Again, my comment may not age well when your company skyrockets.
Anyhow, have you interacted with your target audience and have they voiced that this is a problem they'd pay money for to be solved ? Did they do that before you tell them about your app ? There are many people who talk to me about their apps, and unless they explicitely ask for my straight opinion, I won't dwell on it and just go 'Sounds interesting'.
How important is that for these people? How painful or deal-breaker is the pet part in that app? Has anyone gone "That guy/girl is super hot, but they have a [$pet_breed] so it's dead".
Is it a frequent thing ? What's the substitute ? What's the job to be done ?
Are the 200 users actually using it? How often? Do they use it for their own breeding, or for that of their pets ? As in there are some people who want to breed their pets and are picky with the mates.
If they're not using the application, why is that ? Why did they sign up in the first place, and what value did they expect? Did they even have pets or was it just another dating app to maximize their chances?
I've never had a pet, so I would not know where to start. Would the platform provide guidance for a first time pet owner, something like a Duolingo experience with achievements that takes me from making sure the pet does not die due to something that is obvious for experienced pet owners but completely alien to me?
Would the platform be open for third party experts to publish their courses for specific breeds? Say I want to have a Dobermann; this breed requires experience which I lack. Would it be possible to follow a course for exactly that breed?
Again, I'm not a user of the application and don't intend to adopt a pet so my feedback is not worth that much, but I'm curious.
This would probably be a hail-mary, but I'd even try rebranding to make it hyperlocal to your city. Then build a copy for your nearest other metro area. Then a third before finally coming back to your current branding.
You know more than anyone about your business. You have all the qualitative and quantitative data about your business. If you need some random HN users, most of which are not successful founders, to tell you whether you should quit or go on, there is something wrong.
As a founder myself, I can relate to your feeling. My last startup failed. I saw no hope in what we did. I gave up. There is nothing bad about giving up, if you are sure about it.
1, you set yourself up to fail by not having a web version
2, and again you're setting yourself up to fail by limiting your users to a location based service, open it up
Constructive criticism:
Launch a web version, allow your users to interact with each other regardless of location, your URL is confusing with the two lls as well.
Also, we do have an option to relax and/or disable the location filter, but I think specially for a dating service, having some kind of location filter is a must.
The main problem I see is that it doesn't show any of the post when you are not logged in. Reddit an HN show the post to attract lurkers. Hopefully lurkers become users.
It will be very hard to convince people to sing up if they can't see the posts.
I think the B2C space is neigh on impossible to penetrate in the pet space, most pet lovers form sub-communities on existing social networks (see pets on Instagram or puppy101 on reddit), you would need something very special to be able to get the average person to maintain an app on their phone just to engage with other pet lovers.
I'd flip it on its head and look for B2B niche within the pet lovers industry if you're exploring pivots. A good example of friction I've found recently is pet sitting, dog walking and doggy day care, currently we have a pup which goes day care and we use 4/5 apps to manage this process - to find one we used Google, but then cross-referenced with something like Instagram to get a feel for how they are on their dog walks, to sign up we had to fill out a questionnaire via another web app, after accepting our pup they sent us a waiver/legals to sign from another app, after which they directed us to another app on the App Store to book/cancel day care each week, must be done by Sunday lunch, but it never reminds us... they send invoices each month via email, which we have to then hop over to our banking app to pay manually, they send us pups "report card" and photos via WhatsApp.
I'm sure a small pet walking business or individual dog walkers would happily pay X amount each month to provide an integrated services to manage a lot of this, but more importantly it would be very easy to validate whether this is something the market wants, by just talking to some of these independent pet sitters to understand what pain points they have.
Your pivoting idea and B2B niche is something I have been thinking about as well. Very good example you mentioned. I will be thinking more about it. Thanks for your honest opinion
What were the steps between having this thought and diving into the project?
I’m guessing there’s a valuable lesson there.
As I mentioned in one of my comments, after having the original idea/thought I got too excited too soon. At the time I did not know mobile or web development and so jumped on Google, did a quick search and filled some forms on some mobile app developer companies website and literally hired the first company that called me back. Then spent about $6k for just logo design, wireframe and a landing page. That stage took about 4 months and then they gave me a $50k quote for iOS and Android app. I did not have that money.
That's when I came across Upwork and posted a job there. The quotes were much lower as you may know since most of the freelancers/agencies are based outside the US. I finally hired a company from Pakistan since their CEO personally called me and kind of lured me into not only giving them the job, but also told me he is interested in the project and he could be my advisor/mentor. Again, I got excited and thought that was a great deal. That ended up being the worst experience of my whole professional life.
Their company just broke apart in the middle of the project. Cofounders parted ways and the one who contacted me (the CEO), he said that all their team members left with the other guy and took the source code for our app with them. So I had to contact the other cofounder and have them share the code with a new team that the CEO hired. It was a mess and the project was delivered poorly and way after deadline. However, in the middle of all that, I decided to learn web and mobile development. So, I took a lot of Udemy courses and watched many Youtube videos. That was I guess the only silver lining and maybe I needed to go through the whole excruciating process to get there.
Anyways, long story short, after taking loans and spending about $35k for design and development of the iOS and Android apps, I had to redo everything else myself while having my full-time engineering job (I still needed to pay bills and had just got engaged. So no way I could quit that other job). It was a lot of non-stop 15 to 18-hour workdays.
This might not have been what you asked for, but I thought I'd share part of my story :)
Having read over this and a few other replies I would definitely say it would be worthwhile taking a step back now, don’t fall into the sunk cost fallacy and continue to burn through cash/time building things you think will help, spend a bit of time away from the keyboard, reading The Mom Test as others have suggested, it’s honestly a fantastic book, very actionable and probably won’t take you long to get through. That will put you in the right mindset for where you are in your journey and what you need to do next - which boils down to trying to validate some of your ideas, the correct way.
Finally you mention someone offering mentorship/advice, and you taking it, just be cautious with who you take advice from, the best person to take advice from is probably someone a few steps ahead of you, that means finding someone who may have just secured their very first bit of seed money as a solo/duo founding team, or an indiehacker who’s reached say $1000 MRR for a B2C app.
Good luck.
Yeah. Unfortunately, he caused more harm than help. I ended our relationship when I realized that he was not really the best mentor for what I started. I am going to take a step back and read some of these materials that you and others mentioned
Did you ever stop to figure out the answer to this question or did you just assume that the other dating apps had all made a terrible mistake?
Now the question that I should have tried to investigate more is this: Do people really want all these features in a single app, or they were fine using multiple apps/websites?
1. why is there a google captcha in the app sign up? I have never seen this before.
2. Am I dating people or pets? Some profiles are pictures of animals others are pictures of people.
3. Swiping is showing me men even after I signed up and set my gender/orientation.
4. Is this a dating app or a pet app?
5. "Animal Lovers" is a huge people. Who on tinder is not an animal lover?
6. Why am I using an app to adopt pets AND date people?
2. You are dating people. some people like to put their pets picture on their profile. We can't control that.
3. Filter options are set to show everyone originally. You can uncheck the "no filters". I get your point though, so I need to fix that in the next update.
4. it's an app for animal lovers. So, you can ask questions form others about vets, wildlife, find pet sitters, etc. You can select to opt in or out of dating. The pet adoption section is for mainly shelters to post their pets and our users (who are animal lovers) to see if they can find a furry friend, if they want to.
5. yeah, but we provide filter based on inerest in animals.
6. You don't have to. They are independent of each other. People who love pets are the main users of the app. It's a separate service to them. You either want someone who loves your pet as much as you do, or you want to adopt animals. You can use the app.
2. You are competing with other feedback platforms like Yelp with no clear advantage.
3. You are combining two unrelated markets. Like having a funeral one and child care facility in one.
4. There are no clear revenue channels or models.
It’s not about trying or quitting. Find a known business model and offer a product that exploits the weaknesses of of the competition.
1. Filtering based on interest in animals (and not just dog or cat)
2. I am not sure if I understand this one. What feature of the app are you referring at?
3. Do you mean dating and pet adoption? If so, we are addressing all the needs of a pet owner. We also have a lost/found pet alert. If you are a pet owner, you love your pet, you want your partner to love them and you want to find them if you lose them. You may have questions about your pets, vet recommendations, etc. So, all we are addressing in the app are related to pets and their owners.
4. The app is currently free to download and use. Revenue will be through subscriptions for dating service and ads in any section of the app. We plan to donate 10% of the revenue to shelters and rescues which is a big incentive for animal lovers.
It's not clear what the app does. I can see about 5 features there. Try to cut it down to one.
The screenshots are confusing too. I can't see what's going on and how that solves whatever problem it's trying to solve.
It's a lot harder to sit down and cut features than it is to add them, but that's probably what you have to do, at least in marketing.
That said there is something I’m sure you and the vet can come up with that would work. Animal lovers do spend a lot of money.
I’m not sure what the winning idea is but if the vet friend just listens to what his customers say are their problems there might be some clues there.
Do you know about user interviews and user research? Here's a great short intro: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test
I strongly recommend learning about product management and user research. Read The Mom Test and The Lean Product Playbook and do what's relevant. Start there!
Happy to discuss more and share more resources that could help. Email in profile.
I will look into the sources you shared. I have heard of The Mom Test and The Lean Product Playbook but haven't still had a chance to check them out. Will definitely do.
Thanks for the offer also. Will get in touch.
I have a sideline which makes a part-time wage and I have not spent as much on marketing in 10 years as you have in 1 year. This is what strikes me most about your comment.
In saying that I often wonder if my being over cautious is what made the difference from me having a company and a sideline. That's a different question.
So I guess if you do keep trying consider your outgoings.