Edit: changed title from “Postmortem” to something less dramatic sounding.
Today it has been one month since the official release of the Community Decks feature on Bunpro. It has been available longer in beta (about nine months ago?), but I think now’s the perfect time to see how the community is responding and reacting to this feature.
As of this writing, there are currently 119,232 users on Bunpro. This is found by looking this page and adding all of the users. I tested after making an account, it automatically gets added to the page.
That’s a lot of users! But how many of them are active subs? This is where things get tricky as I don’t have the data, but I can speculate. Edtech apps usually hover between 20-50% so that would put the active sub count between 24k-60k users. That’s a huge gap!
Sources, as this shows 27% retention and this one has it as low as 2.1%! However this source shows 30-day retention rates between 27-43% and higher-performing apps at 32-66%
Boy, that’s not helpful at all! But let’s stick with 20-50%, if Bunpro would share their numbers, this would of course paint a more accurate picture.
Let’s dive into the decks!
Lookin’ pretty good eh?
I manually counted 155 community decks at the time of writing this, so I will use that for the epic math crunch later.
But let’s break things down. Those numbers in that image from earlier? Looking pretty impressive…but that’s misleading. Let’s go into the numbers.
There is one deck that has 500+ users. I assume at minimum 500 users. I think the range is between 500-999 users?
Congrats…@asher…wait…decks from Bunpro staff counts as a community deck? Okay. That’s cool. But what about the others?
There are 6 decks that have 100+ users, again assuming minimum 100 users and a max of 499.
Uh, congrats again @Asher! You must be quite the popular man.
There are 11 decks that have 50+ users. 50 minimum and a max of 99 users. Don’t worry I won’t post another picture! Let’s just go through the rest of this!
57 decks with 10+ users. 10 minimum and a max of 49 users.
And lastly… 71 decks, about half of all community decks with less than 10 users. SAD! Side note, I found 9 decks with nothing mentioned. My assumption that it’s 0 users, so I will add it to the <10 side making it 80 total.
What does this mean?
Let’s do some number crunching!
| Category | Number of Decks | Min Users per Deck | Max Users per Deck | Min % (24k Active) | Max % (24k Active) | Min % (60k Active) | Max % (60k Active) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500+ users | 1 | 500 | 999 | 2.08% | 4.16% | 0.83% | 1.67% |
| 100+ users | 6 | 100 | 499 | 0.42% | 2.08% | 0.17% | 0.83% |
| 50+ users | 11 | 50 | 99 | 0.21% | 0.41% | 0.08% | 0.17% |
| 10+ users | 57 | 10 | 49 | 0.04% | 0.20% | 0.02% | 0.08% |
| <10 users | 80 | 0 | 9 | 0.00% | 0.04% | 0.00% | 0.02% |
What a lovely table, eh? I hope I did the math right!
Wow that is a long tail. Half of all decks have between 0.00-0.04% of active users. Even lower if we account all users on the platform!
Slightly, and I do mean slightly better with the ~55 decks with 10+ users. But we have about 135 or so decks with less than half of one percent of all active users using this function.
However, on the bright side, I think it’s admirable that there are users who spent time out of their day to make these decks with the intent on helping out fellow learners. Not to mention one deck has between 0.83-4.16% of active users on it. Pretty impressive!
Overall, if I was Bunpro, I would pay close attention to the adoption rates of these decks and see how much value they are providing to users. The data…isn’t encouraging, but with tweaking and curating, it could move the needle in a positive direction.
Perhaps consider weekly spotlights to highlight some users or reaching out to deck authors directly to get feedback on the process of making them.
It’s an idea that can work, but must be tread carefully. My instincts tell me that Bunpro-curated decks are the way to go and to axe the community feature entirely, but I would like to be proven wrong!
)
