1) Sell to people who can write the check, and have a budget to spend
That's my entire advice. It seems obvious. If you're selling to an individual, choose a demographic with money to spend. And charge a price to fit into their budget.
If you're selling to a team, don't. Sell to the person buying products/tools for the team, the one with signing authority. They make the ultimate decision. And they have a budget to spend, and will likely spend it all on something.
This reminds me of the quote: "When a great team and product meets a lousy market, market usually wins. When a mediocre team and product meets a great market, market usually wins"
it means a bad market will make even a good product unsuccesful, and a good market will make even a mediocre product successful. the quality of the market wins out over the quality of the product.
Note that this isn't the first step. In order: identify a problem, talk with people (first with those you think have the problem) to learn more about it: Is it actually a problem? How are people addressing/solving it? What are the pain points? Is it severe enough to warrant a better solution? Would anyone pay for a solution? How much would they pay? How many people would pay for that solution? Can I make the solution? Can I distribute the solution?
If you get a bad answer to any of these, you need to do some thinking and talk with more/different users, and if no change then you probably can't make a business on this (and don't need to continue along the chain until then). Once those are true, then yes, sell to the people who can write a check.
>> If you're selling to a team, don't. Sell to the person buying products/tools for the team, the one with signing authority.
While buying decisions are made on top, initial usage/trial decisions are often made by expert team members. I'll say, first soft-sell and get expert team members to try out your product, and soon-after ask them to connect you to the manager or decision-maker for further discussion.
> There are a million and 1 habit and goal apps out there and I made the mistake to think that just because there are a lot of products in this space, doesn’t mean that there is a lot of businesses in that space.
I think you were thinking of two different ways to phrase that, mixed them up, and the result is that it says the opposite?
As in, either remove 'I made the mistake to think that', or 'doesn't mean that'.
At least for this particular flavor of app, building an Android version is an optimization that should be made once the product has been proven successful.
Until that happens, it would be a huge waste of time and money for the developer to build an Android version, since it too would fail as a product, just like the iOS version.
Multiplying 0 by 2 is still 0.
The situation might be different for an app whose success depended on the user's ability to use the app to communicate with all of their friends, some of which had Android phones.
It seems like it would be simple enough, but it's death by a thousand cuts. Supporting Android means having to keep track of even more screen sizes, OS versions, updates, app store releases and so on. It just adds on more and more. For one developer who is trying to prove out an idea, the work to support the app on multiple platforms just eats up your time and focus when you really should be focusing on features and adjusting what the product is as you get more info from your existing customers.
There are of course frameworks out there to help you build one codebase for multiple platforms, but if you go down that route, if you aren't familiar with the framework, you have to learn it. There are going to be quirks in them that you're not aware of. Maybe framework version X only works with iOS version Y and Android version Z. It just goes on and on. Frameworks aren't perfect either, and things don't work exactly the same across platforms even with the framework.
Even when using about cross-platform frameworks, there's quirks, store pages and time to invest to maintain the other platform. My Flutter app is still not available on iOS for example.
For mobile apps, if you're a single developer, I think going with a single platform is fine. You can only do so much, and if you're familiar with the platform, you can move much more quickly than having to support two. That's the strategy I've chosen and it's helped a lot because I was already an expert in iOS and a lot of the work is just "figuring out what users want" and it's easier to change your code on a single platform that you know really well.
I think the biggest myth with apps today is "if you build it, they will come". I think it was true 10 years ago when the iPhone App Store was getting started, but not today.
The thing is, having a ton of competitors in the space means you will have to work extra hard for your app to be seen and then picked. "Lesson 4: Distribution" in the post is probably the most important thing here. Marketing and SEO are huge in terms of getting people to know about your app.
I have an app of my own in the iOS app store and the times I've had jumps in sales have been tied to either me posting about it somewhere or someone else posting about it on their own. If I don't get the word out, nobody is going to know about my app.
Like the poster, my app is in a crowded space (flash cards), and so a search in the app store doesn't even show my app, at least not until you scroll for a minute or so...
> I think it was true 10 years ago when the iPhone App Store was getting started, but not today
In 2008 before the App Store when Cydia and Installer where the only way to install apps on your iPhone, my app was getting 10,000 installs per day with 0 marketing. I refer to that period as the gold rush days.
I remember a coworker made a very basic compass app with a friend in the early days of the iPhone and he disclosed that they made something like $200k on it, which is absolutely wild.
> the biggest myth with apps today is "if you build it, they will come"
Are there really people who still think that? I thought it was common knowledge that market knowledge, sales, and marketing are an order of magnitude more important than the tech.
I shudder to think of those who quit their jobs and jumped all the way in without knowing this basic fact
Full disclosure: I've not been down this road, so I'm talking through my hat here.
Posting a project to ProductHunt is unlikely to get it in front of your target demographic, but that doesn't mean it's worthless. People will download your app and if all goes well some of those people will leave you a positive review.
That matters for ranking, which gets your app in front of people. If you get some good reviews, that matters for conversion because it lends some social credit.
> so many of the upvotes I get and comments that I get are clearly spambots.
Is there any data on this? I'd be interested to see what % of real users they have.
Many times I've visited ProductHunt there's a top 4 app that doesn't seem useful at all that has tons of generic comments like "Great work!", "Can't wait to see what you do next!", "So useful!" (common on Twitter too).
Guessing you could get bots to vote + comment occasionally to build up their reputation and then use or sell your bot army to manipulate the votes for specific product launches later?
I don't know if there's data, but I've seen other people posting about on Indie Hackers. I started noticing something was up when I saw the same generic comments you mentioned on my post as other people's posts.
Another thing that's interesting is after you post on Product Hunt, you may get emails from third parties offering services to boost your upvotes.
I guess it depends on the product. I just recently posted my newest side project there (an NFT minting webservice) and I even got a handful of paying clients. The conversation rate was quite high, and it has dropped significantly afterwards.
So I guess if you want to reach a techie audience, it's not a bad place to get the word out.
Edit: the website is https://Nuftu.com, you can find it on producthunt by searching for the name
Slightly OT: I built myself a journaling app that sends one email every day to remind me to write about that day; I respond to that email and the response gets stored in a db as an entry for that day.
The system doesn't try to be clever in any way, it just sends and receives emails; it's proven quite effective. It's been running for about two years now and there are only a couple of days missing, if that. It's very interesting to be able to go back to any day in the past and know what happened, or what I was thinking about, that exact day.
The system can also be set up to handle different journals at different intervals; it helped me write a novel last year.
I'm the only user and it lacks many features to be called an actual product; but sometimes I wonder if others would find it useful.
Also OT: I built something very similar, but with text messages and asking for a positive thing that happened during the day rather than a journal entry (forcing myself to look for positive things in a day helped snap me out of a spiral toward depression in the early days of lockdowns). I spent a weekend getting it to the point where it was good enough to share with friends and family, and about a dozen of them signed up. My mom and I are the only ones who still use it.
I guess I have two thoughts: 1) simple, habit-based products aren't nearly as sticky as I thought without some kind of social validation component. 2) dogfooding your projects with your personal network is a great way to see if they're actually sticky and just to learn more about the market in general - I recommend it.
This is almost exactly the feature set of OhLife, which tried and failed to make this experience (replying to a daily email as a form of journaling) into a product. It's a great idea but kind of hard to make money on.
This sounds interesting, I think the advantage here is that you've focused on 1 use case where I was focused on many habits. Keeping it focused on one niche like journaling makes more sense.
Users have an email address and own tasks. Tasks are metadata, mainly the frequency (in days) and the time of day when the prompt should be sent. Prompts are a log: each time the system sends a prompt about a task it is logged in the prompts table. And items are entries for tasks: users replies to prompts.
Every x minutes a python script (cron) scans the db to see if a prompt needs to be sent about a task: for each task, when should the prompt be sent, and when was the last prompt sent?
Emails are handled via Mailgun which is used to send prompts and process replies. When a reply is sent, Mailgun creates a POST request to the system with the body of the email.
Each prompt has a unique ID that is present in the respond-to email, so that replies are correctly attached to a prompt (and therefore to a prompt date and a task); it also allows to reply late: each reply is linked to the prompt it replies to, not to the most recent one. It's also possible to send multiple replies to a single prompt.
Web interface for receiving posts from Mailgun and seeing the entries is coded in PHP, but it's extremely light. There is no functionality for updating entries, creating users, etc.: this is done via phpliteadministrator (very useful) or sometimes directly via SQL. There are also triggers in the db to do integrity checks when inserting or updating.
In my case, I spent most of my life around 18-23 years old living in my parents' working about 100% of my time on something of my own
I had a lot of negative support from friends, colleagues, and extended family as many don't see entrepreneurship with good eyes in Brazil.
The last project I worked (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dML0FQIUcTY, I spent 2013-2014 on it), was heading to the right direction, but then my business partner (first and last one so far) always wanted more and more.
In the end I had other opportunities (go back to college, and start a new job), and we just ditched all our efforts. Of course, we both regret it. Especially each time when we see something similar sold for a couple of millions.
I wouldn't have any regrets re:seeing something "similar" sold for millions of $.
Unless "heading in the right direction" means that you had a growing user base and/or solid revenue, in all likelihood the product you were building just wasn't succeeding. The idea in itself is not worth much: think Uber, Coursera, Airbnb, ... these are not novel ideas, many many people had the same ideas but didn't manage to make them a success (bad execution, or just bad luck/timing).
You seem to still be very very young, most successful companies are founded by people in their mid 30s, so don't despair just because a couple of your attempts were not successful. The best is still ahead of you.
tl;dr: I don't regret working on it. Just not even trying to market it!
By heading in the right direction, I mean that I've built the 'minimum viable product' entirely in one year. Now it was time to go after putting it in the market somehow, search for a venture capitalist or anything like that. But, no, we didn't even try.
We had many features that other sites didn't have back then. Such as the 'Google-like' search with auto-complete, auto-refresh appeal, etc. not so common back then, but we never went out after a single potential consumer or investor.
I was in a situation that I had to stop developing on my own and focus on other things in my life. However, my business partner didn't want to stop adding new features. He wanted a few more things that I could achieve in a month or two to start looking for an investor, but I just didn't have the throughput (no time due to new endeavors + saturated), and things died off.
I blame him for chickening out when we had possibly a tremendous competitive advantage that might make it an easy sell. I blame myself for not doing my own research for investors once I noticed that we reached a point of stagnation.
Context: He had great designing ideas but was not technical. I wasn't good at communication back then and counted on him too much to make this happen. If this was today, it wouldn't happen again, thanks to my experience now.
ahhh yes...you were working with an infamous "idea guy" where you were expected to do all the work while he sits back and just thinks of new ways to crack the whip with you.
that sort of thing is very rarely a good way to structure a business. the people who do the actual work almost always need to be the ones who decide on new features as only they know the proper work/reward ratios.
if i had a nickle for all the proposals i've seen from the "idea guys"...well i sure would have a lot of nickles.
Here is the issue: pursuing a - so called - stable career as a public servant is, unfortunately i what many consider success.go to a coffeshop and you'll hear many discussing about the admission process, what friends and relatives are trying, salaries for all sorts of random positions, and so on. Barely anyone will be talking about opening a company. Even less if we aren't talking about tech related ones.
I wouldn't say there isn't admiration, at least where I grew up.
It's just a general lack of role models. It's not often massive, inspiring companies emerge from Latin American countries.
Entrepreneurship is really hard in LatAm: bureaucracy, lack of venture capital, grounded business thinking (investors down here are likelier to invest in more grounded, less technological companies over bigger moonshots).
We just have no frame of reference to dream big. Add to that the fact that most LatAm countries are exceedingly poor, there isn't much room to take the kind of financial risk entrepreneurship entails.
There is hope: things are changing. Governments are investing in startup communities and the last decade brought us the first Latino tech unicorns. But we're a long way to go still.
TLDR: LatAm is generally poor, risk-averse due to culture and has problems generating the feel-good success stories first-world countries mass produce.
> I initially saw oh ok, there are a ton of people making these apps, it must be profitable.
If you look at a dense market and decide to join in because you see potential profit because the market is dense, you're already destined for failure. Everyone else already has a head start, which means you need some sort of differentiating feature to be competitive.
Why would I pay for blog software that's half baked or doesn't offer anything new? Or a to-do list? Or time tracker? Or invoicing tool?
The author dances around this, but it honestly sounds like the product they built wasn't remarkably good or novel, and was positioned against incumbents that were plentiful and often had existing success. The failure here seems to be a lack of business plan beyond "join the pack and make money".
But what about being a chat bot made it better? Being a chat bot doesn't make it do anything different than the competition, it's just a different interface. Being novel doesn't make it useful.
I suspect there are niches that you could profitably target. For example eating habits. Or exercise habits. Or studying habits for preparing for an LSAT exam.
In all of these cases the niche allows you to go much deeper with the product to address specific pain points.
You can also go much deeper with your advertising and marketing strategy. You can also reach out to specific podcasts and to specific blogs for marketing exposure.
1) Build something people really need, not a nice-to-have
2) Keeping customers is more important than just acquiring them
3) If you're not keeping your customers that means they don't want or need what you have
4) Changing people's behavior is really hard. Unless you have a significant amount of marketing budget, don't try to change people
5) "Distribution" is key. I have a hard time with the word "distribution" when often people mean "marketing" or "promotion" or "channels". That's what is usually meant. If you can't get an audience with the people you are trying to sell to, you might as well be invisible. I still don't get why people use the awkward term distribution for this.
6) You have to be better than what's already out there. If you're just as good, or worse, than the alternatives, then it's going to be really hard to make a sale. Alternatives don't mean direct competition. Anything that is an alternative for a customer to buy or use your product is real competition. This is especially the case if you're requiring the customer to change their habits to switch to your offering. You have to be MUCH better than the status quo and alternatives to do that.
7) Know who your customer is. Your user might not be your customer. Your customer might not have the itch to scratch even if the user does.
A lot of these are pretty common reasons for business failure but I suppose everyone has to go through their own personal challenges to internalize them.
Is it really realistic to build something people "need"? Humanity survived millions of years without a single piece of software; it's unlikely that anything you write is ever going to be a "need".
People buy stuff they don't need all the time. Games and other entertainment are the very definition of "nice to have", and they're vast markets. Even business tools are usually not "needs" if all they do is improve an existing product.
It's incredibly hard to know what will attract people. Even if you know categorically that a thing will make their lives better, people often won't get it, and instead spend their money on something objectively useless.
It seems to be luck as much as anything else, being in the right place at the right time. It catches a "buzz" for whatever reason and becomes popular, or fails to and doesn't. Knowing it beforehand would be great, but nobody ever does.
> Humanity survived millions of years without a single piece of software; it's unlikely that anything you write is ever going to be a "need".
I would argue that the software itself isn't the need, but rather a means of meeting the need.
Take Doordash for example. Humans have always needed to eat. Long ago, we met that need by each individual directly gathering food themselves. When a better solution came along - agriculture - we embraced it and largely dropped the previous one. Fast forward 12k years or so, and now we're able to have food prepared and brought to within a few feet of where we're sitting by tapping on a phone.
In other words, just because a problem has an existing solution doesn't mean it's not a viable target niche. If you can make a solution that's better for some population (and get it in front of those people) you have a product.
> Is it really realistic to build something people "need"?
I don’t know about B2C, but with B2B it’s fairly easy — just solve problems that cost them money, either in terms of actual money, time saved, or delivers new value.
If you can’t easily express the value a customer gets from your solution (especially if you have competition!), chances are you need to think again about the problem you’re solving.
If you're trying to run a business, then yes, it needs to be something people need, because you're asking people to give up something of value to them. Money and/or time. If you ask for something of value you have to provide something of value in return.
Of course, the need can be anything that people find valuable. It could be a product or a service or just a way to stay connected or entertainment. Whatever it is, it has to be something people "need" from a value perspective, if you are planning to make a business out of it.
Of course, you don't have to run a business. Many people do things out of their own interests that are never turned into businesses, and certainly humanity has been doing that for millenia. You don't have to turn it into a business. The points above are relevant to running a successful business.
I don't really understand your definition of need. You define a 'need' as anything that people find valuable, but I would classify 'nice to have' as also being things someone finds valuable.
How do you distinguish something that is a 'nice to have' and a 'need'?
If you sell to a business, your software makes a job go from needing 3 employees to 1 employee to do. You saved the business say $6000 per month. As long as your software cost less than $6000 per month, it helps the business be more profitable.
Selling to a person, to learn a new habit.. what is the dollar value to that? If a user cannot learn something on their own, that shows low commitment to that task. What then makes them open their wallet to commit to something else?
I think it's really hard to make money off bettering yourself, and really easy to make money selling to businesses. At least that is my view, and why I do B2B SAAS.
Nice to have is a luxury - it doesn't solve any actual problem people have, it just make life a little bit nicer. Need is an actual value proposition - people are already spending time or money to do a thing that you can do better.
I think you're using the rigid definition of "need" like the bottom of the Maslow hierarchy, but in the business world "need" is more value driven, or in the B2C side closer to the top of the hierarchy.
> Is it really realistic to build something people "need"? Humanity survived millions of years without a single piece of software; it's unlikely that anything you write is ever going to be a "need".
Replace "need" with "desire" and suddenly it makes sense.
People have a desire to socialize (facebook), people have a desire to be heard (twitter), people have a desire to communicate (messenger apps, phones), people have a desire to travel (automotive, travel), people have a desire to be entertained (netflix et al). Etc. Etc.
You don't really 'need' any of it, but there is a very high demand, and thus a big market.
Need in the context of the quote was used as opposed to "want". I think the point was to drive home that people are less likely to pay for, and continue using, things that they "want" versus "need".
The problem is, needs (as prerequisite to survival) isn't really what is being described here. "Desire" doesnt quite sounds like the right term either, because it is semantically no different than a want.
Rather than looking at the customer's spectrum of desire, perhaps a better framing is fulfillment- does the app fulfill a gap in a person's abilities, or does it sate an idle fancy?
Facebook and twitter do both, I think, at different levels. Perhaps that is why they are so successful.
I think another lesson here is that the app was built to help people do something hard (build/change habits) and all the apps that are wildly successful are more oriented to reforcing easy, lazy, and bad behaviors (gossip, idle chatter, time-wasting, procrastination).
The people who really make up their minds to change habits don't need an app. They just do it.
Sure, this is true. In 500 BC I would have lived in a cave. But now I have a garage, it has a door, and one thing I need is an app that lets me open the door when I get back from cycling. Fortunately, there’s an app for that!
It doesn’t have to be a Need with a capital N. I had the same questions when I first encountered this advice, but I’ve since realized that it’s perfectly fine to address vague needs like the need for entertainment.
Number 7 is a subtle but huge problem. I ran into this way back when I was trying to sell a small, education-focused GIS system I wrote as an alternative to the monstrosity that is ArcGIS. Students loved it since it was easy to use (only had maybe 5% of the functionality of ArcGIS, but it was the functionality that covered 90% of basic analysis.) The department heads I spoke to loved the idea since it was drastically cheaper than Arc, they could push the cost to the student (less than a textbook) rather than maintain ESRI contracts. The problem was that the decision maker, ie the real customer, was the professor, who did not experience either the ease of use benefits or care about the expense. As such I got nowhere with the product.
The worst part about a lesson like this is that it can take years to really get to this conclusion. I'm trying to ask myself "who is the buyer of this product". This is happening a lot in digital health where the payor isn't the end user.
I'm a lot more hesitant to say: Build something people really need because of examples like Instagram/Snapchat etc. Were those really needs? Were people really "needing" Instagram at the start?
I think businesses should target pain points/needs but I'm now of the opinion that its best to start with targeting a sizeable target segment and then work out pain points/products/needs/inspiration from there. As long as there are customers/users/market, there will be possibilities.
I know it might sound similar to others but a need can always be argued into existence or a need can be hidden so deep you can't even qualify it until the company/product is out (hence why some startups pivot or end up doing some exploration before they take off). But it is much easier to have a target group in mind and then target them and figure out a distribution channel to reach them than figuring out needs from the start. I think come up with your target customer group first, study them and then figure out the marketing and messaging needed target them and then things get easier from there.
8.In hindsight, it's easy to give advice to others on their flaws than making it a reality on your own. Making a list really sells it to people.
9.Stop making products, start writing personal development/marketing books that contain things that seem obvious in your head but you've never really tried it yourself.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
To your #5, I find that developers tend to be allergic to the term "marketing" because it's easy to think it's a waste of money or the department of flashy do-nothings if you've never tried to actually build a business yourself.
I doubt that's why they are allergic to it. Perhaps I'm projecting, but I suspect that developers have seen their fair share of products which succeed (for some measure of succeed, e.g. "raised a round" or "founders cashed out") with only marketing and a crap or, worse, vaporware product. It's a very common and easy fallacious inference to go from there to "all marketing is bad", especially in a field where there are a handful of success stories (e.g. craigslist) where the success was built with very little or no marketing, and "the product spoke for itself".
I'd say it's also just not fun. For example setting up a product page on Steam and the iOS AppStore is just a royal pain for me, and I would think most developers would feel the same. It's much more fun to code.
Most of these fall under the term "product - market fit". All key points really. Fail at the these and it's an uphill battle to acquire and esp. Retain customers.
Good stuff to read "the mom test" and "sell more faster".
He mentions a false positive of paying customers. I have some personal experience of customers paying for a product and not using it. We're all guilty of it in one way or another.
What percentage of paying customers should be active? 100% is unrealistic, but 0% is troubling since they are not getting any value from it and its not validating your idea. How does this depend on price of the product or whether its a subscription or not?
There will always be inactive customers, but if your customer growth month-over-month is not greater than your % of inactive users (the inverse of % active users), then you will stall and enter decline.
For example: if 80% of current customers login on a regular basis (monthly, daily), and you're growing at 10% per month new users, you will actually decline at some point because your 20% inactive users is greater than 10% new customers. It might take some time, but at some point customer churn will outpace new customer growth.
So you have to measure new customer acquisition as a % of current installed base, total % of actives (measured on a logical period relevant for your solution), and total churn % (non-renewals divided by renewals). If the churn measure is measured differently you can think of it as the renewal rate because you want to measure retention vs. acquisition.
To simplify: if acquisition is not greater than retention, then you have problems. Retention is dependent on active use with some factor and with some delay.
When I first read that it completely made sense. But my mind immediately ran to leetcodes subscription.
I imagine their churn is fairly high, but they can also capitalize on new graduates or folks looking to up their game to keep revenue flowing in so that by itself is only part of the story. Likewise their active count maybe falls off a cliff after 4-6 months for users who actively engage with platform, and I’m sure some of them make the purchase and either never use it or give up fairly quickly.
To toy with your question specifically let’s use LC as an example. Some percentage of users need to be engaged and referring it via word of mouth for it to be validating. As for retention and engagement, once you have a decent cycle of customers coming in that becomes a game psychology. Think Reddit emailing you on every comment you get, notifications, gamey mechanics like Robinhood, or some other mechanism to reinforce behavior
My first and only paid subscription on one product I built was from a user who never used the service, and also never cancelled their subscription. It had no free trial, so they knew they were paying money from the get go. After a while I cancelled their subscription and sent them an email saying they could re-enable if they wanted to keep using the service. I felt bad for taking their money.
It was definitely motivating and I would say it was part of the reason I kept working on it, but unfortunately no-one else subscribed, and it wasn't to be.
My own lesson is to crunch the financials, always. Truth is when I crunch the numbers I almost always end up with the same result: if I am going to invest my own time and money, I must go b2b and charge >=100k per client. I can never find a way to fund myself and the marketing/content experts by charging a few dollars per subscription. Of course you might have a big existing audience or might find a cheap channel to get your product across quickly, I am just saying I find it easier to convince a few companies to pay tens of thousands euros than thousands of people to pay one hundred.
I prefer solving my own need and curiosity than focusing on market fit. This probably means I will never be game for investors but I also won't measure my success by the money I've made. It will be measured in passion and happiness
I'd add one item to your list: No one wants a habit tracking app. A lot of people could benefit from one, but when people have a problem in their life (sleep, diet, productivity) they almost never conceptualize it as a habits problem. They look for tools to "improve sleep," or "be more productive" but not a habit tracker.
My new company (https://usetemper.com/) is all about habits and behavior change, but that's mentioned almost no where on the website because that's not how our customers think about their problem.
This is true, "habits" is too general of a topic. This is why Strava chose cycling as their first sport and expanded from there. Smart of you to focus on fasting, hot topic!
Wishing you all the best.
Regarding lesson 4 (Distribution), the author links to a tweet by Justin Kan saying "First time founders are obsessed with products. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution".
Justin Kan posted[0] today a video of himself criticizing that very tweet, saying that it didn't age well and he now believes product is 99% of the work, and the reason that many unicorns are founded by first-time founders is they don't get distracted by thoughts about anything other than product, like distribution.
Stack Rank reminds me of a mistake our owner made... We purchased a tall Sprinter van for mobile work. When we went to purchase a second, he asked for feedback/complaints and heard it was "blown around in heavy winds." To compensate, the next one they bought was not a tall model. No one wants to use it because being able to stand up straight while in the rear is much more important than the few times we drive in heavy winds. Had they stack ranked the feedback they would have seen that the complaint was small compared to the new issues they were creating.
Nice writeup! I see that the app is available only in English. In my experience with indie apps (admittedly not recent), localisation in at least Spanish and Portuguese can help drive a lot of sales. It can also be easier to rank higher with localised keywords, and it's easier to get featured in country-specific App Stores in non-English languages as well.
I tired Apple Ads, Facebook and Youtube. But no matter how many folks I got in the top of funnel, most chured out... so adding more marketing spend would just have me spending $2 to make $1.
This is the only question that needs to be asked nowadays. You need user acquisition money. Sad fact is that otherwise it is almost impossible to do anything.
I think there is still paths available that don't require advertising money. I think a lot of SaaS necessarily relies on customers to come "From the ether" via the internet, and sustain their business with $9/month accounts. That means you're competing with people who can outspend you for people's attention.
If you're in an industry niche and solving a valuable problem, you can charge a lot more and afford to sell directly to your customers, potentially in person. Acquisition looks like it costs more, but if you're a one person show and it's your time, then that's a sacrifice you can make as you're trying to bootstrap your business.
Just a contrived example, if you're selling telemetry software to motorsports garages, you could have the margin and the value-add to go knock on workshop doors and sell if it's valuable enough to them.
I think there's still a lot of hard software problems to solve in grass roots industries, with customers that you can go visit in your city. I think we get stuck in the idea of selling software to the internet and software industries.
Exactly, I would recommend spending a few thousand on a good PPC marketing agency and let them set up your marketing. You might be amazed at what this would accomplish since your product seems fine.
This is exactly the moment I figured out this version is dead. At first I was thinking "ok I have a good product and now all I need are more folks in the top of funnel" but when all users chured out within 60-90 days... adding more marketing wasn't going to save it.
This makes me wish there was a version of producthunt except where the culture was ok with brutally honest replies (rather than the forced encouragement on producthunt, which is nice and has its place too but you need to hear both voices).
I'm feeling the same way, also can't stand all the self-gratulating content on these sites.
But if you remove the status game, why would people engage with the site instead of only posting their own questions? Shallow social validation seems to be why people use twitter, producthunt etc.
This seems like a classic case of "build and they won't come". I feel like OP could've validated that the market for a product like this is too competitive quite easily before writing a line of code.
From my experience, if an app takes more than a few months to build and launch, the risk is no longer worth it. Large companies also do this (years building before launching and i have yet to hear of a success)
I think it's also important to recognize how much survivorship bias there is in these stories, too, though.
There are plenty of people who have spent similar amounts of time working on games or projects with nothing much to show for it. The experience might be worth something to someone, though, in terms of resume building, etc.
Games are really easy to test viability for, though. The game has perfect information about itself, rarely connects in a complex way to anything outside the game, and it's easy to replicate the user's context just by sitting in a dark room on your own. The test is simple - is it fun?
By contrast, most apps need to connect to people, software and things outside themselves - they're part of complex systems, and it's really hard to know if they work well without putting them into use and seeing how they perform - and that means selling and talking to users, not something you can do in isolation.
It can take a long time to get enough of the game together to test fun vs not fun. Racing games for example can be play tested before the art is finished, but they are heavily dependent on subtle interactions between the tracks, cars, physics engine, and controls.
Yes this is the confusing thing about creative endeavours. Lean start up says to learn quickly and pivot yet so many artists work on the movies, games, and books for years and years.
I guess we need to realize that most of us are not James Cameron :)
Yes. I "wasted" 2019 building a platform that my customers didn't need. Scare quotes because it wasn't really a waste; it taught me a lot about what not to do.
In 2020, realizing it was going nowhere, I started talking more with my target audience. Really talking and really listening. It turned out that most of them had a very specific pain point.
I thought about how to solve it. I could build another gigantic app. Or I could start as small as possible. I could write a tiny script that addressed that pain point, and do everything else by hand.
If I knew it would scale to x, I might have started with more. But I realized I'm bad at predicting what will take off, so I started as small as I could.
This year I'm getting close to $1K MRR. It's not much in the grand scheme of things, but coming from no business experience, it means a lot to me.
My biggest takeaway so far is, for those like me who don't have an incredibly clear vision, start as small as possible. Not "if you build it, they will come," but "when they come, you can build it."
I use this sort of app, have for years. The idea of using a chatbot as UI is completely unappealing. So I think it comes down to there not being a need for this new take on this concept.
Yes totally, I thought "hey using a chatbot would be like texting an accountability friend or coach" but in reality that gimmick just doesn't work. Since tracking habits requires displaying data, a user interface with visual elements is more effective than a chat UI.
I don't think the need-to-have versus want-to-have distinction is sufficient to kill a product. If you niche the product down to a very narrow market you might find people who need to change their habits. It could be a matter of life and death for them. For example, someone trying to lose weight, or break an addiction, or study for an exam that has life-changing outcomes for them.
The first red flag I see is that the app isn't multiplatform. I know there's plenty of iPhone/Android exclusive apps, but I will very rarely use (much less spend money on) something that is locked-in to one app.
Also, does anyone else find it ironic that a habit tracking app has a monthly subscription? Feels darkly ironic looking at the IAP block towards the bottom.
> The first red flag I see is that the app isn't multiplatform.
This doesn't matter to most users (of a given target platform), and if you're charging money for an app—rather than making money with ads, or providing a service that needs maximum reach or user base, or relying on network effects to somehow make money as e.g. a messenger or social network might—then you only need/want iOS until you are seeing enough traction to be confident that the lower sales rate on Android will nonetheless be high enough to make it worth it.
A few months ago I looked for a habit tracker, I don't recall if this was one of those I looked at. As with all apps, for the phone, I skip everything that has a subscription model or "in app purchases" and I suspect many will do the same. To me subscriptions and "in app purchases" has become synonymous with "low quality".
Personally I don't care much if apps exclusive to iPhone, it's not going to stop me from buying an app. It's not like I'd be able to transfer the purchase to Android anyway.
Totally, relying on the apple app store alone was a mistake. Next product I make will be cross platform. I was blinded by the handful of successful ios apps out there.
> So the lesson is that while all businesses have a product, not all products are a business.
And even products that look successful may not actually be good business, if they have negative net income and surviving on venture capital that eventually runs out.
Glad you enjoyed it! I've meditated on that point now for a few months... it's an important distinction in the maker community. Building a product vs. building a business.
I applaud your courage in sharing your failure. You have made yourself vulnerable to people who will play monday-morning-quarterback on your story. Reading your experience is so enlightening. Thank you.
> The app landed as the #4 product of the day on ProductHunt
I honestly don't get this. I don't know a single smartphone user who looks at product hunt for new apps. None.
As far as I can tell, it's just an echo chamber of ego-seeking devs showing off their apps to other devs and spambots - that's not a market (I guess unless your app is targeted at ego-seeking devs?).
Product Hunt's customer base is largely product people, designers, and a handful of developers and investors.
If your product's target demographic overlaps with that of Product Hunt (design tools, project management tools) then it can be useful to get ranked well on Product Hunt. If your product targets the average consumer, Product Hunt is basically useless for anything other than maybe networking.
For a chat bot product to succeed, it has to be indistinguishable from a real human in every way. Otherwise the user will know its capabilities are limited, but won’t know in what way exactly they are limited. This is a perfect recipe for endless frustration as you slowly uncover every way in which it does not work how you expected it to, impeding whatever simple talk you wanted to complete.
If I had nickel for every time a chat bot or phone bot told me to speak to it like a human, and then was completely incapable of handling that, I’d be rich.
Being indistinguishable from human is a high and low bar. Chat is just a medium and it's not usually the best medium (for me). When I use it, I expect speed and care less if it's a human or AI. For example, I had a billing issue with my electric company. I used chat because I didn't have a week to ping-pong emails back and forth (they might cut my power). I also didn't have time to call them and sit on the phone for 30+ minutes. I knew it was something a human would need to get involved with. So, it's really just chat that is helpful as a medium. The bot part almost always gets in the way of speed to answer/solution.
That my personal experience anyways, would love to hear more about how a chatbot was actually helpful to someone. Whenever I see those chat pop ups on a SaaS home page, it makes me think do people actually type "show me the pricing page please" instead of just clicking the link to the pricing page. It has to be just a friendlier nicer way to collect emails and phone #s for sales to follow up with (?). I totally don't get it.
i've seen one - my workplace briefly experimented with a chatbot for taking vacation time. you would say something like "i'm on vacation from tuesday to friday" and it would parse it, extract or convert the input to a date range, and submit a vacation request through the official tool. it would then ask if you also wanted to display your vacation status on your calendar and set up an email autoresponder, and do them for you if you answered 'yes'. i was sad when they removed the bot - i think they did it because they streamlined the website, but even with the new improved web workflow i still preferred the experience of doing it via chatbot.
This sounds interesting.
Although this use case is very infrequent. If this had a wider use case, like something used daily, that just might be be a viable product!
it was infrequent but it was really pleasant to use. it was just a frontend to the internal websites that did the same thing though, so it was more of a feature than a product.
one thing, the OP is missing. with consumer oriented stuff, don't make the naive mistake of launching thinking you'll make money. do it as a vanity project. yeah, every now and then shout it out but don't expect it to make money. unless you're vc funded and you're trying to corner a market. b2b is different of course - there exists people willing to pay
1) Sell to people who can write the check, and have a budget to spend
That's my entire advice. It seems obvious. If you're selling to an individual, choose a demographic with money to spend. And charge a price to fit into their budget.
If you're selling to a team, don't. Sell to the person buying products/tools for the team, the one with signing authority. They make the ultimate decision. And they have a budget to spend, and will likely spend it all on something.