Tackling loneliness in GenZ
Wizz is a social app with 1M DAU that I co-founded and worked on as the product leader for 3 years. Here's my fave features we shipped in 2023.
At Wizz, we thought that best memories and encounters are unexpected – something that is hard to reproduce in an app where today everything in the social industry is centered around algorithms filtering only what you want to see, social competitivity and the constant hunt for approval, and so on.
The agency Social Club helped us to brand our against-the-curve values like randomness and serendipity as something cool and differenciating Wizz from typical social apps.
We then rebranded the app ourselves to make sure we fit the agency’s brand book. We started with the onboarding: ABTesting the old flow with the new brand, which led to a 20% increase in conversion despite the fact the new flow had more steps and way more clicks.
From my experience, a new and more polished design alone is not enough to increase conversion by much. In fact, in most case it has no direct impact on standard metrics. What made the difference here is the storytelling we added through the onboarding and the fact that we added steps showing the core-value of the app before asking for user-effort like completing a profile.
As we were striving for nowness and unexpectedness, we launched several vision-based features, first in our “playground” country, Australia, like the MVP of a facetime-inspired, text-first feature with instant pairing, as shown below.
Text is still the most convenient way for communicating everywhere at any time and texting is a good-first step to start getting to know the person before progressing to audio or video.
Business speaking, Wizz is a very successful app generating 6 figures per day, plus, a direct operating profit > 50% without us even focusing hard on monetisation yet. I left my position as Co-Founder in July as the product is now quite mature and I aimed to kickstart new projects.
If you want to know more about our path to PMF check this post on Wizz’s early days ✌️