When was the last time you were so addicted to a particular app? For teens in the US (2013/2014) it was Snapchat, with snaps going back & forth to maintain that streak. For Indians in the past 18 months, it’s been Tik-tok without a doubt. Everyone from college kids to aunties to old men to wannabe celebs to actual celebs was trying to get a piece of internet fame & following. Boredom time was synonymous with Tik-Tok.

However in Nov 2018, a new gaming app started breaking the top charts. As per SimilarWeb it did 12m downloads in India in the last 3 months. And more importantly the time spent per day was at a staggering 57 mins! The retention charts looked a bit like this. That app was Hago.

Hago — retention charts.

The primary premise of the app was simple — Play simple games like Ludo, knife fight etc and make friends.

Now games have long been the obvious next step for apps with a big user base —content, messaging or social apps. And a lot of apps have tried the exactly same strategy — adding casual games. Hike tried it a long time ago(Even building out a studio inside the company), Facebook added games into messenger. And newer players are also going down the road — MX Player, probably Sharechat etc. But no one’s really succeeded massively till now. So what’s different this time?

The answer is a combination of evolved social + incentives + deep product building skills. And a newly online userbase from Tier2 & 3 cities. Let’s try to understand the characteristics of this user base.

3 things are common among the vast majority of mostly male newly online.

  1. They had a lot of free time
  2. They didn’t have a lot of money
  3. They want to find friends/companion/mate on the internet

Nikita Bier, the founder of TBH famously said that most people downloaded a new app for only 3 reasons.

Hago fits in perfectly — utility($$) + social(friends) + fun(& easy to play).

Play Games, Find friends & Win goods. Image courtesy — Hago app

Hago excels in each of the 3 aspects — Games(Play & discovery), Social(finding friends, chat rooms) & Utility(earn goodies — phone recharge, phones, bikes etc). Let’s examine each of the 3 aspects separately.

Hago — find friends by playing games. Earning money gets you in(Utility), games keep you playing(fun!), community & friends ensure you stay(social).

Awesome casual games

The games are fun to play. You start out playing the simplest one — Knife hit or ludo & quickly graduate to a more involved like Werewolf — where there’s 7 players involved & your whole gang can play. Hago does a great job of moving you across the engagement funnel — trying out new games till you’ve found one you love using game invites.

Games have caught out in India — People playing Ludo in an outstation train. Image courtesy Ludo king

Seamless discovery & nudges to play more games

Getting someone to play a single game is easy. But the magic lies in taking one down the rabbit hole of games — deeper & deeper till you were inseparable from the app. With so many choices discovery of games becomes an issue. There’s an inherent inertia to trying out new things — it’s why most products struggle to get adoption beyond the core feature. Typically this is solved in 2 ways — 1. Generating curiosity 2. Timing it. The first method involves drawing your attention — using the copy or using a certain detail(Or social proof). The 2nd method involves inserting it into the workflow of a user at the right moment— say at the end of a game or one the Splash screen(though some PMs will deem this intrusive). Hago excels at all of these. And with the friends angle, it’s always nudging you to try newer and newer games.

Here are all the different ways a user could start playing a game —

  1. One’s curious & starts playing from the home-page
  2. One’s invited to play via chat by a friend/stranger
  3. One discovers the game from suggestions — at the end of a game
  4. One plays the game in a chat room
  5. One lands on a game using a Splash screen
Hago — great job with discovery of games. Image — courtesy Hago app.

And this is just the discovery of games.

Taking incentivization a step further with Treasure Hunt

Play Games, earn coins, participate in treasure hunt. And exchange goods. Image courtesy — Hago app.

The basic incentive is simple — play games, earn coins & win gifts.

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Paytm pioneered incentivized engagement with cashbacks in India. Discounts meant a single txtn, with cashbacks you could get the user to come back for another. Then the model was stretched out — win Rs. 50 over 10 txns. Till Tez evolved it further with Scratch cards. What was better than a small assured reward? Surely a bigger unassured one. Hago takes this approach with treasure hunt — participate to win a Bajaj Pulsar — among the best bikers in the starter segment.

Finding friends is big

Humans are social beings. We crave for companionship. It’s the reason boys continue to swipe right on every picture on Tinder despite the low possibility of a match. This is where Hago does a great job. Every time you play a game, Hago matches you with a stranger on the internet. Often the match comes with a line ‘discovered a nice boy’, ‘found a cute girl’ to play with.

Hago — Game play screen —Playing with strangers.
Chat with People you play games with.
Hago encourages you to chat & communicate with fellow gamers.

You can chat using voice during the game. And Hago encourages you to chat with fellow gamers using chat suggestions & emojis right after. If you loved playing with someone you can quickly send them a friend request. And as you play with groups of people, you automatically become friends with them. It’s so much better than Tinder or anything else. Like school where you’ll be friends with people just because you’ll pay cricket together.

I played over 3 hrs of werewolf with a group of people & it was awesome. On the other hand I had rarely tried a game on Facebook messenger.

Hago doesn’t stop here — Reinventing chat rooms — IRL behaviour goes mobile.

Remember the old Yahoo chat rooms? You would find different groups on technology, science, physics and a whole bunch of other topics. You would join a room, follow the conversation, maybe chirp in between. It was awesome. But without moderation, the groups got spammed & slowly died out(Similar to a few Whatsapp groups right now). A couple of years reddit emerged as an alternative with the discussion now being driven around a piece of content — post, link or photo instead of just random chat. Some communities reformed on Slack. A lot of communities are mushrooming on Discord.

Chat Rooms on Hago — a few ‘hot boy’ but increasingly centered around newer categories.

Hago seems to be a taking a renewed attempt at chat groups with voice being the key focus. I digged inside a couple of groups & was amazed by them.

A Hago chat group — Fig 1- As a viewer Fig 2: As a top 8 participant

Before I tell you what people do inside groups, let me tell you how a chat room works in Hago & how it shapes user behavior. In a chat group — 8 people can be seated at the top. These users have special game options & ability to voice chat. The rest of the viewers can follow the discussion & text chat.

Inside the groups, people were having a group discussions over voice, playing games, making dares, teasing each other, singing songs & telling shayaris much like they would in real life. The game options — dice toss, counter enabled them to match up users to spice up the conversation. While on Whatsapp Groups vernacular users had to type & read text that others had posted — here they could just ask a question & get the answer. Everything was just so much simpler & like real life.

Houseparty touted itself as the next best thing to hanging out in person. But if you try Hago — you’ll realize that it was so much better.

Where are the opportunities & what are lessons from Hago?

In hind-sight, it seems so obvious. Voice chat groups are so much more convenient than text chat. People don’t have anything to do in groups — why don’t we add some prompts to let them match up & compete? Genius.

But how does one observe existing behavior to productize these insights? I’m no expert but let me explain with an example. Consider groups on Facebook with lots of tier-2/tier-3 users — say an English learning group or such. You might have seen posts where someone posts a picture with a puzzle & asks you to guess the answer. They have a huge number of comments & tremendous engagement.

Snapshot from a Sandeep Maheshwari Group :)

Now how can you take this & make people play on an app? Hago for example took Draw Something & put it inside a chat room!

Draw Something inside a chat room — I drew a lip!

Final comments —

There’s a lot more to the app that I haven’t covered. If you found something interesting, do let me know in the comments. Overall below are my summarized views.

Games —The chance to win recharges & big prizes draws users to the app. The whole games experience is really well done. Right from design to discovery to performance. Loved the interaction to play with local players. What’s your favorite casual game on Hago?

Social — finding friends is a huge use-case. Hago helps you make new friends & chat with people by playing games.

Voice & Chat-rooms — IMHO Hago’s chat rooms are the next best thing to hanging out in person. Voice chat with friends, make jokes, play games, tease friends, play songs & more.

I’m excited about the opportunities at the intersection of social, voice, communities & gaming. As I’ve elaborated in the post, Hago is the product of a team that has a deep understanding of games & social. I’ll love to hear your comments on the big white-spaces in this space & the products you love. What would be your strategy if you’re competing with Hago?

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If you liked this story, you’ll enjoy my story on ‘How a new wave of AR games is going viral’ https://medium.com/@vernekard/a-new-wave-of-ar-games-is-going-viral-heres-why-e69074228aa3