of a similar App?
We attempted to hack the Google Play Store ASO logic. We worked in every possible way we could. Of course, it wasn’t easy to do. We experimented a lot around the icons, Play Store titles and descriptions and didn’t worry much about the branding in the initial days. Instead, we focused more on what triggers the user to download a particular Application.
You see the icon with number 4 on the notification — that increased the CTR by 23%;
What more could one want!
Our topmost priority was to improve the customer experience constantly. We were incredibly fast at pushing releases, thanks to Anurag and Naimish, our star tech guys.
We decided to go global from the very first day. We had done our market research thoroughly and knew exactly which countries to target in the initial days to get ourselves ranked on Play Store.
We monetised our Apps starting day 1 through advertisements and in-App purchases. We didn’t want to go through the VC route. We pushed ourselves to think of strong business models with early profitability.
As of today, we have cumulative 13M users from all around the globe generating enough revenue to bootstrap our company. We have been constantly iterating our products to increase our overall KPIs and receiving an average of 60% weekly growth in the numbers.
The success elevated our confidence in our research and gave us the boost we needed. We started making a lot of revenue for the entire team associated with us (It was not limited to just the founders) + we received the bonus of scaling the Apps to millions of users. (Honestly, the excitement of seeing 1L+ active users on your App is something that can’t be expressed in words).
At Randomly Club, we are building the world’s first most powerful talent hub of engineers who are empowered to ship products faster than the rest.
We’ve an innovative model which keeps the engineers incentivised and yet challenges them to learn and build products which have a global impact to billions of users.
We ensure that everyone associated with us goes home making a significant earning individually by owning a revenue share in the products that they build along with their personal work satisfaction.
To summarise — At Randomly Club, we work on the following principles which help us define the right framework to implement on an idea.
We empower each of our members to jam together and discuss innovative, ‘random’ ideas. These ideas further go into the research funnel expecting an outcome — ‘whether the product can be a success or not?’ If it does, ‘what’s the potential of the revenue?’ If the revenue potential is what we would like to work for, we get on with it and ship the product as quickly as possible.
Our ideas pass through the famous hook framework
The CEO of a product documents everything, answering all the questions that might help us look back whenever we have doubts on the things we have tried and what has worked for us/ what didn’t.
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