How We Launched a Social Network for Neighborly Interactions
Every product needs an initial insight to get started, and when that insight is found, it needs to go through a series of hypothesis-driven customer discovery experiments. This is the story of how we built a product that brought neighbors and local stakeholders together and helped them build social capital using technology.
Table of Contents
Initiation: From Parking Troubles to Community Empowerment
Uncovering the Psychological Drivers Behind Neighborhood Connections
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Initiation: From Parking Troubles to Community Empowerment
It all happened naturally and accidentally!
Initial Need
In late 2018, our payments startup faced a parking crisis as it rapidly scaled from 15 to +50 full-time employees. With an office located in a densely populated area in a megacity that lacked urban planning, finding legal and safe parking spots near the workplace became a significant challenge. The options available to employees were far from ideal:
- Arrive at the office extremely early to secure a spot before others.
- Risk parking illegally and getting fined.
- Park within a 20 to 30-minute walking distance from the office.
- Avoid bringing a car altogether, which was not a sustainable solution.
Accidentally, we recognized that many residents in the neighborhood left their private parking spaces vacant during the day while they were at work.
And we were willing to rent these spaces on an ongoing basis.
To initiate conversations, we approached local businesses to vouch for us in building trust with the residents and finding available private parking spaces for the staff.
Within a short period, several neighbors agreed to rent out their parking spaces to the startup’s employees, primarily due to the established neighborly trust.
To manage the rental interactions, including identifying available spaces, communicating with neighbors, arranging meetups, and facilitating payments, we created a Telegram group, which was the mainstream messaging platform at the time.
Market Validation
Our initial efforts to secure parking spaces through neighborly connections validated the demand for a marketplace solution.
By leveraging the trust built with local businesses and residents, we could access a previously untapped supply of private parking spaces during peak commute and demand hours.
This approach addressed the parking shortage faced by our employees while providing an income opportunity for residents with underutilized parking spaces.
Sharing Parking Spaces Was Just The Beginning
As the members of the Telegram chat group expanded to more than 100 users, mainly through peer-to-peer invites and local business referrals, the scope of interactions broadened beyond just sharing parking spaces.
The group became a platform for various local collaboration needs, including:
- Sharing rooftops, barbeque spaces, swimming pools, and party rooms
- Asking for and making recommendations
- Coordinating food and grocery ordering and delivery
- Discussing security-related matters
- Offering help during emergencies, such as when a tree fell onto a neighbor’s driveway during a stormy night
- Mentioning found items
- Organizing charity events and non-profit advocations
At this point, we realized that the Telegram group was no longer a convenient place for us and the neighbors to manage our local and neighborly interactions effectively. The product we were using was not designed for this purpose.
That’s when the requests from the neighbors started pouring in:
“Since you guys are tech-people and software developers, can you suggest or build something that would help us manage our interactions?”
The initial need to share parking spaces had evolved into a broader demand for a dedicated platform to facilitate seamless local collaboration and community engagement.
The neighbors recognized our technical expertise and sought our guidance or a tailored solution to streamline their interactions effectively.
Lack of Adequate Substitutes
In our quest to manage the parking space rental interactions, we quickly realized that there weren’t any adequate substitutes available that provided the perfect “neighborhood” management tools we needed.
- Telegram, the mainstream messaging platform at the time, was built for mass communication through its channels and large group sizes, but lacked the focused neighborhood-centric features we required
- Instagram was just a different social platform designed for photo-sharing among close connections, not suitable for our use case.
- Twitter and LinkedIn didn’t have the functionality and design purpose aligned with our neighborhood management needs.
- Facebook, at that time, lacked the neighborhood-specific features it has today and had filtering limitations that made it unsuitable.
- Other messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, and Kakao were less flexible compared to Telegram for our specific requirements.
We found ourselves in a situation where no existing platform catered perfectly to the neighborhood-level coordination and management of parking space rentals between our employees and residents.
The lack of an ideal substitute motivated us to continue using the Telegram group as an interim solution while exploring the potential for developing a dedicated platform tailored to our needs
Defining a North Star: Building a Neighborhood Collaboration Platform for Community Well-being
When we compared the interactions among our colleagues in the workplace to the social interactions we experienced in our neighborhoods, it became evident that there was a significant gap to be filled.
We realized that the sense of community and belonging we craved in our neighborhoods was lacking, and this motivated us to embark on a mission to improve the lives of ourselves and our neighbors within our local communities.
We defined our guiding north star as:
“We help build better neighborhoods for all to live in.”
This statement encapsulated our desire to foster a more enjoyable and fulfilling experience within our local communities, prioritizing pleasure and well-being over mere functionality.
While this mission statement wasn’t set in stone forever, it served as a beacon for our small team, consisting of one product manager, two and a half developers, and one product designer, to strive towards as a side venture.
Our goal was to measure and validate the demand for further investments in creating a platform that could facilitate seamless local collaboration and community engagement.
We recognized that the existing platforms and tools fell short of catering to the specific needs of neighborhood-level interactions.
By focusing on this north star, we aimed to develop a solution that would not only address practical concerns but also enhance the overall quality of life and enjoyment within our local communities.
Uncovering the Psychological Drivers Behind Neighborhood Connections
In our pursuit of developing a solution to address the declining sense of community and belonging in neighborhoods, we recognized the importance of taking a human-centric approach. Rather than diving headfirst into benchmarking existing products and features, we consciously stepped back to understand the true needs, desires, and psychological drivers of our potential users. By conducting surveys and qualitative interviews, we aimed to uncover the underlying motivations and emotional factors that could shape a product capable of fostering meaningful neighborhood connections and reviving the eroding social capital within local communities.
Keeping it human before becoming all ‘techy’
In the initial days of deciding to imagine a solution for the problem, it became very natural for our technically experienced team to dive into browsing the array of products in the marketplace and benchmarking possible solutions’ features and offerings.
However, we realized that this approach was creeping bias into our efforts to find product-market fit.
To better understand the utility and transactional needs, as well as the hedonic needs, of what we were solving, we had to become human and go directly to the customers and their demands.
We decided to think of the new product as something that we were building for ourselves and the small community of neighbors at the workplace.
With an active sample of 300–400 engaged users on the Telegram group, we decided to identify pains, prioritize them, build a deserving value proposition, and pivot based on their feedback on paper until they were ‘fully’ satisfied.
- By ‘fully,’ we meant that we didn’t want to get into any major development work before we had the value proposition nailed down — it’s just more cost-effective and emotionally less painstaking.
Initial Survey: Quantifying Scale and Urgency of Needs
Our initial questionnaire entailed a demographic segmentation questionnaire to better understand what various segments desired, along with a motivational and psychographic survey that focused on five categories of neighborly interactions, including:
- Communicating with public organizations and services
- Improving co-living cultures and interactions
- Collaborating to enhance local security
- Building and delivering upon collective interests
- Socializing actively and objectively, locally
Insights
Through referrals and shared invites, more than 3000 people participated in the survey, and below are the main insights:
- All the main categories mentioned above were important to local living standards across all customer segments
- ~3 out of 4 (75%) participants knew less than 5 neighbors in the neighborhood by name
- ~4 out of 5 (80%) participants indicated a low level of satisfaction with their neighborly relationships and desired improvements in the frequency and quality of interactions with one another
- ~4.5 out of 5 (90%) participants indicated that they had no source for neighborly news and content
- ~3 out of 5 (60%) showed a large desire to attend local events
- Having used Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and Whatsapp, ~4.5 out of 5 (90%) participants trusted that similar technology tools could be used to improve neighborhood relationships
- Only ~15% of the participants believed that current products could sufficiently help them build local online communities
- Building trust and delivering on privacy concerns would be key for members joining a local neighborhood group/network
- Female participants had a stronger desire to improve neighborhood relations than male participants
- New residents of a neighborhood showed a higher desire to socialize locally
- Married couples showed higher interest in neighborly interactions compared to those who were single
Qualitative Interviews: Discovering the Underlying Psychological Pains, Problems, and Desires
With the survey validating demand and providing a priority of features for us to focus on, we needed to uncover what psychological drivers were creating demand and how a potential product would need to make consumers feel before, during, and after using it. That’s why we embarked upon face-to-face coffee chats with 10 of the participants from the early adopter, early majority, and late majority to understand the personality archetypes we were dealing with and their emotional needs.
The main insights were:
- All believed that a society that fosters close neighbor relationships is a healthy society with large degrees of social capital and civic engagement. This was a common string of stories that the participants remembered and told from their childhood which they no longer possessed and at times, yearned for
- Those with public sector backgrounds, such as those working in the municipality or the police force, indicated that closely knit and interactive neighborhoods were easier to collaborate with on public projects and safer to live in, resulting in higher real estate values
- Life in neighborhoods with high social capital is perceived better due to high levels of social trust with existing norms of socially beneficial reciprocity, delivers amplified reputation and status, and possesses a feel of collaboration rather than competition with a high degree of volunteer work and help
- Observations of participants were that it wasn’t just neighborly connections that had deteriorated, but also familial ties had declined over the last 3–4 decades, which could indicate a macro-social change beyond just neighborly interactions. Which could have been a massive barrier to finding product-market fit if it was the absolute truth
- Participants highlighted several thoughts as the driver of the change and erosion of social capital over the last decades including the entrance of women into the workforce, whether willingly or circumstantially driven by economic needs and lower real wages, lack of time to socialize due to a large share of daily time spent commuting, a seismic shift in social bonding beliefs including a decline in marriage and increase in divorce rates, fewer children per household, and the technological transformation of the entertainment industry from broadcast Radio and TV to smartphones.
While we weren’t discouraged, this is mainly the output of most qualitative interviews.
A reality check and deep dive into the extent of the problem and how deep-rooted it could be.
It was obvious that if we were to make any change and deliver value to customers, we would need to build an ecosystem of various players including the public sector service providers and local activists, local businesses, NGOs, and the residents coming together to build upon each others’ social capital to benefit and stick around.
Discovering the MVP
From the very beginning, we recognized the importance of validating our assumptions and gathering feedback from potential users throughout the product development process. We employed various techniques to ensure that our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) would resonate with our target audience and address their needs effectively.
Napkin Testing and Rough Sketches
Even before diving into detailed designs, we conducted napkin testing and created rough sketches to explore high-level design flows and potential features.
During our one-on-one interviews with neighbors, we discussed these early concepts and gauged their understanding of the product’s utility and hedonic offerings.
This approach allowed us to observe their reactions, feelings, and potential for referrals, which would be crucial for future growth.
From day one, we had rough sketches and mind maps of the product’s flow and potential features.
We cross-examined their stickiness at any touchpoint where we had the opportunity to interview and interact with users.
This was key, as we could gauge their reactions, and feelings, and have a rough feel for the Net Promoter Score (NPS) or potential for referrals by the target customers, which would have been essential for growth.
Feature Prioritization for Mockups
Based on our quantitative surveys and direct interviews, we identified our early adopters as:
- Female
- Married
- 25–40 years old
- Tech-savvy and varied in life interests
- Extroverted and socially conscious
- Homeowners
- Had been living in the neighborhood for more than 10 years
- Known/popular in the neighborhood
- Held a neighborhood responsibility/role
We built a list of approximately 30 features that we thought could add value to neighborly interactions.
With the early adopters in mind, we set out to identify the priority of these features.
Through this process, we quickly figured out a couple of experience design principles:
- Intuitive Design: Since the early adopters were mainly women who had habitualized using Instagram, a similarly intuitive design was desired.
- Personalization and Relevance: Personalization and relevance of content on the newsfeed would be key to enhanced communication, engagement, and retention.
- Structured Conversations: Compared to Instagram, conversations and posts on a neighborhood product were quite transactional and utility-need-based, hence conversations needed to have structure and be around specific categories and topics.
- Authenticity: In the long run, anonymity and fake user profiles would be a no-go in a somewhat private and closed community social network.
- Local Integration: Interaction with local businesses and public entities would be key to local communication and the platform’s value proposition.
By prioritizing features based on these principles and the feedback from our target early adopters, we aimed to create an MVP that would not only address their functional needs but also provide an engaging and delightful user experience.
Delivery of MVP in 5 Milestones
With the goal of quick iteration and incorporating market feedback, we launched our initial prototype after just 6 weeks and 3 development sprints with a lean team of 2.5 developers, 0.5 designers, and 1 product manager.
However, as suspected, the quality of the product and the scale of features it had to offer was not on par with what other substitutes were delivering. In other words, the new product did not offer any differentiated advantages or unique selling points to wow users and detach them from their Telegram habits — something we had anticipated.
So, we broke the MVP into 5 milestones that delivered the following main features in 16 weeks of development:
- Sign up
- Newsfeed
- Local businesses
- Messaging
- Profile and administration rights
1. Sign up
The signup process was built with two main subsections:
- User registration and profile building: We designed an intuitive user registration and profile-building experience, allowing users to create a comprehensive profile that would represent their identity within the neighborhood community.
- Creating a new or joining an established neighborhood: Since there was no objective definition of neighborhood boundaries, and different people define their neighborhoods differently, we gave members the ability to build their boundaries and communities associated with them.
This approach made users feel fully in control, empowered, and motivated to bring their local communities together.
For established neighborhoods, we implemented a login experience with an invite code, ensuring privacy and exclusivity within these communities.
2. Newsfeed: Structured for the Occasion
The newsfeed was a complicated feature, as it drove engagement and retention rates. To maximize engagement, the newsfeed was designed to have:
- Structured Posting Regime: We clarified topics of conversation with a quick conversation filter for ease of access. We decided to have 7 categories of posts that brought meaningful conversations and a sense of belonging to each neighborhood:
- Urgent Alerts: for safety and local notifications, similar to a local amber alert.
- Crime and Safety: a high priority across all segments.
- Polls: a massive ask from public figures, local influencers, and residential and high-rise managers.
- Events: to build awareness and notify neighbors of offline gatherings, mainly driven by public agencies and local leaders.
- Local Classifieds: to create a convenient exchange medium with someone down the street, rather than trying to replace the ‘Craigslist’ of the world.
- Recommendations: local requests and Q&A-related conversations.
- Lost and Found Items.
- General Topics.
- Geographic Reach Limit: Since content created downtown would have little meaning for someone living 30km to the North of the city, we defined a geographic reach limit of 5km in radius to improve engagement with the newsfeed. In essence, we gave users the option to choose neighborhoods within the 5km radius where they wanted their content to be seen and interacted with.
3. Local Businesses: Possible Point of Differentiation
This idea had gotten kicked off through our interaction and trust-building with intermediaries and partners, the local businesses.
We also knew that neighbors wanted to interact with their local organizations and service providers more humanly compared to, for example, Google Maps.
We tested several hypothetical features and benchmarked them against other substitutes to discover users’ key local business needs, but the key point of differentiation was that:
- Neighbors and their local service providers desired an interface whereby they could communicate daily, get notified of recent developments including discounts and public opinions, and have businesses reach out to them in a professional local-feel fashion, such as seeing a post about discounts on their local grocery store or updates on project developments. This was a feeling and interaction that neighbors had not experienced before and wanted to see more of.
4. Messaging: A Must-Have, but Not Required to Be WhatsApp
Like any other social network, the main goal was to remove information asymmetries and ease human communication on a 1:1 and Many-to-Many basis. While this was a must-have, due to the nature of the interactions, which were more functional interactions among neighbors compared to emotional ones with loved ones, the interface and quality of the messaging feature did not have to meet the experience of mainstream messaging platforms such as WhatsApp or Telegram. There were three key messaging requirements:
- Direct 1:1 messaging: Commonly used to transact classifieds
- Private groups: Used by small apartment complexes and condominiums to manage interactions — there was huge potential for further feature development in this segment of the messaging services in areas such as collecting maintenance fees, issuing tickets, digital signatures, etc.
- Public groups: Used to build local communities of interest, such as weekend soccer and volleyball tournaments, recycling initiatives, charity events, etc.
5. Profile and Administration Rights: The Key to a Localized Feel
Unlike a global social platform such as Twitter, where users can anonymously post any content with few restrictions and get into brawls over politics, a local social network needs privacy, real members, and moderation according to the needs and policies of each neighborhood and community. What made this complex was that the cultural and communication norms of an uptown neighborhood could be quite different from that of a downtown one, and the product design needed to consider these variations.
To build a flexible product that would scale, we built administration and monitoring tools for the leaders of the neighborhood to set their respective rules and policies, giving control of the culture of the neighborhood on the platform to the users, while only stepping into their governance policies upon request and if high on demand.
By delivering these five milestones, we aimed to create an MVP that not only addressed the functional needs of our users but also provided a unique and engaging experience tailored to the local community dynamics.
The Troubles of Scaling the Network
While satisfied with the product’s usability and customer acceptance ratings, we used the neighborhood at the office for beta-testing and looking into users’ consumption and interaction patterns.
Within 3 months of observation, we delivered more than 20 iterations of the MVP to the controlled group and gradually migrated them from Telegram to our product.
Across the 3 months, we tracked the following metrics daily:
- Number of Users: The total number of users — the jumps indicate a new and adjacent neighborhood joining organically.
- Number of Organic Daily Posts: The daily number of new posts. Our content team was also pushing interesting and differentiated local content onto the newsfeed to keep people engaged. During early weekdays, users would sometimes spend hours on the product catching up with local news, content, and updates. While not sustainable at scale, this helped us gauge user behavior and habit formations, and kickstart the cold launch problem.
- Daily Engagement: During the testing phase, we observed a range of daily engagement patterns, including people spending hours on the platform. However, on average, 12–15 minutes of daily time was the norm towards the end of the 3-month period, which had grown from the initial 5–7 minutes at the end of the first month.
- Post Response Speed: We tracked the response rate to a post within the first hour and the first 24 hours. As the network scaled, the response speed increased, though our notifications were not working properly in the initial weeks.
- The Number of 1:1 Messages: The general usage of this feature was quite low, as neighbors were not primarily there for 1:1 conversations but rather the newsfeed and daily updates regarding their neighborhoods.
- The Number of Many-to-Many messages: When we launched the product, the usage of groups was zero due to the lack of enough members. However, in the last month of the beta-test phase, we built public groups of interest that served across multiple neighborhoods, with potential options for local offline events. The indications revealed that these groups needed to be curated by our team and had the potential to bring people in neighborhoods together.
- The Number of Businesses: Due to the nature of the initial neighborhood as a test group, we neglected to focus on local businesses, which would become a weakness as we went after other neighborhoods.
- Viral coefficient: Our viral coefficient was not great compared to other social platforms due to the nature of neighbors not knowing each other. This meant that we would need to invest in onboarding and invitation programs to help kickstart growth.
- Cohort retention rates after 28 days: The figure stood at ~63%, but this was too high and inherent to the nature of the pilot neighborhood. After launching in other neighborhoods, the figure stood at ~40% after 28 days.
By closely monitoring these metrics and iterating based on user feedback and behavior, we aimed to refine the product and identify areas for improvement before expanding to other neighborhoods.
The beta-testing phase provided valuable insights into user engagement, content consumption patterns, and the potential for features like groups and local business integration.
Pivoting from the Pilot Launch
The pilot launch was a great starting point as it had a niche and receptive user base ready for experimentation.
However, as neighbors and businesses from adjacent neighborhoods were inviting members onto the platform, the metrics showed a significant drop in performance.
Furthermore, public services and local businesses needed their communication to reach beyond immediate neighborhoods and in a more targeted fashion.
Hence, we added more features and made some pivots based on the feedback.
To address these user onboarding and trust concerns we worked on the following solutions:
- Demo Version: We added a demo version for people to check out the platform at scale before fully committing to ‘another’ social network.
- Removing Validation Restrictions: We removed the restriction to become a validated user before signing in and allowed 30 days until losing posting and communication abilities.
- Neighborhood Admin Tools: We provided admins of the neighborhoods with a wide variety of tools to validate new members, including referrals and private entrance codes. The private codes gave the network a feel of exclusivity that boosted the perception of its value proposition.
- Reporting and Moderation: We delivered monitoring and reporting tools to all members of the platform to report and mute members, fostering a safe and trustworthy environment.
- Integrated Sign-In: We integrated easy sign-in using mobile numbers and Google and Facebook accounts to streamline the onboarding process.
- Notification Summaries: We built systematic daily and weekly summary notifications for updates in the neighborhood, keeping users engaged and informed.
- Visual Social Map: We added a visual social map of where neighbors were in their neighborhood to bring visual transparency to the neighborhood and foster a sense of community.
Businesses as Key Growth Partners
When moving from the pilot neighborhood to new ones, we hit a massive problem — when only 3 out of 4 people knew less than 5 neighbors by name, this made the invitation and word-of-mouth virality of the network very challenging.
Unlike on Facebook and Instagram, where one can invite friends and family through easy access to their smartphone’s contact list, or on LinkedIn via professional email addresses, on a hyper-local social network where no one knows each other and users are onboarding to get acquainted, viral and low-cost growth becomes a challenge.
- To grow, we went back to the basics of our starting story, and very similar to the parking problem, we used local businesses and local mom-and-pop businesses to invite new users.
- Additionally, we approached local community centers for introductions to local leaders and influencers and onboarded them to become our word-of-mouth ambassadors.
- However, to make this work, we had to incentivize our growth partners, including local businesses, public organizations, NGOs, and local influencers, with rewards such as specially designed ads and campaigns for long periods, sometimes lasting as long as 12 months, and at times providing admin rights to some local leaders to buy their commitment toward our growth.
Fundamentally, these growth partners were willing to help us grow because they saw a differentiated value in the partnership — and this was something we hadn’t planned for in our initial product design work, as we were optimizing experiences for residents, which was a mistake.
Unlike Twitter or Instagram, a local social platform offers local network effects. While you can scale the reach of your business on Instagram, the interactions are less meaningful because your followers could be from anywhere around the world, while the local pub, grocery store, or public sector leader needs the direct attention of its local constituents and stakeholders.
Launch strategy was critical for sustained retention
Our data indicated that it would take a neighborhood between 14–28 days to scale until sustained network effects kicked in and user retention reached around 40%.
This period was a critical phase that needed careful attention and nurturing.
Data showed that we needed a minimum of 30 members with 6–9 active participants who posted content and responded to others to catalyze growth and engagement.
To help facilitate this crucial launch phase, we had two dedicated teams:
- Boots on the Ground: This team would physically go into neighborhoods and onboard our growth partners. They would assess the neighborhood dynamics, including the scale of early adopters, the willingness of public entities to collaborate with us, the number of local influencers and their public relations needs, and the fragmentation of local businesses. The team’s work would kick off 2 to 3 weeks before the push to invite neighbors, where they would negotiate collaborations with the partners and tie them in before the launch. This groundwork was essential to ensure a smooth and well-coordinated launch with the support of key local stakeholders.
- Content team: The content team would supply engagement materials, including sharing local news, urgent alerts, events, signaling charity gatherings, etc. so that new joiners would grasp the benefits of the network upon landing. The ‘Boots on the Ground’ team would also provide them with key local stakeholder contacts for the content team to broadcast their content on the platform. This content seeding would continue for approximately 3 months until we felt the network had enough scale of engagement for organic user content to ensure sustained engagement and retention going forward. The role of the content team was crucial in providing an initial spark and demonstrating the value proposition of the platform to new users, keeping them engaged and active during the critical launch phase.
By having these two dedicated teams working in tandem, we aimed to create a well-orchestrated launch strategy that would facilitate rapid growth, engagement, and sustained retention within each neighborhood.
The on-the-ground team ensured buy-in and collaboration from local partners, while the content team provided a constant stream of relevant and engaging content to showcase the platform’s capabilities and foster a vibrant community from the outset.
