Poesie: Mission, Product, and Roadmap (2019)

This document lays out the upcoming year’s roadmap for Poesie, an app dedicated to the arts that was launched last year. Our main goal is to build a broader vision of our current app and validate product market fit and engagement. If you are interested in collaborating as we build and evolve the product, we’d love to hear from you! You can reach us at poesie.app@gmail.com.

Poesie is available for download on the iTunes app store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1332841582.

Background

Poesie is a company dedicated to delivering interactive and social online arts experiences.

In 2018, Poesie launched as a simple poem-a-day app, curating “best of” selections from classic poetry for arts lovers around the world. As we’ve grown organically, we’ve been sending out surveys asking our engaged users what they want us to build next. Answers have come in three buckets: show us more great content, help us learn about that content, and give us opportunities to share our own creative work. With a target audience in mind and guidance around what they are looking for, we are ready to build and scale a full-featured, self-sustaining ecosystem.

Poesie began as a basic poem-a-day service. This remains the core of our product.

Mission

We want Poesie to be a community space for lovers of the arts all around the world.

We want to build a virtual community center for the arts. Poesie should be a place where people who love the arts come to read and learn about great literature and music, discuss what they’ve read, and even share things they’ve written with others. Once here, members should feel like they have found a community of people all around the world who also love the arts.

The space we build will provide services spanning discovery, learning, and creativity — we think that offering these three services is necessary for becoming a lifestyle destination around which the Poesie community can grow.

Our main audience is the set of people who love the arts and want to bring more poetry, literature, and music into their lives. While most will come to read and learn, arts enthusiasts and even arts organizations should be able to help produce and facilitate content and interactions.

Our community cares about content discovery, learning, and creativity.

Product

Poesie will deliver core services around discovery, learning, and creativity layered over digital content and user profiles.

We want Poesie to be an interactive space for engaging and connecting with arts content and the arts community. Our users have told us that engagement with the arts includes discovery (help them discover and read great new content), creativity (help them discuss the arts and even share their own work), and learning (help them learn more about the content they love).

To get there, we have started by building a foundational layer to deliver arts services. This feature set includes searchable libraries of digital content, social and interactive reading surfaces for the content, and user profiles to track your journey through the app and interact with the rest of the community.

With that groundwork in place, we are building the basic suite of services our users have requested. We have already built a daily curated content discovery service. Next, we are adding a forum for sharing your own poetry and a platform of learning modules covering content and genres across the arts.

Poesie provides services layered on top of digital libraries, interactive content, and user profiles.

Roadmap

Our main goal for the next year is to validate product market fit and engagement for the broader vision of our product. Then, we will begin to explore partnerships and avenues for growth.

Over the past year, we launched our poem-a-day service and are successfully reaching and retaining an initial audience that is passionate about the arts. We goaled on (1) user survey responses gauging sentiment towards Poesie, and (2) stable long-term retention from engaged users.

Product: Achieving these goals encouraged us to pursue a broader vision for Poesie. Our current focus is building that full-featured Poesie product. Engagement goals here include (1) participation across the expanded set of features, and (2) higher WAU/MAU and app retention as a result. We will also goal on (3) user surveys gauging success at building community.

Monetization: Success here would open up the possibility of bringing revenue streams to the expanded feature set. Goals include (1) user survey responses indicating willingness to pay for content, (2) initial tests to see if users will purchase premium content, and (3) demonstrated interest from partners who want to reach our user base.

Growth: Finally, we want to learn whether Poesie has the potential to reach millions of people. Our initial goals here include (1) ramp up and sustain new user flow (at a low cost/user), to prove the feasibility of user acquisition, and (2) drive to minimum penetration in a single geographic area, to prove market size.

Just this week, we launched the ability for community members to share and interact with each other’s poetry.

Summary

We are beginning a journey to build a product that has the potential to positively impact the lifestyle of users around the world.

Today, thousands of users love Poesie’s simple poem-a-day service. Our bigger mission is to help people around the world integrate the arts more regularly into their lifestyles. To accomplish this, we must build a broader set of services that support the growth of self-sustaining community.

Using the input of our retentive user base, we have created a product roadmap that covers three major buckets of engagement with the arts. If engagement is strong, we will move on to a next set of work including partnerships and premium content, increased depth and breadth of services, and eventually growth and marketing.

Though we are not yet focused on growth, it has been inspiring to watch our community grow organically.