Frontier Tech Live 🌊 Voice and Venmo
For the last ten years at betaworks, we’ve primarily developed our new products privately — whether it was building GIPHY with Alex Chung, Dots with Patrick Moberg, or Bitly way back in the day, the way we spur new ideas is by lowering the walls between people — encouraging everyone to share insights or information.
In our space, we host brown bag lunches, Think Sessions, and diverse talks with everyone from behavioral scientists to former governors. In the next ten years, it’s our aim to share these learnings not only among each other, but with the wider betaworks community (that’s you, if you’re reading this…).
In Meeting Notes, we’ll be sharing insights from these conversations at betaworks. Today’s is on @jarednewman’s weekly Deep Dive Live, where he goes deep on select topics in frontier tech. Here’s what we learned…
Meeting Notes: Frontier Tech Live
For our first (Frontier Tech) Deep Dive Live, we looked at two themes with a specific example for each: Voice in the context of Alexa Owners vs. Alexa Buyers; and Humane Tech with an emphasis on Venmo as a social platform. Jared, an analyst on the betaworks ventures team, will continue to present Deep Dive Live every Friday. Below we cover some of the major themes and discussion points of the session:
Echo Owners vs. Echo Buyers vs. Amazon Customers
If you’re one of the 50 million Amazon Echo owners in the world, you are on the VIP list at Club Bezos. Why? You’ll typically spend $1,700 on Amazon.com in annual spending compared to Prime Members who spend $1,300 per year, followed by regular Amazon customers (U.S.) that spend $1,000 per year.
betaworks has unique access to cutting edge research from portfolio companies like Alpine.ai, which defined Echo Owners as individuals and households that have never ordered items on the Echo, and Echo Buyers are those that have placed an order once or multiple times. A report from Alpine.ai deemed Echo Owners as wealthier individuals that tend to spend more on consumer packaged goods than those without the device. Echo Buyers are older, more educated, and skew male. What does this mean though?
It should be a signal to those of us in tech, ecommerce, and other related industries that (at some point) Echo Buyers will become more important than Echo Owners, and they’ll also become important to distributors and retailers who sell items through Amazon. We expect our buying behavior on the Echo to expand beyond household items and CPGs like toilet paper and dish soap, to other categories like apparel and groceries. Items that we typically wanted to see on our screens or perhaps touch in-person will eventually be ordered by Alexa, who we will trust more to make decisions for us.
The new brand advertising challenge with voice
Brands, retailers and advertisers must also be prepared for more and more smart speakers entering homes. These companies will need to start answering questions like, “What does the actual voice of my brand or product sound like on the Echo and other smart speakers? Male? Female? Promotional? Personal?”
These brands must also consider selling on Amazon since buying through the Echo is a currently a walled garden (placing orders for items cannot be done outside of Amazon.com, and the same is true with Google Home and Target courtesy of an exclusive partnership). Focusing on the branding and usability challenges alone, we also discussed the importance of where in the house smart speakers sit. If in the kitchen, you’ll likely order items and use Alexa for things relating to cooking, baking, and eating. In the bathroom, you’ll ask Alexa to get you more toilet paper if you’re running low and add on a new toothbrush since yours just fell on the ground.
Relating to the walled garden shopping experiences, some of us in the room expect Google to use that to their advantage since they are not a true marketplace like Amazon. These Google Home advocates expect the garden walls to open up allowing users more flexibility and specificity with voice-based purchases. If this does become a reality, that means direct to consumer brands have a really strong opportunity to control the relationship with their customers who are also smart speaker users. If they develop a “skill” that is intuitive and people can find value from, the DTC brands could find a very pretty spot in the emerging voice space.
Venmo is the honest social network
Peer-to-peer payments app, Venmo, is considered by some to be more social than Facebook and Instagram. If you’re unfamiliar, Venmo has a couple of feeds that fuel the social nature of these P2P micropayments. There’s a “global” feed for any and all public payment posts, and then there’s the “Friends” feed, where you can thumb your way through post after post of your friends as you would on other platforms, and see your friends’ payments (if they set the visibility to public). You can see who they paid (or who paid them), a caption (either text, emoji, or a combination of the two), and the day and time of the payment. You do not see the amount.
“It’s arguably easier to learn more [on Venmo] about people’s relationships than it is on Facebook. People are careful about what they put on the latter platform these days. Hell, it’s 2018, do many couples go Facebook Official anymore?
But couples absolutely broadcast their dates to the world on Venmo. I have found out not only who is dating, but who is living together, and who is a person’s rebound. I have discovered who has the weed hookup, which friends go to the movies every Friday night together, and a group of six that brunches every Sunday. Venmo makes it incredibly easy to keep tabs on people. This has been a revelation to my procrastination methods, but not so great for my psyche.”
— Anna Iovine (Slate)
Since most users set their transactions to be seen by friends, knowing what your friends are doing (but not how much they’re spending) builds these new behaviors that elicit intrigue, curiosity, and the same desire you might see on Instagram to be funny or cool. Context without the content at its finest.
The role of emoji for Venmo and its users?
When you create a new payment in Venmo, the first thing you do is select which of your friends (or new connection via username or phone number) will be involved. Next, you choose the dollar amount (only visible by you and the other user). Next, you enter your caption, and this is where things get interesting. As you type, Venmo will (strongly) suggest you use emoji instead. So, if you write “piz” Venmo will display the pizza emoji. Or, as you type “socc” Venmo will auto-generate the soccer ball emoji and try to get you to use the visual instead.
We’ve noticed that Venmo uses design elements that pray on human weaknesses. Let’s put this into a formula of sorts:
Hidden dollar amounts + Contextual emoji = human vulnerabilities (jealousy, curiosity, FOMO)
Now, there’s also a Millennial audience at play, and part of Venmo’s user behavior is to write fake captions or random emoji sequences trying to one-up their friends. Sometimes they’ll be referring to inside jokes which completely removes the true context to anyone seeing the payment in their feed. But we asked, “why does the app UX encourage users to use emojis over written sentences?”
Perhaps it’s merely a nod to the Millennial audience, but it also could parlay into a social network, or built on mystery. Unlike Facebook or Instagram which allows us to showcase the best versions of ourselves whenever we want, Venmo is different. You can’t fully control when someone accepts your payment or requests money from you (sorry if your primetime is Sunday evening at 7pm). You also may not be the one setting the emoji, so your friend who uses Venmo purely for its utility may keep her payments private, when you actually wanted all your friends to see 💅 🥂️ in their feed.
Add a layer of relationship tracking to this social network built on mystery, and we speculate that some of the addictive behavior on Venmo is actually a result of lack of user knowledge. We suspect some users do not know they can change the privacy settings of their payments from public to private, nor do they know they can turn off the suggested emoji feature. While it’s certainly possible to turn both off, it is hidden in the Settings. Plus, we can’t deny a Millennial-fueled drive to be social sharers (whether intended or not) on Venmo and present our lives in a certain way, just with less creative control than we do on the major social platforms.
We do Frontier Tech Live conversations every Friday at betaworks Studios 12:30–1:30pm for members and guests. For membership question tweet us @betaworkstudios and we’ll wrangle up a day pass for you to come in person.
More soon, Tyler and the studios team.
