Telvee was originally a Facebook app. It was Burak Büyükdemir‘s idea to create a virtual coffee reading app. Rakı Sofrası was super popular then. We have quickly built and deployed and getting some good results. But the competition wasn’t fair.
When I decided to give this software a fair chance to succeed on its very own domain the only question in my head was; will it pass the test of users? It doesn’t really matter what you have intended the users do with your application. What matters, first, is what they think they’d like to do with it and then whether or not they actually use it.
So I tried and I failed. Two main reasons of this failure are; technical deficiencies and the special way of interaction coffee reading is. Technical deficiencies is the easy one. I couldn’t devote enough time for telvee, especially lately. As a result it doesn’t even have basic stuff like e-mail changing or account deletion. This is 100% my fault. The second reason however is more complicated and there was not much I could do about it. Except one thing I will tell you at the end of this post.
Telvee didn’t pass the user’s test mainly because coffee reading is somewhat private. It’s more of a 1-to-1 communication, while all social applications1 are designed for 1-to-many communication. This was disastrous not only because of the lack of viral growth but also because of the reluctance of users to interact with other users.
An example image of coffee remains telvee generates
I would like to thank everybody who participated and I hope you had some fun playing with it. Telvee domain will soon redirect to this post and I will probably not renew it next time.
I won’t be starting a new experiment soon. I will spend most of my time on my work. Hopefully I will be spending a little more time on free software projects. By the way I would like to note that Telvee has spawned a couple of Django apps: django-inviting & django-simple-friends.
Oh, and the thing I could do better about user experience was to be more agile. I should have either fixed the problem quickly or failed fast. I have no regrets though. This was a unique experience and I have learned a lot.
1: Yes, even the e-mail system and dating sites are designed for 1-to-many communication primarily in mind.
