Ekalavya Bhattacharya

I saw Dabangg in its second week. This was well after it was already stamped as one of biggest hits of all time. Mid-way through the song ‘Tere mast mast do nain’…Salman’s aviators flashed hearts. At that very moment I got the idea of a facebook application.

48 hours later, Dabanggify was live.
http://apps.facebook.com/dabangg/

What was the application about?
Well you could add these hearty aviators to any pic of yours.

Kamal (@designerkamal) did the coding and we ensured that we kept it simple and an easy to do thing.

I knew this application was going to do well.
Within 24 hours we had 5,000 users.
Within a week we had 50,000 users and we had to put this on a new server.
At the end of a month we had 5,00,000 users in India who had tried this application out!

Why? How?
All we did was change our profile pictures and added a link of the application in the caption. 50+ friends of ours had used the app by the next day and 90% of them had it as their display profile pic. That did the trick. Virality took over.

But what made this app viral?
Dabangg was a super hit.
The app was simple to use.
It was a conversation hook. Once you made the pic your profile pic…others were bound to comment on it and one of the comments would definitely be - How did you do it?

What you as an app developer or as a brand need to understand is that - Not all applications will become viral. We were lucky with Dabangg becoming a huge hit. 3 brand managers have cited this application as an example of what they want to do (without knowing that this was my app).

So basically some things which you need to keep in mind…

• Branded applications do not make it big on Facebook. Even if they do…it will be short-lived. Accept this. I as a user don’t want to engage with your brand on a daily basis. If I use it once and ensure that at least 3 other friends of mine also end up using it…please be happy.
• Keep it simple. Have a look at the application.
  The flow of picking a profile image or uploading an image was kept simple.
  Resizing and rotating the aviators was made idiot proof.
• End product needs to look good. This is the major viral quotient of any product. It needs to be able to draw a smile. People had to choose to post the image on their walls and they wouldn’t have done this if the end product didn’t look good. If you can add a conversation element to the whole thing…all the better. If you can get the friends of users to participate - you are home!

What could we have done better?
Sold this to the Dabangg marketers and probably made some money :-)
Anyways we were not in it for money at all. This was purely done as an experiment. We wanted to know if we could viral out a product on Facebook.