For a second I read $194m in revenue, is it Friday yet.
My app failed: lessons learned
51–60 of 177 posts
Re: My app failed: lessons learned
#52> The app landed as the #4 product of the day on ProductHunt, had some good initial traction which proceeded to fall off a cliff.
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.
Re: My app failed: lessons learned
#53I think the biggest myth with apps today is "if you build it, they will come". I think it was true 10 years ago when the iPhone App Store was getting started, but not today. 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 t…
> I think it was true 10 years ago when the iPhone App Store was getting started, but not today 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.
I remember a coworker made a very basic compass app with a friend in the early days of the iPhone and he disclosed that they made something like $200k on it, which is absolutely wild.
Re: My app failed: lessons learned
#54I use this sort of app, have for years. The idea of using a chatbot as UI is completely unappealing. So I think it comes down to there not being a need for this new take on this concept.
Yes totally, I thought "hey using a chatbot would be like texting an accountability friend or coach" but in reality that gimmick just doesn't work. Since tracking habits requires displaying data, a user interface with visual elements is more effective than a chat UI.
Re: My app failed: lessons learned
#55From my experience, if an app takes more than a few months to build and launch, the risk is no longer worth it. Large companies also do this (years building before launching and i have yet to hear of a success)
Yes. I "wasted" 2019 building a platform that my customers didn't need. Scare quotes because it wasn't really a waste; it taught me a lot about what not to do.
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."
Re: My app failed: lessons learned
#56From my experience, if an app takes more than a few months to build and launch, the risk is no longer worth it. Large companies also do this (years building before launching and i have yet to hear of a success)
Yes I've now learned that lessons, luckily I've not quit my day job.
Re: My app failed: lessons learned
#57This makes me wish there was a version of producthunt except where the culture was ok with brutally honest replies (rather than the forced encouragement on producthunt, which is nice and has its place too but you need to hear both voices).
Re: My app failed: lessons learned
#58Slightly OT: I built myself a journaling app that sends one email every day to remind me to write about that day; I respond to that email and the response gets stored in a db as an entry for that day.
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.
Re: My app failed: lessons learned
#59> The app landed as the #4 product of the day on ProductHunt, had some good initial traction which proceeded to fall off a cliff. 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.
I've posted on ProductHunt as well and so many of the upvotes I get and comments that I get are clearly spambots.
Re: My app failed: lessons learned
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Games generally take significant time to build sometimes years, but can be quite successful. You wider point is reasonable though as many people waste a lot of time building something that never gets traction.
Totally agree about certain games. You can't have certain games before years of building, it's like making a movie.
Yes this is the confusing thing about creative endeavours. Lean start up says to learn quickly and pivot yet so many artists work on the movies, games, and books for years and years.
I guess we need to realize that most of us are not James Cameron :)