Using a chat SDK not only can shorten your development time, but also help you build a stable product and scale quickly. Before you instruct your team to start investing time adding all available features from ChatKitty, have you identified your product's purpose, and its primary use case?
Are you and your team considering adding chat to your product roadmap? Congratulations! You have made the right choice. As a product owner myself, I believe all excellent products eventually need to connect all users via a good chat experience. At this point, you probably have spoken to your developers about the options to make the chat happen. If you are looking at the ChatKitty website, you are probably thinking about using a chat SDK.
Using a chat SDK not only can shorten your development time, but also help you build a stable product and scale quickly. Before you instruct your team to start investing time adding all available features from ChatKitty, have you identified your product's purpose, and its primary use case?
You may be wondering why I am asking these questions. Many founders will tell you one of the hardest things before getting the blade and glory of developing a product is to plan out the features that need to be included in the road map.
Your developers and your users may have different expectations of what your product will accomplish. Before digging into it, simplify what the chat needs to accomplish and who the users are.
Here is a breakdown of all the features ChatKitty offers. You may be surprised by the variety of features right away, but we trimmed our offerings to provide our partners' essential features compared to our competitions on the market.
User features:
Admin features:
Rather than going through them one by one. I want to use a more product-driven way to help you discover what chat experience you need. To help you better plan out your features with ChatKitty, I have broken down various standard chat features on the market.
Relationship apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Tinder
You are not a stranger to the apps I mentioned above. Suppose you are building something to connect people in the same communities or who already know each other; private chat and push notification are going to be your bread & butter. Besides, you can add Reactions and GIF to the conversation. For a dating app like Tinder, small things like GIF will get the conversation going. For the rest of the features, it will be up to the user survey. Whatever helps the users to make the conversation interesting, you add it.
Must: Private Chat and Push Notification Nice to have: Reactions, GIF and Delivery and read receipts
Collaboration apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangout
You need to make this category as productivity-driven as possible. Group chat and message threads are a must in this case. Especially message threads, this should come as a standard for collaboration tools. The users can follow up conversation back to the original post. Since now, we are all working from home, Typing and Presence Indicators will be nice to have. It gives the insurance that you are there and receives the message.
Must: Group Chat and Threads Nice to have: Typing and Presence Indicators
Community apps like Twitch, Reddit, and YouTube
If you are working on a product in this category, you bring the entire world together. Rather than having public chat rooms, message threads and reactions, you need to have control. ChatKitty admin tool will help you to keep heated conversations under control and restrict troublemakers on your platform. Speaking from experience, one bad character in the group will scare off other users. You need admin control as early as in the development.
Must: Public Chat Room and Admin Control Nice to have: Reactions and Threads
Marketplace app apps like eBay, Airbnb and Upwork
This category is similar to the relationship app, but your users are not here to build an ongoing relationship. Users are here to find a perfect match of things. Once it's done, the conversation can end there. In this case, delivery and message receipts are something I considered essential. You want the buyers, and the sellers are aware that the transaction is happening. A stable push notification will also be a plus, but when a seller misses a text, this may lead to a potential loss. Lastly, a presence indicator will be something nice to have, but you need to test it with your users.
Must: Private Chat and Push Notification Nice to have: Delivery and message receipts
One and done apps like Uber, Instacart, and DoorDash
Finally, we have to talk about this category. It's a category that has changed our lives forever, but we don't care too much about the message feature within them. When you think back, users only use it for a few phrases: "Where are you?" "Almost there." and "Food is here!". For this category, a private one to one chat, stable push notification and location indicator will do the job.
Must: Private Chat and Push Notification Nice to have: Location Indicators
Aside from these common chat apps we mentioned above, many other types of apps on the market have excellent chat features Hinges, Poshmark, Instagram DM, and many more. When you dig into those products' history, you can find a common theme, which is to find the bread and butter feature you need in the chat. When you don't know where to start with your feature planning, you can't go wrong, starting with a one-to-one chat and stable push notifications.
Once these features are running smoothly, your team can start to validate your idea right away without spending extra time and money on development. My team and I have learned from experience.
My co-founder Aaron elaborates in detail on our chat features in this series of articles. Stay tuned for more.
This article features the image "CEO planning and prioritizing the quarter with the team." by airfocus.