I served as a Product and Branding Consultant at Reelay, striving to revitalize the social content creation space for TV and movie enthusiasts. Our mission was to make the streaming experience more interactive and engaging, and to provide personalized content discovery influenced by community recommendations rather than algorithms. Within my consulting period, we achieved a remarkable 250% increase in active users.

My intrigue with this project was sparked instantly when I discovered Reelay at SXSW '22 in Austin, Texas. I've been captivated by the intensity of film and TV discussions ever since I found myself fervently arguing with friends that 'Gladiator' is, in fact, Ridley Scott's masterpiece. The chance to contribute to a platform that nurtures such passionate dialogues was an opportunity I couldn't resist. It felt like a natural step to join the team and lend my expertise to this endeavor.

App Name: Reelay (iOS)

Timeframe: 6 months

Role: Product and Branding Consultant

Objective: Identify problems, improve key metrics, and ultimately discover a system to rejuvenate a declining product.

Category: Social App in Entertainment (Film/TV)

Reelay is a short-form video app for people to connect over their love of film/tv and recommend titles to each other.

How it works:

Personally I really love what Reelay is all about. It's where people help each other find great entertainment and also contribute to subject-driven conversations. It is not a place where people look for fame or post about themselves. Reelay is to be a social experience that is authentic, useful, and feels like its happening over dinner.

What truly drew me to the project is that the entire team was made up of 3 people (4 including me). Everything moves fast. Decisions matter. Communication is direct. Everyone is involved. Collaboration is intense. I joined a small team with big aspirations, who are passionate, and committed. A truly great opportunity for me.

For the amount of time and effort that was put into the app, the lack of growth in userbase became an issue. Despite a loyal and active core user base, Reelay struggled to both attract new audiences and retain existing users over a longer period of time. Furthermore users session duration times were noticeably low. The overall feedback from users was overwhelmingly positive - what was the issue?

It was important to clearly define the KPI we were aiming to most improve upon.

We broke our KPI down in three main categories (Users, Usage, and Content)

Understanding the stage of the product, I presented four specific metrics I believed we should focus our efforts upon.

For Reelay to succeed we needed users to not only watch movies, but also post their thoughts on them. It also needed to be a variety of users who upload content as the feed should not be dominated by the same faces everytime a user opens the app. To monetize effectively through advertisements it is important that the 'For You' page (Discover) sees a lot of traffic. Thus an emphasis on increasing the avg. swipes per session per user. Lastly it wasn't just enough for users to view content about movies. We want them to add these titles directly to their watchlist so they can remember to watch them and join the conversation afterwards.

As the app has not been adopted by the casual masses yet - Reelay's users were mostly people who are deeply involved in movies and TV shows and have a desire to enhance their overall experience through a social platform with like-minded people.

1. Casual Viewer: Casual viewers may often find themselves spending more time deciding what to watch than actually watching. With Reelay, the burden of choice is alleviated as they can rely on recommendations from their favorite influencers, friends, and trusted circles instead of algorithmic suggestions. Casual viewers are mostly lurkers - they don't post content and rather watch videos on the latest titles.

2. Avid Film and TV Fan: The most active and loyal users. Their love for film/tv and the art of cinema unites them. They are first to post about what they have seen and they usually engage in in-depth discussions about plotlines, fan theories, and hot takes. The app becomes a hub for sharing and exploring the content they love with others who share similar interests.(Can be Influencers)

3. Content Creator/Influencer: Influencers come to Reelay to engage with an audience and are excited to share their opinions on movies and TV shows. By starting discussions and sharing recs they guide followers and others alike towards new content. Plus, their influence can help promote lesser-known titles and contribute to a broader understanding and appreciation of the art of film and television.

4. Family or Friend Group: For families or friend groups, Reelay provides a way to collectively decide on what to watch, reducing potential disagreements or indecision.

Designing for everyone means designing for no one. As such I crafted a 2x2 to identify our priority user type for this campaign.

Superhero: Watches a lot of titles and feels the need to share their thoughts on them to strike up a conversation with the community.

Sidekick: Has plenty of thoughts on titles and wishes to discuss them, but is usually not the first to strike up a conversation (mostly expresses themselves in the comment sections).

Celebrity: Wants to openly share their opinion on titles. Mostly to attract like-minded people and validate their feelings.

Supporter: Seeks out opinions similar to theirs about titles they have recently seen.

Although all users are important, time and resources were limited. As such the design had to prioritize certain users at certain times for maximum impact. Fortunately, by designing experiences that attract & retain more Superheros , we improve the overall experience on Reelay for all other users.

More vocal film fans -> more content created -> more community-wide interactions -> more recommendations

To ensure that the design will speak to the target user there needs to be sufficient motivation in place. I created an Octalysis to visualize these motivators (validated through conversations with users and secondary research) based on the 8 core drives of human motivation (framework by Yu-Kai Chou).

Due to the limited resources (extremely small size of the team) we had agreed to only work on features / systems / QoL changes that would take no more than a week to develop and implement. This approach allowed us to test, ship & iterate often while maintaining a close relationship with our core users.

Film lovers truly enjoy getting to showcase their knowledge of cinema. We implemented a systemwide event that launched once a day. Users (Players) were given a mystery film and had up to 5 clues to guess the correct title. Due to the competitive nature of our target user, the guessing game became a quick hit.

The Reelay game achieved multiple things:

Users started to build a habit to open the app a certain time, play the game, and browse through the app for the latest

Users increasingly added titles from the guessing game to their watchlists

Users recorded themselves playing the game and shared it across socials bringing in new users organically

Once they tried it, the vast majority of users continued to play every day and made it a point to not miss out on the daily challenge

During my initial audit of Reelay I experienced several issues in regards to the usability and consistency of the system. Each week we tackled a set of issues to improve the usability of the app and reduce frustration within the user.

Minimal changes allowed for a smoother introduction to Reelay

Feedback suggested that new users struggled to navigate within the main feed. I solved this by educating them when they first entered the feed

Early December I was notified that the team decided to close the doors on Reelay due to a lack of resources to keep the project going. As a result the majority of my work, all of which I was incredibly excited about, unfortunately never got to see the light of day.

Areas I was working on:

Crafting a Design System

Landing Page Re-Design

Gamification of the System (The Hero Journey)

Battling Participation Inequality

Building a Dynamic Experience