#Imvu people plus
#Imvu people series

Roleplay, dress up, party, go on a virtual date, host an event, and join a virtual world with millions of others. Explore our chat rooms where you can meet and voice chat with friends from around the world. Customize your 3D avatar to reflect your sense of style.

#Imvu people plus

A one-window experience with tabbed conversations plus inventory available across all tabs meant user's could have more fun in a focused experience.Enter IMVU, the world’s largest avatar-based social network where shared experiences build deeper friendships. Her avatar was now the star of every surface of the app, reinforcing the user's creative decisions, implying that she could change them before conversing with others, and incentivizing her to go show off to new people. A hub & spokes model gave our core Persona the control she craved. From sign up to avatar creation & shopping to virtual space exploration, navigation and ownership to meeting people & making new friends: everything was made clear.īelow is where we landed. 40 days later, we had a map that 10 out of 10 total strangers in a row understood completely. We clarified early on that the live product's value proposition wasn't clear and the experience was exhausting.

We staggered 5 (10, with double booking) tests throughout every day to ensure we maintained pressure to deliver new solutions for the next test. Compared to the rigors of the previous two Lean years, our process was totally un-scientific: if one aspect of a design failed with tester A, we redesigned a fix before tester B. The goal was to land a design that made sense to everyone and THEN iterate with paying users to refine the offering.

#Imvu people series

We assumed that our tech stack would follow a 'correct' design so we attacked the problem from a design perspective. By day three, we had built a prototype (really a series of connected web pages) and started showing it to a mix of existing users and total strangers. My cofounder and design partner, Marcus Gosling, and I had a lot to lose if IMVU went belly up so we decided to do something about it. The initial (Alarmingly convoluted) IMVU Onboarding flow The only thing that truly matters about YOU is how you treat others. Gender, race, rank, physical state: none of these matter when anyone can be anything. You see, world class avatar systems are the great equalizers. What's more, it meant friendships they made within IMVU were based on this new sense of self and, consequently, were much, much closer (ie - real) than most of their real world relationships. Suddenly, IMVU allowed them to try on new, more powerful personas in a safe environment to explore who they really are inside.

Across the entire socio-economic spectrum, there are many tens of millions of people in the world who are unhappy with the amount of control they have over their own lives.and that's just counting the signal we had access to (people who happened to have an internet connection.) It's likely more than that! Maybe they don't like aging, responsibility, long term relationships, their income, their position at work, how they are treated by the society around them.

People don't get dressed up to go over to their buddy's house so, if you are trying to sell avatar & environment customization, users must be able to meet, and show off to, new people.

(The method we devised together was memorialized in my cofounder Eric's book The Lean Startup)

Treating a startup as a series of experiments whose goal is to prove hypotheses as quickly and cheaply as possible is SOOO the way to go.

However, by prioritizing really listening to users, we uncovered three profound truths. We learned a lot of the things every new company does when getting something off the ground.

Ha! So, in five months, we shipped an ***absolutely, embarrassingly awful*** first product in an attempt to understand the complete product & marketing pipeline. IMVU began as a reaction to the big company thinking prevalent during the dot com boom & bust: build first and then figure out what people want. From the get go, we set out to become the kind of company that values its customers' opinions above all others.which meant we kinda needed customers right away.