Hacker News Reader

Mobile app churn is insane. Unless you can bring people back into the app every day, or it is a super utility, they will leave. Period.

I run a much smaller app that's bootstrapped, but we have hit top 100 free apps in the App Store before, and have been featured in the section our app is in, so I'd like to think I've learned at least a couple things -- tweens and teens more or less dominate app store explosive growth with regards to social apps.

I think the sticker chat is definitely something that those teens are into. That being said, those same teens mostly just care about followers and likes, which is why Instagram is quite the 100 pound gorilla in the room. Believe it or not, there are tons of folks on IG with tens of thousands of followers, who on twitter or Facebook have 10-100 followers. It is the de-facto mobile social network.

Honestly Path is a damn beautiful app, but because Path does not have enough content, people will leave. Period. It would be interesting to hear what the engagement numbers are on that 6M.

Relevant quick read: Tweens and Instagram http://wisdomsofpearl.tumblr.com/post/44064921127/tweens-ins...

I actually love the idea, and have enough friends (~30) and enough regular-user friends (~15) to make it worthwhile.

However, I couldn't get over how slow the experience is. The app itself is snappy enough (well, 2.x was; 3.0 appears to have slowed down a bit). The network communication is terrible. Loading anything takes way longer than my patience allows, and far too often I get an error message stating that the app was unable to contact Path.

It's simply unacceptable, especially for a mobile-only service. I don't have latency problems with the mobile apps for Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. Just Path.

For that reason (and also because the checkin feature just stopped working, claiming it could never find my location), I uninstalled it last August and gave up. I just reinstalled to see what 3.0 is like, and still find the same problems. Tried 3G, tried WiFi, and it's so ridiculously slow, and I still get timeouts every now and then.

I think the app is beautiful and has great UX, and loved being able to tag people, tag locations, and even mirror selectively to Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook. But using it was (and I'm afraid still is, though I'll give it a few days; at least the check-in feature appears to be working properly again) just a horribly frustrating experience.

path was designed to be a deeply personal social experience. if you take the time to recruit 8 people it will be a great experience for you. i usually recommend that people start with their family first, as the core use case we tend to serve is families wanting to stay closer.

dave, I tried :-)

Honestly it doesn't work. It's not sth that's filling a gap. They have Twitter/Facebook/IG (very few are still into Orkut :P) blah-blah. So, they just won't use it.

It's not everyone who hates those farmville updates, spam links etc (like me or many others). Most are just fine with it. AAMOF most of my friends enthusiastically re-share those bs videos(some are not even videos). Taste for a minimal and clean experience is sth very scarce.

All this happens on desktop, in a browser. Not in the mobile app. Mobile app just a link for them(and for me too) to look at sth new and very interesting(if there at all) and then use the app extensively on the desktop.

Actually I am not very positively hopeful about apps like WhatsApp either. It's not uniform. Hell, I would rather chat with GTalk everywhere - both desktop and phone, rather than WhatsApp on phone and then Gtalk on desktop. I love the idea of keeping messaging/chat separated from mail but it needs to come everywhere.

Only apps I successfully converted many in my circle with are Dropbox, Astrid/Any.do, Evernote(maximum)/SimpleNote(because of the very good Windows app Resoph), WhatsApp, Pocket etc - because they filled a gap more or less.

that's cool. we'll keep going and hope to win you as a user at some point :) appreciate your feedback.

Dave. My immediate family, wife, and grandma use path for basically our entire communications. We love it, brought us closer together.

One product note. I like path because it is only my immediate family, so the suggesting friends thing is a little annoying (because I think it will be less valuable to me of I add more people).

I tried that use case several times, I really dig the vision. It never sticks for me though, I don't get enough value added. Especially for my parents, Path is too complex, and a family whatsapp group serves much of the same function.

I'll keep trying Path once every few months, maybe one day it will stick.

Dave, I really want to use Path, but my closest friends and family either don't have an Android or iOS device, or can't be bothered to join a new social network.

You know what we use instead? Whatsapp. If it were pitched to us as a social network, we'd have passed but free international messaging (at a time no other app did)? Sign us all up!. It's fast, it's simple, it's our private social network.

Maybe with Path's addition of messaging, things will change. But if you could bring your app to Blackberry, that would be a huge help.

Dave, do you have any tactics to help people recruit 8 more people? Or recruit the family? This sound like the most important issue raised here and still something that only depends on word of mouth. Actually is "let's encourage new users to recruit 8 more people, preferentially among their family" part of the grownth strategy?

I went for "please sign up on Path and add me as a friend because unlike on Facebook, there are some things that I share which I really sincerely would like YOU (and not every other random person) to see". I've got my family and closest friends on Path now, about 12 people in total, most of whom add content regularly and I'm happy :)

Having said that, as much as I like Path, I do sometimes feel like I'm doing them a favour promoting it so aggressively, and the favour hasn't quite been returned yet.

Wow, I wasn't even thinking about that. I know I'm not "every person" but at work I almost exclusively use Facebook on the desktop. I rely on it for a lot of communication that would take a lot longer to do on mobile. If Path doesn't have that, I really can't use at as a primary social network. Instagram on the other hand is all about photos I took on my phone and short comments. For a more robust network I need a desktop much of the time.

I don't think being mobile only is Path's problem. Plenty of social networks like Instagram and WhatsApp have flourished without a webpage. For most people, Path doesn't offer anything they don't get from Facebook, or Twitter, or Foursquare, or Instagram, so they stop posting or checking the app.