annekate

You could do an ambassador program of some kind (check out The Skimm, they have a great one). But I wouldn't expect people to eagerly spread the word about solutions. For B2B you should be investing in content marketing and SEO above all else. Other clever ideas are like what Slack did; make it friendly enough for a consumer to use, and then that consumer ends up advocating for the product to their organization.

Thanks for being on team Winnie and for all your support since launch!

go to local Mac/iOS dev meetups and ask around. they also show up at conferences and of course at WWDC.

Childcare data in 50 states is coming early in 2018.

It’s not a lottery. I’ve done it several times over many years with different products and companies. The advice I laid out is basically how I did that.

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.

If you have the choice, yes. You'll regret React for many reasons but you are so, so much less likely to be featured with a React app, even a great one. Suck it up and learn Swift/Kotlin (not that hard) and if you can get your app featured that's a cool 10-20k installs for free.

Or you can write a native app and get 10-20k installs for free from a feature on the app store. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

^ This is good advice.

I was an early employee of Quora and can vouch for it being a good place to do content marketing! I really love that site.

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.

It's in the article. Provide the supply yourself (content) while you build demand (users). Do things that don't scale.

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.

You can't get from 0 to 100k without passing through 171 first. :) Congrats and good luck!

Depends on the product. Winnie's target demo is millennial parents who are mobile power users, so we knew the apps had to be best-in-class and we were prepared to invest in them.

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.

Games are the exception to this rule. Apple and Google have no problem featuring games built in Unity as long as they are performant and polished.

It entirely depends on the domain so there's no good answer for this.

Our growth has been remarkably steady, with minor seasonal factors. If the majority of your acquisition channels scale with the number of users (SEO, social, viral) then you should see a steady accumulation of momentum over time, even from a very small number — perhaps the low thousands.

We've had a strong word of mouth factor from the very beginning, but I attribute that mostly to the brand and the fact that this is an underserved market. Parents have traditionally been invisible to tech companies and they are delighted someone is finally building for them.

Funnily enough, we also sort of failed to capitalize on push. We didn't even ask for push permissions in the first version of our app! Eventually we found the right push product for our users, but it's still the case that a lot of people have them off by default or prefer to be contacted by email.

Long live the web!

The Android app is US only, but you can also sign up on Winnie.com. We do have some Canadian users :)

Thanks, I'll check it out.

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.

Enough to get statistically significant data. There are programs to get $100 AdWords or FB Ads credit and that's more then enough to get a few thousand to 10k impressions on your ads and give you decent data about how well they perform. I would usually set a testing campaign to spend about $10/day for 5-7 days, and would shut it down early if it was looking particularly bad.

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.

Sure, of course! So this is one thing that might be unique to Winnie — local data is one of our value props (and the best one) but it's not the only one. We discovered pretty early on that even in the local communities people were asking not-local questions like "what's the best diaper?". This told us that there was some demand to be part of a parenting community, even if it wasn't giving you particularly local insights. This is one feature of Winnie that works anywhere in the world, and we do have an active cohort of users who just use us to talk and get advice from other parents.

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 :)

BTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!

Great post! I absolutely love the tip about reviewing your own PRs. I never would have thought to do that and it seems like a great practice to look at your own code from a different angle.

I am her cofounder and I can verify she is not normal. She is exceptionally capable, hard-working and focused. When she is with her kid she is 100% a mom. When she is at work she is 100% a founder. When her husband needs her, she is there; she managed all of his care, down to staying up late reading medical research papers so she could understand his test results.

A lot of people would have given up. I certainly wouldn't have blamed her for a second if she had. She chose to fight and I'll be damned if she isn't winning. It's inspiring to see.

"If I don't give myself permission I perceive all of that time as wasted just trying to get the package to do what it does and I need it to do so that I can forget it and move on." Wow this is really insightful. Also, the best and most reliable engineers I've worked with are very meticulous about reading the docs. They end up down less rabbit holes and it saves time in the end.

Can confirm, Winnie is really cool.

This happened to me too after I had my kids. More planning, less coding, and I'm pretty sure my productivity has actually gone up.

Hello! I'm one of the founders and I lead design & development of the iPhone app. I welcome any feedback, comments or questions about Winnie!

This is actually just wrong. Compare them side by side and you'll see that the web view components in the iPhone app have been specially designed and constructed for the app.

See http://www.quora.com/Why-is-most-of-Quora-for-iPhone-a-wrapp...

Check out http://www.quora.com/Anne-K.-Halsall/Quora-for-iPhone/Announ... and http://www.quora.com/about/app/ for some more specific information.