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My app failed: lessons learned

rithm.app

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Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#151

Post by folli »

nowherebeen wrote: post #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.

I guess it depends on the product. I just recently posted my newest side project there (an NFT minting webservice) and I even got a handful of paying clients. The conversation rate was quite high, and it has dropped significantly afterwards.

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

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#152

Post by jmcphers »

bambax wrote: post #58

Slightly 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 i…

This is almost exactly the feature set of OhLife, which tried and failed to make this experience (replying to a daily email as a form of journaling) into a product. It's a great idea but kind of hard to make money on.

https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/ohlife-personal-journal-em...

http://ohlife.com/index.php

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#153

Post by dzonga »

one thing, the OP is missing. with consumer oriented stuff, don't make the naive mistake of launching thinking you'll make money. do it as a vanity project. yeah, every now and then shout it out but don't expect it to make money. unless you're vc funded and you're trying to corner a market. b2b is different of course - there exists people willing to pay

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#154

Post by somenewaccount1 »

drewolbrich wrote: post #91
somenewaccount1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you are still working on learning distribution. I'm typing on a mac, but own an android. i still can't use or try your app :(

At least for this particular flavor of app, building an Android version is an optimization that should be made once the product has been proven successful. 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…

than i guess it wasn't actually a lesson worth learning, although it was in his list of eight. ::shrugs::

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#155

Post by somenewaccount1 »

kylebolt wrote: post #82
somenewaccount1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you are still working on learning distribution. I'm typing on a mac, but own an android. i still can't use or try your app :(

I thought failing on 1 platform would be more economical than failing on 2 :)

Then.....extending distribution wasn't really a problem or lesson learned. It's a nice to have.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#156

Post by phgn »

tvirosi wrote: post #57

This 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).

I'm feeling the same way, also can't stand all the self-gratulating content on these sites.

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.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#157

Post by mavelikara »

Axsuul wrote: post #105
dcolkitt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the quote: "When a great team and product meets a lousy market, market usually wins. When a mediocre team and product meets a great market, market usually wins"

What does this mean?

https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html

> market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#158

Post by kylebolt »

allenu wrote: post #135
throwawayboise wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not build something like this cross-platform? The functionality sounds simple enough that you don't really need a native app for each platform.

It seems like it would be simple enough, but it's death by a thousand cuts. Supporting Android means having to keep track of even more screen sizes, OS versions, updates, app store releases and so on. It just adds on more and more. For one developer who is trying to prove out an idea, the work to support the app on multiple platforms just eats up your time and focus when you really should be focusing on features and…

Yes exactly, having the same app and features on android would still have leave to all users churning like they did on iOS.

Think Clubhouse only moving to android when it was working on iOS.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#159

Post by kylebolt »

somenewaccount1 wrote: post #155
kylebolt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought failing on 1 platform would be more economical than failing on 2 :)

Then.....extending distribution wasn't really a problem or lesson learned. It's a nice to have.

Yes, no point in more distribution when users were not retaining. Although, it was hard to even get those first few thousand users to try the product.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#160

Post by kylebolt »

zem wrote: post #124
nicoburns wrote: post #11

I've yet to see a single product that was improved by being a chatbot.

i've seen one - my workplace briefly experimented with a chatbot for taking vacation time. you would say something like "i'm on vacation from tuesday to friday" and it would parse it, extract or convert the input to a date range, and submit a vacation request through the official tool. it would then ask if you also wanted to display your vacation status on your calendar and set up an email autoresponder, and do them…

This sounds interesting. Although this use case is very infrequent. If this had a wider use case, like something used daily, that just might be be a viable product!
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