Ask HN: How many signups should an app realistically expect in the first month?

I am going to take all this feedback and have a think.

Thanks again.

I'll be frank here. It's like a date. If you don't think it's going well, it probably isn't. It might be doing okay, but it's probably better to move on.

If people aren't lining up to give you their money, it's likely not working. If it is working, your focus would be scaling, dealing with complaints, getting frustrated yet excited that there's too much to do.

That doesn't necessarily mean the product is wrong. It could mean you have the wrong market, wrong marketing channel, wrong pricing model (imagine if Facebook tried to charge membership or Netflix tried to monetize from microtransactions), wrong pitch.

One thing that always works for me is asking, who is the best competitor? And trying to build a product that is 10x better.

How do people do split proceeds now? They write out the math on a piece of paper, transfer to friends. Cash or click click bank account details. Is your product 10x better? Probably not. It's not too hard to do as it is, and it's more effort to sign up.

What about someone who does this a lot? Course seller, or freelance teachers for a studio. Well, they probably have done it in a contract, where they collect a sum and then pay it out. It's a burden, but is it a burden worth paying 6% + the cost of figuring out a new system?

Your fee system could be off too - I strongly dislike pushing fees to customers, because it feels like a dodgy 'hidden cost' thing. The reason people offer "free" shipping (i.e. write costs into the price) is because this puts off customers.

Alright, so who would actually have this issue so badly that they would be happy to pay 6% to get it off their hands?

A large scale company probably has integrated it into payroll, and at some point it's cheaper to just hire someone to split the bill. So you'll want something medium sized, maybe hectic and complex. Event management perhaps? Or training. If so, you'll actually want to be approaching those target clients directly and asking them. Asking your friends and family, or posting on HN will likely just give you fake data - your effective customer base could be 0, but is being floated up by supportive people.

I would be ecstatic with 1000 users, and would definitely give me motivation to continue to build. Out of curiosity what was the state of the 1000 user 1st month vs. 200 user 1st month? Were they both pretty much complete apps? Or still in a MVPish state?

I was torn between spending more time developing before releasing or get some sort of validation to avoid the “building a solution for no ones problem”, and really was getting drained spending hours on developing. Maybe a bit of burnout being a solo dev working on this. I wanted to be reinvigorated by some level of validation.

Generally feels like the bar for getting any validation/feedback is higher, as the general consumer wants a shiny, not buggy, fully functioning app before even dipping their toe in.

Agreed its not 10x better for most people, but do think there is a convenience factor and some price that someone might be willing to pay for that maybe not 6%, but the 6% covers stripe charges (processing & payouts to connected accounts)

With regards to the pushing fee to customers, my logic was that a possible user would be pushed off by the 6% charge, and not even try out the application (albeit everything else about the app is pushing them away anyway!)

Thanks again.

The 2 examples you provided are great...thanks a lot. Think its going to take some time flesh things out!

For sure, doing everything yourself is not the way to go -- there's simply too much to do :)