I’ve been watching the messaging app battle for a few months now and it’s really hard to say who will win out by the end of the year.
There are just too many players. It reminds me of the battle between Altavista, Yahoo, AskJeeves, and others in the early days before Google arrived. One I haven’t taken a close enough look at yet is Cubie. The made-in-Taiwan messaging app has about eight million users to date, which is a humble but compelling beginning for a small bootstrapped team of 12. 40 days after launching in March 2012, Cubie already had over one million downloads, with only organic growth.
Just last week, Cubie got featured on Google’s Play Store for the customary nine days on the front page and I wanted to find out what Google saw that I’ve been missing. I talked with James Hill, Cubie’s “international messenger” about getting onto Google Play. It basically comes down to focus and design.
Are you guys basically competing with Line and WeChat?
No. We don’t want to become a platform like them. We’re not focused on China. And we’re particularly focused on being a messenger app.
What James means is all the design decisions are focused on the chatroom. This comes out of lessons the team learned from 500Startups and Dave McClure who they ran into at Echelon in 2012.
We were lucky to learn from 500Startups and some of the team even came out to the Valley to get some tips. They taught us which metrics to look out for. At the time, we weren’t looking at very useful metrics. They told us, one app can only have one or two main functions because more will be distracting for users.
Thus, Cubie, unlike Line, KakaoTalk, and Zalo has not moved in the direction of gaming platforms and timeline microblogging. Features like disappearing texts and drawing all happen within the chatroom only. They’ve stayed small and stayed lean.
When Google contacted them, they had already satisfied three of Google’s top four criteria: an app that competes globally, a high consistent star rating, favorable user comments, and design criteria. For the final aspect, Cubie had to adapt to Google’s requested design restrictions before being let on the featured section of the Play store.
Before we got on Google Play, our total downloads across iOS and Android were averaging between 15,000 to 20,000 downloads per day. After being featured on Google Play, we were getting over 50,000 downloads per day on Android alone.
So yeah, it’s helpful to get featured by Google. James’ final tip for startups trying to get lots of downloads might be useful for some readers:
We found that it was always better to have the app description in the local language, even if our app was in English. So if you want your app in France, it’s good to have it in French. Users appreciate it.
Next up for Cubie is adding the ability to share YouTube videos in the chatroom, sending pictures that can disappear (they already have text that disappears after ten seconds), and adding the ability to listen to music in the chatroom. And of course, they’re working with local artists to get localized stickers on the platform.
Personally, I think Cubie’s a pretty interesting chat app. I’m especially jazzed by disappearing texts (like Snapchat) and I like that it’s not turning into a platform like its competitors. Now whether or not this will entice users or not, is anybody’s guess. Recent growth indicates that it could, but there’s a reason the feature-packed Asian apps have tens of millions of users.
If you want to grab a download, there’s iOS and Android.
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