Designing For Production
3.2
Interaction-first platforms need an active ecosystem of producers to create value. A platform without producers is a ghost town, and there is little incentive for consumers to use it. Replicating the technology of Airbnb or YouTube is a considerably smaller challenge compared to replicating their respective communities of hosts or video creators.
Producers are active partners in creating (and delivering) the value prop- osition of the platform. Too often, they are bucketed under the term “users”
without giving due importance to the production function on a platform.
Understanding producer and consumer roles and catering to them indi- vidually is important for driving interactions on the platform. To execute toward platform scale, every platform needs to:
1. Understand the motivations of the producers.
2. Create enabling technology that caters to those motivations.
3. Have a clear strategy to maximize the number of producers on the platform and the frequency of their participation.
This chapter provides a checklist for planning and laying out incentives for producers on a platform.
does the platform provide tools, access, or both?
Platforms may provide producers with the tools to enable them to be creative. Alternately, platforms may provide them with channels to market their creations to an audience. Some platforms may provide both incentives.
Tools: Platforms may provide production and/or infrastructural tools.
Vimeo gives anyone the ability to host a high-definition video online and delivers video streaming quality that is superior to those of all competitors.
Instagram enables users to produce beautiful photos without being Photo- shop experts. The provision of production tools goes beyond mere infra- structure. Instagram provides a production tool, but Flickr, in its original manifestation, provided only a hosting infrastructure.
Access. In some cases, platforms may provide access to a specific desired audience. Dribbble allows designers to upload their creations and gives them access to the right professional community. Airbnb provides global access in a way that enables anyone to be a host and run an accommoda- tion and short-term rental business.
Tools + Access. Platforms that provide producers with both tools and access often beat platforms that provide only one of the two. That is what enabled Instagram, a late follower, to disrupt Hipstamatic, a far superior product.
Hipstamatic allowed users to apply filters to pictures (initially), but Insta- gram created a thriving community around such photos, thereby providing tools as well as access. Facebook Photos similarly disrupted Flickr to become the largest storehouse of photos on the Internet. Facebook provided access to an audience while Flickr provided only hosting tools. WordPress provides superior tools to producers, but Medium provides tools as well as access.
In a networked age, access constitutes much of the value proposition.
Platforms that offer producers only tools may be disrupted by those that provide access as well.
does the platform simplify the production process?
There is no dearth of choice on the Internet. Competing platforms are a click away. In such a scenario, platforms that make creation easy and allow users with lower skills to create high-quality creations may achieve higher traction.
The number of people who tweet is much higher than the number of people who blog. This is partly because Twitter provides channels to an audience in addition to tools. However, the more important factor is the lower skill level and investment required to tweet compared to writing a blog post.
Similarly, Instagram lowers the level of skills required to create beautiful pictures, a factor that led to its widespread adoption.
does the platform leverage a robust curation model to separate the best from the rest?
Curation is critical on an open-access platform. The platform should have a robust model to separate the bathroom singers from the award winners.
There are typically three broad models of curation, and a scalable platform usually leverages a combination of all three:
1. Algorithmic curation. The key ingredient of a scalable model of curation is the algorithmic detection of good versus bad, based on certain rules.
While algorithmic curation is highly scalable, it may also lead to false positives and reject good creations, similar to a spam filter erroneously capturing legitimate email and classifying it as spam. Hence, it should be scaled carefully and constantly “teach” and optimize itself with social and editorial inputs.
2. Social curation. Social curation leverages the networked and distributed nature of platforms. The community of consumers is provided with tools (such as voting, rating, and flagging tools) to offer inputs and signals regarding the quality of the creation, and the aggregation of these inputs is used to sort and rank creations on the platform. Beyond being a source of curation and quality control, it also ensures that producers constantly receive feedback from consumers. For all its benefits, social curation may not apply in certain scenarios, as illustrated later in this section.
3. Editorial curation. While tech entrepreneurs would want everything to be automated, manual curation holds a place on every platform, especially in its early days. Editorial curation helps in understanding patterns that can then be automated and scaled. In some cases, editorial curation can even be used to kick-start the platform when there aren’t enough producers
on the platform. Quora, the popular community-driven Q&A platform, has employed editorial resources in both forms. In the early days of the plat- form, editors would ask and answer questions to generate activity. Edito- rial inputs would hold sway over a regular user’s judgment in curating. Over time, editorial control over the platform was gradually relaxed as the users started driving curation.
does the platform create a clear, democratic, equal- access path to the top?
Platforms like Etsy and Airbnb allow producers to run entire businesses on them. Producers wouldn’t participate unless they were assured of the democratic nature of such platforms.
Platforms need a curation model to separate signal from noise reliably.
Content and listings that are ranked higher are also consumed more often.
As a result, producers should understand the mechanisms by which cura- tion and the ensuing exposure on the platform work.
In a manner similar to how website publishers invest in SEO to score high on Google’s “curation” of the Web, producers on a platform need an under- standing of what it takes to “rank high” on a platform. If the mechanism of ranking high and gaining visibility is unclear, producers may not be moti- vated to participate on the platform.
Platforms often struggle to ensure democratic exposure for all producers.
Those who join early get to the top faster. Early Twitter and Pinterest users succeeded in building massive followings. Producers who come in later have a greater problem being discovered. The platform must ensure that all users, regardless of when they join, find equal opportunity.
does the platform use inorganic incentives to motivate producers?
While marketplace platforms allow producers to earn money and run businesses, most other platforms do not provide content creators with monetary benefits. Platforms may use inorganic incentives to encourage producers to stay engaged.
Threadless is a platform where designers can upload new T-shirt art, and the best-curated creations are printed on T-shirts and sold, with monetary incentives offered to the design creator. Inorganic incentives complement the organic incentives of community recognition and reputation. Similarly, designers who are ranked high on Dribbble have a greater chance of being selected for a design job on the Dribbble job board. Chictopia, a platform that allows fashion bloggers and enthusiasts to build influence, gives its top producers exclusive access to events like Paris Fashion Week. On a different note, writers on Quora and Medium have been known to land book deals, though not directly through their involvement with the platform.
does the platform convert consumers into producers?
User-generated content has come a long way on the Internet. At one point, the 90-9-1 rule was often quoted to explain the low levels of contribution in online communities. Online communities were supposed to have 90%
of users performing only consumption actions, 9% performing curation, and only 1% performing creation actions. Over the last few years, platforms have emerged with much higher percentages of producers, especially owing to the rise of smartphones, which allow a larger user base to create more often.
The success of a platform still hinges on its ability to maximize the percentage of producers. In its initial days, a platform must focus on attracting producers. But once a minimum number of producers are on board, a second cycle must be started: the platform needs to convert consumers into producers. Two mutually reinforcing mechanisms must work together.
Producers coming on board attract consumers, and consumers, in turn, are converted to producers. This ensures that the platform constantly scales the number of producers on board.
how does the platform communicate feedback from consumers back to producers?
Producers participate repeatedly on a platform only if they are repeatedly encouraged and motivated. This is achieved through feedback. Every action
taken by a producer involves effort. Producers are encouraged to partic- ipate repeatedly on a platform when they receive appropriate feedback for their effort. Feedback may take various forms. Producers on Twitter get explicit feedback in the form of retweets and favorites. Sellers on market- places may receive ratings and reviews that help them stand out for future transactions. Communicating feedback from consumers to producers is the single most important driver of sustainable and repeatable interactions on the platform.
platform scale imperative
Producers power the platform engine by creating value on the platform.
The platform must ensure that it bakes in incentives that encourage frequent participation, reward desirable behavior, and discourage undesirable actions.
The effectiveness of an incentive should be measured by its ability to power the core interaction and drive higher value creation on the platform.