Product Management: ambiguous, but fun
As the Product Lead at KiwiLink, my role felt ambiguous.
I pretty much just did everything that I could possibly do to ensure success for my team and for our users. Sometimes, this means that I need to come up with innovative product marketing strategies and directions.
Today, I will tell a story about the marketing side of things.
I wanted our marketing efforts to benefit our product AND our community: how can we do win-win marketing?
Flashback to September of 2020: as KiwiLink’s iOS and Android launch came closer and closer, I felt increasingly excited and pumped, but also increasingly anxious, since I had never marketed an app before
During ideation sessions w/ my awesome teammates, I was interested in asking, “how can we use our marketing to both boost our app AND boost the UW community at the same time?”
Let's partner up with some prominent UW clubs! We can help each other
In the end, I decided to go with a series of collaborative marketing efforts where we team up with prominent clubs from the University of Washington.
After persistently pitching to dozens of clubs, I was able to set up a deal with roughly 10 prominent clubs from the University of Washington (including DubHacks and CSA)
We agreed to use post free advertising for those clubs on the KiwiLink app (in exchange for the clubs doing marketing for KiwiLink on social media and beyond)
We were thrilled to partner up with these awesome stakeholders and community leaders.
Dealing with a challenging roadblock
One roadblock we had to deal with was that KiwiLink (at the time) didn’t have an elegant way to display ads on its interface.
I didn’t want to bombard users with pop up ads that would detract from the beauty/simplicity of the current user experience in the study buddy finder interface.
Enter our solution: Billboard - an elegant announcement board
After exploring solutions with my UX team, we decided that we would add a new separate feature to KiwiLink called “Billboard,” which only shows relevant promos and ads from UW clubs
Billboard:
- shows relevant ads and announcements from official UW clubs and partners
- exists in a separate tab from the friends explorer page (doesn't add clutter)
Everybody was satisfied with this compromise (clubs got extra attention and traffic, and KiwiLink users kept enjoying their user experience)!
I learned a lot and gained a lot from leading this product marketing campaign!!!
In the end, our collaborative community building marketing efforts were highly successful and highly educational for me.
As a result of this marketing campaign and billboard launch, KiwiLink’s user base doubled (from around 800 users to around 1,600 users. Now, we see that KiwiLink hosts over 2,500 users!)
And we were able to help those 10 student-driven-clubs at UW increase overall club attendance by about 20%.
As well, we were noticed by the UW College of Engineering, and we eventually worked out a partnership deal.
To celebrate this great success, I led my team in throwing a huge party in UDistrict; we invited KiwiLink contributors, club partners, and KiwiLink users to come enjoy some Soju and hotdogs. What a great time!
From this experience, I reaffirmed to myself that it’s fun to build great products by building great relationships.
Flashback to September of 2020: as KiwiLink’s iOS and Android launch came closer and closer, I felt increasingly excited and pumped, but also increasingly anxious, since I had never marketed an app before
During ideation sessions w/ my awesome teammates, I was interested in asking, “how can we use our marketing to both boost our app AND boost the UW community at the same time?”
Let's partner up with some prominent UW clubs! We can help each other
In the end, I decided to go with a series of collaborative marketing efforts where we team up with prominent clubs from the University of Washington.
After persistently pitching to dozens of clubs, I was able to set up a deal with roughly 10 prominent clubs from the University of Washington (including DubHacks and CSA)
We agreed to use post free advertising for those clubs on the KiwiLink app (in exchange for the clubs doing marketing for KiwiLink on social media and beyond)
We were thrilled to partner up with these awesome stakeholders and community leaders.
Dealing with a challenging roadblock
One roadblock we had to deal with was that KiwiLink (at the time) didn’t have an elegant way to display ads on its interface.
I didn’t want to bombard users with pop up ads that would detract from the beauty/simplicity of the current user experience in the study buddy finder interface.
Enter our solution: Billboard - an elegant announcement board
After exploring solutions with my UX team, we decided that we would add a new separate feature to KiwiLink called “Billboard,” which only shows relevant promos and ads from UW clubs
Billboard:
- shows relevant ads and announcements from official UW clubs and partners
- exists in a separate tab from the friends explorer page (doesn't add clutter)
Everybody was satisfied with this compromise (clubs got extra attention and traffic, and KiwiLink users kept enjoying their user experience)!
I learned a lot and gained a lot from leading this product marketing campaign!!!
In the end, our collaborative community building marketing efforts were highly successful and highly educational for me.
As a result of this marketing campaign and billboard launch, KiwiLink’s user base doubled (from around 800 users to around 1,600 users. Now, we see that KiwiLink hosts over 2,500 users!)
And we were able to help those 10 student-driven-clubs at UW increase overall club attendance by about 20%.
As well, we were noticed by the UW College of Engineering, and we eventually worked out a partnership deal.
To celebrate this great success, I led my team in throwing a huge party in UDistrict; we invited KiwiLink contributors, club partners, and KiwiLink users to come enjoy some Soju and hotdogs. What a great time!
From this experience, I reaffirmed to myself that it’s fun to build great products by building great relationships.
One roadblock we had to deal with was that KiwiLink (at the time) didn’t have an elegant way to display ads on its interface.
I didn’t want to bombard users with pop up ads that would detract from the beauty/simplicity of the current user experience in the study buddy finder interface.