Katch
Building a product roadmap by engaging a community of early adopters
Role
Brand strategy
Growth strategy
Community engagement
Product strategy
User interviews
Video curation
The Challenge
Katch started as a two day hack after the livestream trend took off when Meerkat exploded at SXSW in 2015. While some people liked the ephemeral quality of live video, other viewers often missed out on content, and many wished they could save their streams to repurpose on other platforms. Our core hypothesis was that users wanted to save their videos. In this early nascent space, creators and brands wanted more tools faster than live video startups could roll out.
Solution
I was a founding member on team that built a much loved, community-first product in the live video space. The product was developed pre-Facebook and Instagram video, and tested and validated many post-live use case scenarios. Our startup was working on a different product at the time, but pivoted to Katch after a few months with buy-in from our board after our hypothesis was validated when our app went viral after a soft release with no announcement or press. By immersing ourselves in the community and listening to our users on their feature requests, we built an app that became indispensable to early adopters of live video.
Result
Katch served decades of video to 1.3 millions users a month and posted 20% month-over-month growth before shutting down on May 2016. Press mentions include TechCrunch, Mashable, Product Hunt, and The Next Web.
Build the features that users want now
Our team developed a suite of tools that enabled broadcasters to save and share their videos to various social media platforms, embed their videos on websites, and organize and curate their content into collections and themes. These features proved extremely valuable to influencers and brands who were looking to leverage their live video content by distributing them across multiple channels and reconnect with their audience.
A dedicated page for every creator and viewer
The ability to search and organize videos into collections became a game-changer. Previously, there was no way to search or discover new live stream content. We gave users the ability to automatically collect and populate videos using hashtags into collections on their own dedicated profile pages. This enabled even non-broadcasters to be part of the live video community by becoming curators of post-live video content on their own Katch pages.
Feature the community
The homepage featured daily trending videos and hand-selected curated picks. One of the biggest pain points of live video in this nascent space was content discovery. I initiated and wrote a weekly newsletter to all our users and subscribers with curated video picks, sometimes around a theme. This helped users discover new content and broadcasters to follow.
A community-first startup
I helped cultivate our loyal fanbase of users by listening to our community and becoming a regular broadcaster on live stream platforms. I joined multiple Twitter groups, organized meetups in NYC and at livestream conferences, and gained the trust of the live-stream community. By being immersed in this ecosystem and becoming an evangelist as a user of our product, this user research helped with product strategy. I was able to collaborate with the product and engineering team to translate feature requests into future product releases. Users loved our mascot, Klyde, and the friendly icon became instantly recognizable in the community.
Notable users included The Monterey Aquarium, The Weather Channel, Science Fridays, George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic, Central Park Conservatory, Yvette Nicole Brown, and One Republic.
