For this posts series, I will talk about our strategy for Android Cloud Services, our mobile-cloud platform that seamlessly extends any Android phones running version 2.1 or more. ACS is a complex platform and is more of a horizontal capacity than a specific product solving a specific problem. This is a product, we aim at selling cloud resources through a micro-transaction model, but for now, the platform is not ready to be opened to the world wild web and not rich and stable enough to cover all potential uses. This is a future product that we have to mature in the coming months for it to emerge as a solid revenues stream for next year.
But more than just maturing, we want to apply lean startup principles to discover what’s the real killing feature of this platform. We have ideas, we think we know what will work and what won’t, but thinking is not enough. We want to quickly test our hypotheses in the market and get any feedback we can from early adopters. If we can’t open the platform to fellow developers out there, our only choice to get the necessary feedback is to build our own applications on the platform and gather indirect feedback on how it’s used.
We already have four Android applications built on the ACS platform, only one being available on the market: CloudPhone. We know for sure that CloudPhone won’t be a popular application today: it doesn’t do anything useful! It’s just a router to the ACS cloud, abstracting all ACS protocols to other client applications. We decided to launch a minimal version of CloudPhone to the market, to ensure that when we develop another client application, it’s easy to find and install. It’s a mandatory dependency for any ACS compatible application. The other three applications are open-source and simple prototypes accessing various cloud features.
This week, we will launch a first version of MusyMix, a simple music streaming player built on ACS and using 8tracks.com as music library. This is a minimum viable product that focus on getting 8tracks members with Android phones to listen to music mixes anywhere. So our target market is basically 8tracks.com 100K visitors per month who own an Android phone. We think we can easily reach 5000 persons, assuming that a few Android users will try it without an 8tracks account (not required). For ACS, we want to validate that people understand and are willing to install the ACS CloudPhone. This will give us quality data to improve our next move. We’ve integrated Flurry Analytics in both applications to ensure we get the right information, quickly.
The key point is that MusyMix may be used without ACS. This is important because we want people to understand why they need ACS and what problem it solves. Actually, this is an Android platform problem where the native media player is unable to stream M4A (iTunes) content. Using ACS, we perform the audio transcoding on the cloud, in real time, before returning the audio stream to the media player. Without ACS, you get plenty of errors, mostly because 8tracks.com content is built by the community from their local iTunes library (not normalized).
So we go to the market, quickly (less than 2 weeks) to learn what features is missing from MusyMix, which in turn will provide us insights on our evolving cloud platform. This will shed some light on our ACS target market and help us guide our next moves, without wasting too much time developing features we think will be marketable.
