Your DreaMachine was a concept that has been developed in the late 2008, and aimed at tracking common themes of dreams, and to enable transparency of common themes of a dream, of defined group.
As an example, imagine your self how cool it could have been to compare common themes of a dream between boys and girls?
Between age-groups? Geographical slices, etc.
This data is unique in the sense that there is no person on earth that has this information, especially not live and on-demand.
The approach
The approach that has been taken was to develop Facebook application called Your DreaMachine. (And available here: www.YourDreaMachine.com)
Your DreaMachine will incent users to share their dreams, by providing dream analysis based on key words.
Every analyzed dream will be categorized, according to key words, into one or more, out of 20 themes.
The user will be able to compare him self to other users from the same group, and to see who are the users which are most probable to have the same dreams.
The belief was that the viral nature of social networks will enable to obtain sufficient amount of users to present meaningful data.
The reality
Development:
The application has been developed in a satisfactory way, and in a reasonable cost.
The software hasn’t been de-bugged fully, and one of the key learning from that stage will be to allocate at least 30% of development budget for testing and de-bugging. All in all, the product was doing what it was aiming to do, in a user friendly manner, but it wasn’t perfect.
Technical challenges where apparent from Facebook end. Low reliability of facebook servers and changes of the interfaces, required continues software maintenance that proved to be costly. Creating Facebook application is not “launch and forget”.
Getting traffic into Your DreaMachine:
This is where it becomes tricky. In the early days, Facebook was the right place for independent developers. Back then, the viral nature of Facebook enabled every application that knows how to send hugs to achieve millions of users in no-time.
The situation changed significantly later on, when every day, more than 100 new application been launched (Equivalent to more than 11,000 new applications every year), and 95% of the traffic was aimed at 5% of the application. Facebook application market became a market of few VERY big players.
The here above described challenges, made the traffic generation task, to become costly and time consuming.
Ad campaigns:
The cost of a click in online ads campaign is between USD 0.1-0.4, with dependency on the user’s location. Due to the fact that user enters Your DreaMachine will not generate the same in revenues, it became clear that this is not the way to achieve significant amount of users.
Viral Marketing:
The viral character of Facebook has been changed in early 2009, in a way placing the application less apparent to the users, and the traffic on Your DreaMachine was well below any level that can provide significant revenues.
Attempt to use the Youtube platform by creating funny-sexy videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku3juGZqQcc), and different blogs didn’t succeed in creating the required sustainable buzz, and traffic showed only minor changes in days of the content publication. The conclusion is that in order to generate traffic, you must first have traffic.
All in all, this application was a very nice concept, but without a strong business model behind, that enables sustainable development.
It seems like in Facebook, just like any other on-line environment, any application with no sustainable maintenance will not make it. Sustainable maintenance is a cost that with no cash-flow is not acceptable for the independent .
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