Scaling Santa: How Make Believe Labs Built a Successful Video Chat App

The primary customers of the 'Hello Santa' app are parents who want to give their children a magical experience of video chatting with Santa Claus. These parents value authenticity and realism in the representation of Santa. They are willing to pay for a service that provides a high-quality, believable interaction with Santa. The app also appeals to the children who get to interact directly with Santa, making their Christmas experience more memorable and exciting. The customers are tech-savvy enough to download and use an app, and they appreciate the convenience of being able to access Santa from their own homes at a time that suits them.

In August, Dorian Collier's three-year-old son asked if he could FaceTime with Santa Claus. Dorian, a veteran software consultant and a partner at Make Believe Labs, was confident that an app for this purpose would already exist among the million-plus apps in the App Store. However, his search ended without a promising result. He found that no one was offering video calls with Santa at scale. Seeing an opportunity, Dorian and his partners decided to create an app that would allow children to video chat with Santa Claus. The challenge was to create a product with mass appeal and have it in the app store in just a few weeks. They also needed to ensure that the Santa represented in the app was realistic and authentic, as this was the most important factor for parents.

Make Believe Labs started by conducting market research. They talked to around 1,000 people and used Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect responses to a 50-question survey. This helped them understand who would use the service, how much they would pay for it, and what kind of experience they expected from it. They also recruited a 'Chief Santa' and about 50 other Santas to answer calls in a 12-hour window every day of the week. The technology behind the queuing system was built by Make Believe Labs. They released a private beta of the app in October to test their idea. The app was kept simple: users signed up, pressed 'call', and it dialed Santa. The positive response from the beta test led to the official launch of the 'Hello Santa' app in the App Store on November 21. To support their fast-growing user base, Make Believe Labs used Zapier to automate a proactive approach to customer support.

• The 'Hello Santa' app was a success, both in terms of its reception and its operational efficiency. The app was able to handle a large volume of calls, thanks to the queuing system built by Make Believe Labs. The use of Zapier for automating customer support helped the small team manage their fast-growing user base effectively. The app was also able to deliver on its promise of providing a realistic and authentic Santa experience, which was the most important factor for parents. The positive response from users and the press coverage it received helped boost the app's popularity. The success of the 'Hello Santa' app has opened up new opportunities for Make Believe Labs, with plans to launch more apps featuring popular children's characters.

• The app was downloaded by thousands of users within weeks of its launch.

• The app was featured in a Los Angeles Times holiday article and received its first press coverage in TechCrunch within two weeks of its launch.

• The app was able to handle calls from a large number of users, with about 50 Santas taking turns to answer calls in a 12-hour window every day of the week.