My app failed: lessons learned
rithm.app
rithm.app
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.
> market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure.
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.
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.
The 1st version was a chatbot app, think of it like an accountability coach that you text with to track habits and stay accountable.
Rithm landed as the #4 product of the day on ProductHunt, had some good initial traction which proceeded to fall off a cliff.
Here are the 8 lessons for a failed version 1, see video and blog post.
Hope this helps some makers out there!
> 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'.
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.
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.
Think Clubhouse only moving to android when it was working on iOS.
Combine a Tamagotchi with your app, have the user "feed" them with his "habbits". At least you would combine two things.
With the chat bot? Move on.
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...
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.
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
This is why you don't post on ProductHunt. Your target market isn't there. Its nothing more than an ego trip for so many founders.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/ohlife-personal-journal-em...
That confirms there isn't a big market for this... Still happy to use it for myself though.
The db (sqlite) has four tables:
users
tasks
prompts
items
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.
Good luck to us next time!
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.
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.
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.
How do they think the companies that offer salaried work started?
In Latin America, our culture is extremely conservative about taking risks. We're expected to get a job, settle down, live a nice life.
Generally entrepreneurship is frowned upon by our families and friends.
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.
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".
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.
To summarize:
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.
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.
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.
- Acceptance/Self-confidence - the need to be appreciated
- Curiosity, the need to gain knowledge
- Eating, the need for food - Family/Love, the need to take care of one’s offspring
- Honor, the need to be faithful to the customary values of an individual’s ethnic group, family or clan
- Idealism, the need for social justice
- Independence/Freedom, the need to be distinct and self-reliant
- Order, the need for prepared, established, and conventional environments
- Physical activity/Vitality, the need for work out of the body
- Power/Efficacy, the need for control of will
- Romance, the need for mating or sex
- Saving/Ownership, the need to accumulate something
- Social contact/Fun, the need for relationship with others
- Social status/Self-Importance, the need for social significance
- Tranquility/Safe, the need to be secure and protected
- Vengeance, the need to strike back against another person
I could make the best new social network, which addresses a need, but hardly anyone really needs another social network.
So how do I distinguish between a need or a nice to have within this context?
It has to be an unmet need. The key word being "un-met"
You said:
> "hardly anyone really needs another social network"
You're absolutely correct.
The first phase of social networks had a lot of early adoption for many different social networks circa 2003, because at that time the need was unmet.
Then the world settled on a winner, Facebook.
Now that's no longer an unmet need.
But in reality, there are limits to being able to predict a winner.
If that existed, starting a winning business would be easy.
We only have heuristics, no crystal ball.
Also, spotting a need is not the same as satisfying it.
It's why Steve Jobs could arrive late to the party and build a winner that leapfrogged the competition over and over again.
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.
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.
How do you distinguish something that is a 'nice to have' and a 'need'?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The people who really make up their minds to change habits don't need an app. They just do it.
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.
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.
10. Make your fluff seem as authentic as you can
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
No marketing on a good product seldom lets you be successful.
The mistake of founders is to let burns from the first bucket, stop the second from having a chance.
Good stuff to read "the mom test" and "sell more faster".
Even though I've read and heard about these common mistakes, sometimes we have to learn by doing to truly find out if they apply to our use case.
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?
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.
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
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.
It is very important to also see some of these failures, where the stars did not suddenly align and sparkling rainbows started raining money.
I think I learned more from your post than from 10 success posts, honestly.
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
I wrote a book on habit formation in apps. https://usetemper.com/digital-behavioral-design/
I run a sub-reddit that get's at least 1 post a month from someone launching a new habit tracking app. https://www.reddit.com/r/Habits/
My last company made SaaS to help app publishers understand and strengthen the habits in their app. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dopaminelabs
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.
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.
[0] https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1418003365695418373
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.
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.
You wider point is reasonable though as many people waste a lot of time building something that never gets traction.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
Typing “walk north” instead of just pushing the up arrow or clicking with a mouse was pretty frustrating
I don't know of any others that I would put in the same category.