Open Hours: An Exercise in Building and Learning Quickly
Open Hours is a new project by Rohan Pavuluri and myself. We believe phone calls are one of the most powerful and meaningful ways to stay in touch with the people we care about.
But phone calls don't happen as often as we'd like because we don't know when people are free to talk. Social norms prevent us from calling the people we want to talk to out-of-the-blue. Our mission is to make them more common, fun, and spontaneous.
So we built an app to make that possible. Open Hours enables you to let your friends know when you're available for a phone call in real-time. Flip a switch and your friends get a notification that you're free to chat. We made it for people to use when they're bored, lonely, or feel like talking to a friend.
Timeline
November 16 [Private Beta]
We launched our first private TestFlight build to a few of our closest friends — the type of people we call regularly and hypothesized Open Hours would be most useful for.
This version was raw. We had to walk our friends through signing up for a new account because they couldn't enter their phone numbers without finding a bug. We would teach our friends to force-quit the app when it would crash every time they tapped the button to sync their device's contacts. Yet, our core functionality — a notification to let your friends know when you were available to chat — worked perfectly and that was compelling enough to start learning from.
Rohan and I started using the app to talk nearly every day, constantly prioritizing the most critical elements we'd observed in our respective social networks.
November 24 [Public Beta]
We reached our 6th private TestFlight iteration and deemed it stable enough for our first (small) public release. We'd iterated on the interface to mark yourself as "available" and resolved many of the pesky bugs around signing up and syncing contacts.
We used Instagram Stories to start seeding Open Hours within our broader social networks. Despite hundreds of views, tens of excited comments, and even more website clicks, we'd only managed to attract 22 new users to the app.
This release also uncovered a few fundamental flaws. We'd realized our core network effect-creating features — custom links to invite friends to Open Hours — didn't work. And while the app wouldn't crash, most users wouldn't wait for the 30 seconds it would take to sync their contacts before getting bored and leaving the app.
December 11 [Public Launch]
Rohan received an invitation to join Clubhouse and invited me onto the platform as well. We thought they'd nailed their onboarding and used it as inspiration as we refined every part of Open Hours.
We helped our users build out their networks as a core aspect of the onboarding flow. Speed was also no longer a concern for our users as we found ways to sync contacts within 6 seconds and within the background as they completed other onboarding tasks. We made it easy to add new users as friends when they joined the app and added notifications to remind our users of Open Hours when we thought they had downtime.
We were jazzed. The app felt good. We resolved a lot of the usability issues we had found in the weeks before. And so we launched on HackerNews, ProductHunt, and LinkedIn.
Crickets.
December 13 [Pivot]
We built, tested, and iterated on our first experiment in a few very dense weeks. Rohan and I still needed to communicate with each other nearly every day and used Open Hours as an alternative to scheduled meetings. Our networks, on the other hand, would rarely return to the app.
By now, we had a large backlog of ideas we had to improve the core functionality of the app. But as we spoke to our friends that started using the app, we realized our approach to Open Hours didn't make phone calls more common, fun, and spontaneous. We weren't solving the problem. Here's what we learned:
Learnings
Network density is a pre-requisite for enabling spontaneous phone calls. Open Hours' notifications increase the chance of successful phone calls, but each user needs to have friends on the network for it to matter. Our users need to invite their own friends, which didn't happen.
And despite having a large network of friends, there would be a less than 20% chance that our users would receive a phone call. Our users didn't have friends who are always free or willing to talk. Mentees didn't have questions often enough.Creating habitual behavior requires a single-player mode. For Open Hours to be successful, we needed it to be top of mind whenever our users felt bored, lonely, or like talking to a friend. And we needed them to have a way to be instantly gratified, but couldn't rely on their friends calling them.
Many consumer products — Dialup, Honk, Roadtrip, Houseparty, Instagram, etc. — face this challenge and have found clever mechanisms for working around it.Missed phone calls and text messages to coordinate conversations are "good enough." We crafted Open Hours to be most useful for close friends — the ones that wouldn't mind being notified anytime their friends wanted to talk. The app wasn't providing the 10x value it needed to be a better alternative.
Separate use cases require separate thought. We named and crafted the Open Hours app to be use-case agnostic. We wanted to explore social, academic, and business use-cases from the start. Building without a singular target customer in mind, however, makes learning difficult.
What's Next?
Our first experiment in making phone calls more common, fun, and spontaneous taught us a lot. We're going back to the drawing board, this time focusing on facilitating one-on-one phone calls within existing communities.
Online forums like Slack, Facebook Groups, and Reddit keep communities connected, but don't lend themselves to deep one-on-one conversations. Members are required to keep returning to these forums to participate and even then, only a subset of the community actively contributes while the rest consumes. They can still make you feel lonely.
And while these online forums are great for some communities, we're excited to explore how one-to-one matching and audio can better meet the needs of other communities in a remote environment or supplement the needs of existing communities.
We're looking into:
Workplaces. How can we help remote employees feel more connected with their companies? Can we break down organizational silos and improve information exchange through structured conversations?
Social communities. What conversations can increase the value of a community to its members? How can we help deepen relationships beyond what's possible in a Slack or FB group?
Elderly companionship programs. How can we unite volunteers with members of elderly communities who might be lonely?
Check us out at www.getopenhours.com. Subscribe to my mailing list to stay in touch with future updates.
Special thanks to Hoyd Breton who’s been a beacon of support through this journey.
