RSS Graffiti has doubled in the last three months and now serves over 170.000 feeds to approximately 100.000 profile and fan page walls on Facebook. A great milestone, for a small side project started by it’s two founders Yannis Roussochatzakis and Dimitris Komis 20 months ago.
I have personally followed Yannis (@Rousso) for nearly 2 years, and he has quickly become an inspiration to persist with a concept, to allow the evolution from idea to reality. I am certain RSS Graffiti is just a small taste of what is to come, as I am sure you will discover yourself after reading the interview below.
I suggest following Yannis here and Dimitris here on Twitter. You are also welcome view Yannis and Dimitris profile on Linkedin.
It has now been over a year since you first started RSS Graffiti. What first inspired you take on the project and how did you come up with the name “RSS Graffiti”? Tell us the story.
The story starts 1999, with a guitar at hand in front of a computer. I wanted to get in touch with other people that played Blues, so back then, I decided to start a web community about Blues in my home country, Greece. Fast forward 10 years later, January 2009, I have a small social network focused on Blues music in Greece and I’m looking for ways to promote it through Facebook. Everybody goes on Facebook every day so the idea was quite common: bring the content form my site to a wider (and more loyal) Facebook audience and get more exposure (and more users) for my site. The fundamental means to do that were quite common too: RSS Feeds!
I did some research to see what tools were available for monitoring RSS Feeds and automatically posting stories to a Facebook Fan Page. My conclusion from that research was that the tools available in Facebook at that time, were disproportionately inadequate to my perceived importance of (and potential demand for) the service. So I felt there was a gap in an unexploited market. During those same days I was also evaluating ideas for starting a web project with my friend Dimitris (@dkomis). Although we were aiming quite higher than an RSS tool for Facebook, this idea managed to get first in line very quickly because we (foolishly) thought that this would be a fairly easy thing to do in decent way. So we started working on RSS Graffiti in late January 2009.
The project was initially codenamed RSS Minifeeder because back in early 2009, the Facebook stream was not invented yet and the name for it was the Facebook Mini-Feed. I came up with the name “RSS Graffiti” a few days before launching it, in August 2009, as a metaphor for writing on a wall. It’s not such an exiting name and not everyone sees the connection between the application’s name and it’s function right away, but it has worked quite well so far.
Have you been surprised by the huge amount of users it has attracted during this time period? What sort of interaction do you have with your users – and how do you monitor any customer service issues they may have?
We always smile to remember how excited we were when we got our first 100 users sometime in September 2009 (a few weeks after we launched). Today (a year later) RSS Graffiti writes actively on 100.000 Facebook walls (and we are just as excited about it of course). RSS Graffiti has grown much bigger and much faster than we initially anticipated, so when we first realized that this project could potentially turn out to be a success we were pleasantly surprised yes!
Since the first day we tried to talk to every single one of our users. If they were happy we would thank them, if they were unhappy we tried to make them happy and correct our mistakes. We still try to keep up but it is getting more and more difficult every month. It seems “impossible” for a team of two to keep up the pace and give immediate and adequate answers to everyone. So we know we need to work more on fostering our community and trying to get support more organized and better oriented to a large user base. We learn as we grow and we know there are specific adjustments we need to make on how we deal with user interaction in order to be able to achieve the impossible and talk to everyone!
Keeping in touch with the users is not an easy task, especially because it has to happen where your users are; which is everywhere! We try to talk to our users wherever they are, but to help centralize the conversation to some extent, we created a user support community at Get Satisfaction. We don’t require our users to come there for asking their questions but we try to point people that way, so that we have a more central location for gathering all this information and managing all this interaction. One of my personal favorites for talking to users is our own Facebook wall (on the Application’s Profile Page). It is not organized at all like Get Satisfaction, but it has a spontaneity that is thrilling. I really plan to invest on this type of interaction especially as a part of our own product and we do plan to add features to make this interaction over a Facebook Wall more manageable.
Given the overwhelming support of the application from the online community, do you have any future plans monetize RSS Graffiti, and if so – would you adopt the popular Freemium model, to retain users?
So far, what we’ve done was kick start RSS Graffiti. Our main priority now is to release our first premium services. We have been working on them during the past month and we are moving ahead at full speed. The model we plan to use is indeed the well established freemium model.
In our first iteration we plan to provide a premium service for the higher end of the market. We aim there because we don’t want to reduce the features that our users already have in order to make room for our paid plans. Instead we are working on providing a service that does not currently exist on the market and that is targeted mainly to businesses and professionals. This will narrow down the market segment that we will be initially targeting, but it will result in a more manageable paid user base, which we will be able to keep happy and supported. Later down the line we will evaluate more options on monetizing the application and furthering our premium offerings.
During your last 12 month journey with RSS Graffiti, what has your biggest challenge been, and how have you overcome this? Is there anything you would have done differently with RSS Graffiti- during this time period?
I think the toughest part of this deal was that we started RSS Graffiti as a side project. It still is a side project. We are now trying to breath some life of its own into it, so that it takes off. Building launching, running, supporting and growing a service like RSS Graffiti as a side project, takes a lot of devotion, discipline and hard work from a small team of two persons like us. This is not the tough part though. The tough part comes when you combine this with a platform like the Facebook Platform. Facebook is notorious for its rapid evolution and change. It’s a huge living, evolving and moving system and you really need to be determined to keep up with it.
Although we have been working on this project for 20 months now, we still feel we are very early in this effort to have any regrets. There are a lot of things I would like to have done better in the process but I know that what we have done so far was the best we could. We have learned a lot of lessons but luckily we didn’t have to endure any disasters so far. Time will tell if we manage to make something of real value out of this effort.
Besides RSS Graffiti being a superior product to itʼs competitors – how have you marketed your application to the community?
We don’t really market RSS Graffiti. What we do is try to make it worthy as a tool and also be there for it whenever and however we are needed. We let RSS Graffiti spread initially through Facebook’s Application Catalog and later through its own users.
I wouldn’t really see (or market) RSS Graffiti as superior to its competitors. What we did from day one in RSS Graffiti (and that’s precisely the reason why we started building it) was to implement features that were missing from other solutions in the market. That is exactly what we are still doing. We try to look at the big picture, find the missing pieces and put them together in RSS Graffiti. As a result, RSS Graffiti does a lot stuff that you cannot find in other applications. At least not yet. But that doesn’t make it really superior. It makes it a bit smarter maybe; or makes it a bit more exciting or groundbreaking. But not superior.
Everybody has something that others don’t. One thing I “envy” in other teams is that they have more social media marketing know-how available to them and this enables them to offer -for instance- consulting to their customers. I’d like to have that in RSS Graffiti; not because I want to sell consulting services but because I think I could put it to good use in better understanding our most demanding customers and better providing them with high-end solutions. We like RSS Graffiti to be a pioneering tool. We would like our users to know that RSS Graffiti will keep exploring new ways for making more things possible. I can’t find the proper word for this now, but when I will, I will probably base a campaign on it.
Where would you like to see RSS Graffiti in the next 12 months? What would you like to have achieved, and do you have any benchmarks in place – to achieve these goals?
RSS Graffiti is actually three products; but we only have so far unfolded just one of them. We like to see it as a product spanning three axis. One of them is bringing content to Facebook. That’s what RSS Graffiti mainly does now; it brings content from external sources into Facebook. Another axis that we are only starting to unfold with our “Wall Paper” feature, is about consuming Facebook content. So there is more than feed publishing that we are working on. If life permits, I would like to see all three axis of RSS Graffiti to have unfolded and evolved after one year. I would also like to see RSS Graffiti to have a viable business model in place and be able to fund its operations and foster its growth.
Internet, as we all know, is far from static. Likewise, Facebook as a leader and a catalyst for innovation on today’s web, is rapidly evolving and changing the social landscape. We would be foolish to assume that a project like RSS Graffiti will even have a context for existence one year from now, but as long as we can see a next step, we are going to be taking it. Even if we can’t see the next step we will probably be taking a leap of faith.
We don’t have any complicated benchmarks for monitoring this progress, but we do follow some indicators of growth, usage and user satisfaction. As a part of the process of designing and launching our first premium services we are also trying different classifications of our audiences in an effort to better understand and identify our target groups and be able to later evaluate our initial assumptions about them. We do have short-term and long-term goals and we do have mid-term check-points. We are a team of two at the moment but our work is governed using disciplines that you would expect in larger teams.
Do you have any other big projects on the horizon? If so, how do you see the learning experience from RSS Graffiti positively impacting the development of these.
As I mentioned earlier, we see RSS Graffiti as a project spanning three axis, only one of which is currently unfolded. So there are two more child-projects that we will be focusing on in the coming months. We plan to launch them as part of RSS Graffiti because of the synergies we identify in them, but these could very well be three independent Facebook projects altogether.
We started RSS Graffiti because we had to start from somewhere. It seemed like an easy door to open. But we had much broader visions and ideas for things to do on the web and somehow we manage to find links between this project and those other things we wanted to do. So it’s like entering a maze and then keep making choices hoping that the path you follow will lead you closer to where you want to be. That’s how we evolve RSS Graffiti. We try to adjust our vision to our current abilities and options, we take our next step and hope something good will come out.
Finally, what top three tips do you have to developers on how to create a successful application?
I’m not really sure about the value of advice as opposed to the value of experience. Even more so, if the advice comes from me.
One of the things that troubled me while working on RSS Graffiti was the inherent dependence on the Facebook Platform.There has been lots of discussion around the web about Twitter apps and the (un)certainty of their future in view of Twitter’s own expansion into areas of the market that were previously dominated by third party offerings. Practically everyone invests on someone else’s platform (be it Windows, iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, you name it). Web platforms, being generally less mature than desktop ones, tend to evolve very quickly and often change violently. To make things worst, the business landscape of the web is like a huge chess-board where it is hard to predict where the next queen will show up. So game-changing moves are as huge a threat for some, as they are a potential for others. I don’t have any good tips on how to survive this situation, but my attitude towards this is a) keep evolving with the environment and b) be realistic about the application’s lifetime. Tip: (a) extends (b) (or in a more Darwinian context, evolution increases life expectancy). I think that that’s three tips in one so I won’t try to get any wiser than that!
Thank you for hosting me!
