Maltese tech entrepreneur Jean Gatt has opened up on the lessons learned through the development of Meerchat, an app which sought to redefine the support group experience, but which he ultimately terms a “failure”.

The social app reached over 10,000 users across more than 250 micro-communities focused on everything from students and language learners to people quitting smoking or losing weight, as well as programmers and meditaters. The start-up even secured pre-seed investment from venture capital firm Antler.

Nonetheless, it did not achieve the kind of growth its founders, Mr Gatt and Guillaume De Sá, were hoping for. Various features were tweaked to improve user engagement and retention, but with little to offer by way of virality, the pair saw their efforts to relatively unrewarded.

Writing on Substack, the Maltese Founder underlined the importance of a viral element to drive organic growth through a high K factor, which defines virality by factoring in how many new users the average existing user.

“We've come to believe that the issue boiled down to a single factor: our product was largely trivial and novelty-free,” even though it “addressed the needs of a significant portion of our clients,” said Mr Gatt

“Merely being ‘good’ wasn't enough. The absence of a ‘wow’ effect was detrimental.”

He explained that Meerchat’s interface was too similar to existing offerings and failed to stand out. Ultimately, they could not find a way to overcome this challenge: “We didn’t find this unique mechanic, interface, or network element that sets us apart to pave the way to virality.”

The problem, as Mr Gatt puts it, is that “no one was talking to their friends about our app,” an issue that might be related to the nature of the project – connecting isolated individuals with shared interests.

“If you don’t have peers sharing the same interests, who will you tell about the app?”

The main takeaway, for Mr Gatt, is that designing with virality and shareability in mind needs to be a key focus. Finding a mechanic that naturally increases the K-factor is a “necessity” to trigger the urge to share something novel, even if it does not directly add value to users’ experience within the app.

“We've failed, but that's fine,” said Mr Gatt, “as what we have learnt over the past months is invaluable for our next venture,” which is set to be released “in the coming days”.

The full post can be found here. It also features fascinating insights on the differences in user behaviour between generations and interest groups, the optimal notification settings to drive engagement, online group dynamics, and more.