Our app is free, so we aren't eager to pay for installs at any price, and paid aq is not a major channel for us. The lion's share of our new users come from organic search, social sharing, and word of mouth.
This also sounds like a good link that can go on indiehackers.com
We solve an huge number of extremely important problems for our users. Some things just off the top of my head:
- Find local daycares that have spaces available, which is pretty important when you need to work
- Find a nearby restroom or changing table when you need one RIGHT NOW (and when you need one, it's usually RIGHT NOW)
- Get parenting advice in real time on just about any topic
- If you're someone who doesn't fit in with traditional parenting groups (mostly moms, mostly married, etc), connect with a community of parents like you (single parents, stay home dads, etc)
- Find places where you can nurse or pump safely
- Get suggestions for things to do with your kids, because they are bored and you need to get out of the house
- Locate family-friendly restaurants and businesses when traveling
Etc. In some ways this is actually a challenge as there's no single, dead-simple value prop that we can use. But I love Winnie. We're genuinely helping people be less stressed and more successful as parents.
I see that Winnie have great topics discussion with questions asked and answered by users.
For a new forum, there are bound to be empty-room syndromes.
How did you guys manage to kickstart discussions in the beginning? Is it all organic or is there some growth hack involved?
This qns have been bothering me a while and I can't seem to get any good readings anywhere else.
Initially it did feel like an empty room, but this was before the ability to start discussions with other users and ask questions. Initially you could only add reviews of places. I remember adding a couple of reviews and since I didn't get any immediate engagement from other users it felt like I was adding valuable content but it wouldn't really be useful until they got a large number of users.
When discussions became available the biggest thing was that Anne and her co-founder Sara were really active users and shared their knowledge of being parents. Every single post that I added was liked and/or commented on by them. If you asked a parenting question or posted something in the early days it would be answered/commented/liked by Anne and Sara and often within minutes. They also would add valuable and engaging content on a daily basis whether it was an interesting article, something funny, or just asking a question that could be answered by users and start a discussion. When you see how active both of them were it makes you feel like posting something or commenting is okay and at least going to be acknowledged and appreciated by them even if there weren't a whole lot of other users that were active. I always knew that in the early days the biggest thing was just continuing to add valuable content and eventually the engagement would follow. After a few weeks I started to see other users become more active and start liking my posts and adding their own which just continued to grow until they got to some of their big growth events like being featured in the app store or launching their daycare directory.
There are many benefits to native apps from the experience polish to the community and resources surrounding them. There are 2 major negatives to native: dev time and cost.
The Native vs Cordova/SomethingElse discussion is going to have different answers depending on your use case. Let me restate that for importance. Your use case will dictate which is "correct" early on.
For us, the rapid product tests we were looking to run, in both web and mobile platforms with a very small engineering team all but required a cordova app. As our product has grown more mature, and major client features change less frequent, the appeal of native has grown. But despite that appeal, we remain firmly in cordova and will for at least another 6 months.
Not all products need to invest in amazing apps or apps at all, but if you don't have a decent app than ASO and featuring are not going to be available to you. This may or may not be important to your business.
Since then, we've done close to zero marketing, and it's been amazing to see new signups, wishlists and items being created - seemingly out of the blue. I made a simple Slack-bot to post those events to a channel with their ID, and these are the stats from it was added late March until now: 53 new users, 74 new wishlists, and 482 new items.
As we do no sort of analytics, we have no clue who these people are, but boy does it make me happy to see those "A new user was just created!"-messages nonetheless!
Extract out the most popular items that people are sharing (no identifying information connected, only extract out super items that you can identify well, like "Wonder Woman on blu ray"), or similarly build your own curated lists based on what's popular right now (eg a new PS4 game). Build some categories that they belong to ("video games" or "clothing"). Then enable people to quickly browse for things within those segments to add to their wish lists. It should boost wishlist item adding substantially over time and give people new ideas. You could also build a gently curated top 10 or 20 item list in a given week or month (manually reviewed for potentially inappropriate items). You can track various metrics for what's moving socially right now for a link/item to get an improved idea on what matters to provide some further ranking (eg facebook sharing acceleration or deceleration).
To be honest, I wish I had this two weeks ago when I was making my own wishlist!
Thank you for taking the time to suggest a feature!
People will hopefully not just find the items interesting, but will also be curious to see what items others are looking at.
And best of all, hopefully a lot of people will find your site this way.
Good places to find camgirls is /r/camming / linked subreddits in the sidebar, along with the sites themselves (I only used Chaturbate, so I can't speak to the other platforms).
We were able to sign up a few thousand people to our new product waitlist through two main channels: exhibiting at conferences and answering questions on Quora. In the past, I would have just done a small beta with friends, but I guess I'm getting a little wiser over the years :)
Going big from the beginning is really a tough one. I already got burned at a previous startup by not narrowing the focus enough, but it really depends on the market and the type of product you are building. We're building a product for college students, which is a big group, so it's a toss-up whether to go after a certain category of students or go after them all. We're casting a wide net for now with the idea that our product will resonate with certain subgroups which we can focus later.
The CEO thought this was a good way to build up anticipation, and make sure things were fully polished before opening the floodgates.
We got a few waves of attention, which meant we had about 30k emails on the list at some point.
Of course, this large number put more pressure on us to “get things perfect before we launch”, and it was over a year before the CEO decided it was time to let everyone in.
But by the time we did, people had lost interest, and our conversion rate was abysmal. While a bit buggy and unpolished, the product was still very functional a year before, and had we just let people in we’d probably have gotten very valuable feedback a year early.
(I left the company a long time ago, and it is now in zombie mode)
I should add that the waitlist strategy isn't always the right one. If you are a new team building a product in an unfamiliar space, it might be better to start with a small group of users. We've been fortunate to have a succesful product in a similar space, so we can take a little bit more of a risk.
I have no flippin' idea how the other 5 found my landing page. I haven't been running ads or anything. I was going to wait till I actually launched (hopefully in a few weeks).
My thought process was the same. Pay for Adwords, et al., to drive people to a page that basically says "Sorry, we're not ready yet, but sign up for our mailing list, maybe?" Not sure that's a good idea.
The idea that you should have a small scope and narrow focus is the one very common piece of startup advice I struggle with. In my experience at Winnie, whenever we "thought small" growth would stall out. I think if your product is just better with higher numbers of users, get as many people into it as you can.
And I know who am I, nobody. But as a person who hears about some service like "We'll help you get hired by these new methods of looking over resumes" great. sign me up. I sign up "Sorry we're in private beta at this time." like what? Why did I Go through all of that process to be told it's not available.
What is wrong with building the functionality first, get paying customers, and from there scale? At least that way, you'll have the money to scale.
you have also to consider that solution don't grow in a vacuum. the moment you build something, you can count of having ten competitors out there doing the same or similar thing, akin to convergent evolution someone else is experiencing the same need you're solving right now and among those someone is building a solution. if you want to monetize your solution, unless it's a physical thing, you need to be the first out there and the faster growing.
additionally, if the strategy involves financing at some point, a big cache of user waiting/registered is good leverage and something you can build without having a product if you have the resources to do both - more financing, more money to grow and outgrow competitors.
people sometime demonize growth but unless your startup is something that inherently doesn't scale growth and lock-in are practically the first filter to weed the competition.
- Go true native, not hybrid
- Use ads for testing ideas
- Don't forget about email!
I'm also intrigued by your approach of not going market-by-market like a lot of local-focused marketplaces do. Your approach seems to make sense, and obviously worked for you. I particularly like that you had a different onboarding flow for users in new markets, that's smart.
But still, I'm not sure that this approach would make sense for a lot of local-focused apps? I think the fear would be that it would be relatively easy to get 100k users but they'd be spread out so thin that they'd find little utility in the app and stop using it. So you'd have 100k users in your database, but a tiny fraction of that in terms of actual active users. But maybe that doesn't even matter, since you wouldn't have had all those inactive users anyway?
Could you speak to that? I'd love to hear how many of those 100k users are DAU or MAU, but understand if you can't share that :)
Congrats!
We also did something that I forgot to mention in the article that helped us grow nationally before we had a lot of proprietary data. One of the nice things about starting a company in 2017 is that there are tons of great resources available to you. Free or cheap services that solve what used to be really hard problems are readily available. One such service is Foursquare. When we launched Winnie, if you opened the app in an area where we didn't have data, instead of showing you nothing we instead showed you results from Foursquare. This was admittedly not the best experience, but it gave people affordance to still find places and write reviews.
Refusing to go market-by-market also forced us to build a bunch of proprietary and very cool infrastructure that collects data at scale. One early system we built could actually figure out which restaurants had changing tables and highchairs, nationally and instantaneously, at a VERY low cost. I can't say how we did that but you'd be surprised at what's possible if you have the will and ambition :)
Users don't care. Most of them can't tell.
It's definitely not required, it just helps. Our app got featured in one of the App Store's daily stories despite it being written in React Native.
Developer apathy becomes user apathy. If you make great apps, your customers will be enthusiastic about using them. If you make mediocre apps, you will attract mediocre users, or no users at all.
What about for games? Unity is extremely tempting, especially when the alternative is to write the game twice in two different languages...
I'd honestly just lean in on PWAs if you're a content/SEO focussed business.
Honestly, its like giving financial advice and saying "Ok, win the lottery or marry someone rich"
It's "editor's choice" and the other front/center features that you might equate to "winning the lottery". And yeah, you can't expect that unless you've already made something huge.
Of course you can’t control if you are featured or not just like you can’t control if you get a writeup in a big publication. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give yourself the best chance of getting it.
- Retool ads as a way to test for and identify demand.
- Bait people with truly useful content where they're already looking, and then direct them to your app.
- Simple changes in wording or flow of UX can increase shares dramatically.
- Get featured in app stores. How?
- Integrate with latest device features being pushed
- Adhere to vendor design standards
- Email is still very effective, so use it.
- Have 10 enthusiastic users that will spread their enthusiasm before you start.
Also, the "don't use cross platform" preached in the article isn't very convincing. You can get excellent performance with well-coded cross-platform build tools, and in far less time.
The best way to get those 10 enthusiastic users, without being a social butterfly (in a traditional sense), is to manufacture them through inclusion. For example, find a subreddit that is relevant to what you're doing, and sell a batch of users on being early adopters (a certain type of people love that). Then give those people credit, attention, and make them feel like their input matters and that their contribution to the thing matters. Basically, make it personal for them, cultivate that experience. For a lot of people those last few concepts can be very rewarding, they'll become your first cheerleaders (and just one of those on eg Reddit can spark something). I've observed that people who are not traditional social butterflies, can still often function at a decent social level on sites like Reddit (at least enough to do what I've described).
Could you elaborate on the content-growth strategy? I'm really curious since in some business ideas I'm usually stuck with "chicken and egg" kind of problem. I believe there is no universal strategy here, but what worked for you except this special onboarding flow for users in new markets?
One specific example is that we saw a lot of demand for information on child care, so we researched over 5000 local daycares & preschools and created very comprehensive pages for all of them. This sounds like a lot of work but it actually wasn't that bad. Once we had done that we were instantly the best place in the SF Bay Area to research daycares and find open spaces. Word spread like wildfire and we climbed the Google rankings quickly as well. Now, we no longer have to collect data manually, because the daycare providers come to us to reach their audience of customers. So it delivered growth on both sides of the network in a sustainable, ongoing fashion, and only required a one-time upfront investment in content creation.
Yeah no. Apps using push notification for marketing/dark purposes is super irritating and for that reason I block notifications by default from all apps.
In particular the “mobile-only” resonates with me well. I have seen a number of products only provides a homepage to send me to their appstore/google play. In some cases I was trying to see what job openings were available. I was suprised to see no “career” page. Hmm Did they hide that in the webconsole / developer console? Nope!
So please do not do that to both your users and your potential hires. Your modern website should be mobile friendly, and if you are mobile-focus like instant messenger, that makes sense - but I recommend adding a desktop version later. I have facebook messenger, WhatsApp and Telegram installed on my Macs so (1) I don’t need to switch gears constantly, and (2) there are times I need to transfer stuff over from desktop...
Partnering with people in the same pace is a great idea. For example. Reaching out to Youtubers who are parents early on, brainstorm with them, and invite them to your paid sponsorship could help in your case.
At last, I am surprised you are able to register winnie.com. I would have expected it taken and if so I wonder how much it cost to buy it.
Sigh...this is one of the last things to worry about. It's like hoping your roulette number hits. Doing a lot of work is like getting a second roulette wheel number towards getting featured, but a lot of work might improve your chances of success any how. Every year that goes by, this hope becomes less and less likely as the competition grows.
Also, the advice on how to get featured on Google Play is not great advice. If I wanted a higher chance of being featured in Play, I would read this web page - https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/android-8.... . New features of the latest Android. Then I would make an app showcasing one of the new features that Android wants to highlight. If you look at featured apps, these are what get featured a lot. Think of it from Google's POV. Actually, Oreo has been out for a bit, so someone trying for Oreo is already behind the ball. There are videos of the Google people telling you what they look for when featuring, watch those.
The cost of doing two native apps is not small at all, and I imagine (not being a mobile dev) that being featured in the App store is a LOT easier for a family friendly app like OP's than the average. I'd also assume the vast majority of native apps don't get featured.
It's well-intentioned advice, but the cost-benefit analysis is nowhere near that simple.
I'm really curious how product folks decide to go mobile-first, especially in many cases where the user interacts with the app once a week or less frequently. Would love to know how you decided on this with the assumptions you made.
Going native on the mobile and email is something we are already working on. The advice about focusing on the demand side first is really interesting too.Network effect is great but its easier said than done and really hard to get it going.