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Ask HN: I spent months building an app and now I don't know how to get users

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61–70 of 75 posts

Re: Ask HN: I spent months building an app and now I don't know how to get users

#61
post #27

I like your vision but I do not understand the fundamental proposition here. The creators in the platform are supposed to perform specific tasks to raise money -- That's called "having a job". Essentially the platform is a marketplace to hire part time workers for specific one time tasks. If so, why position it as a campaign to raising funds as if it is some sort of charity. Is the underlying assumption that creators…

Hmmm... I don't see it as a charity. Campaign creators create their campaigns and offer their services. People in their community can buy those services. Let's say a person who has a full-time job, a person you know, wants to raise $1000 to help pay her rent and offers babysitting services in return. You need this service and instead of searching for someone you don't know, you hire that person. At the same time, you get a job done and you know you did a good things and helped her pay her rent.

Re: Ask HN: I spent months building an app and now I don't know how to get users

#63

Look at success stories. What did Kickstarter do? What did TaskRabbit do? What did company XYZ who is similar to your business do? Study your competitors.

And the failures as well to avoid survivorship bias. Sahil wrote a great book called "The Minimalist Entrepreneur" that goes into a lot of depth about finding customers. Also, Stripe Press has a book called Get Together that covers how to create community as well. I would recommend both books.

Re: Ask HN: I spent months building an app and now I don't know how to get users

#64
post #53

I am not sure where the app would fit. Besides renaming "workers" to "Creators" and "employers" to "Supporters", isn't it like "services offered" on a traditional newspaper classified ad column? (or nowadays Facebook, Craigslist or similar)

Well, it is in a way, but with a story. People can raise funds for something, very often very important like paying rent or mortgage so it's not just work-money exchange between them. It's more, when a person buys a service, they also did something good, they helped someone.

Re: Ask HN: I spent months building an app and now I don't know how to get users

#65
post #43

Great project, I've been looking for something like this many times, looks like I'm your user :) 1. Try using your platform to fund your marketing yourself. Create a ticket “Help with money for marketing” and issue your HN post as a separate article on different social platforms for indexing by Google and provide a link on social networks to this ticket. 2. Contact VCs and write to investors. This is a direct path to…

Hey, good to hear someone was looking for something like that. The idea to create my own campaign to raise marketing funds is a great one, thanks a lot. Regarding investors, I would like to get at least some users first, know that this thing works and then go talk to the investors.

Re: Ask HN: I spent months building an app and now I don't know how to get users

#66
Firstly, I believe people will buy almost anything if it's positioned and marketed to them correctly, so I wouldn't get discouraged if there are similar things out there at this stage. The trick is building and positioning a product with specific features that can withstand the buyer question of "what is my next best alternative" and ultimately choosing you. That, plus good unit economics, is how you build a foundation for a strong business. Most likely you'll overhaul the entire app and pivot 2-4 times before you get a strong product market fit, so be open to change (which is why building the entire thing before validating need is a great way to get your heart broken when it needs to be overhauled).

For Taskwer:

> I didn't listen to it

I'd start there, and introspect as to why you ignored the advice of the experts and experienced people. Validating market need before building anything you intend to sustainably sell is always a good idea. This will help you next time around and help you better understand yourself.

> At the same time, salaries didn't keep up with inflation, and more and more people started to struggle financially.

This is ground zero, the starting point, step one, etc. You think you've identified the problem. Who is struggling, exactly? Are you learning about this from a Business Insider or New Yorker article, or do you actually have a line of sight to a real person in your life this macro economic thing is hitting directly? You need to be able to contact at least one, but ideally 10 people to start, who are "struggling" and need to do odd-jobs or service work to make ends meet. Without them, you don't have a need and subsequently you don't have a service or an app that will go anywhere in its current form. You could perform (or purchase) the services yourself for the time being while you figure out who is more important to market to and how to market to them (my favorite lean solution to the cold start problem), then swap in the other participants in that side of the market over time. This can work really well if done correctly. In every two-sided market place there is a favorite child who is more important to the system and needs more attention, like drivers in Uber or homeowners in Airbnb. You should figure this out early on.

> just like on Kickstarter.

You need to have positioning that supports canned responses / dismissals with real incremental value to answer the inevitable comments like: "oh, so like Kickstarter? LOL" or "This sounds exactly like task rabbit". Ultimately I think you'll need to validate whether this incremental value is strong enough to carve out a niche for yourself and win users from the other solutions.

>Now, I have an MVP, and most of the features have been implemented, but I have no users.

Often times the MVP is a fraction of what you think, and you should spend the other X% of your time on GTM strategy and experimenting. The images on the site show payments support, messaging, scheduling, etc. I'll bet you could have prioritized better around a single core need that is unmet, and built the first feature cheaply. In this context, the value is connecting the right people at the right time, and you could deliver this with a cell phone, G-Suite and a great landing page with a form for email/phone number collection.

My impression is this is a grass roots, neighborly / community-driven idea, which is really cool. It has a feel-good, positive slant that pulls on your heart strings, which I think can help with marketing. The next question I'd ask is: "who is the type of person that would buy this over a Taskrabbit or existing expert solution?". Who wants to feel good about paying for services in addition to being happy the job got done?

I would turn to churches and similar groups, community centers, and leverage your own network to find a key partnership that can give you a pipeline of paying customers who want to feel good about using this type of thing rather than the typical service aggregator. In the future, I'd think about hiring or partnering with someone to round out your weaknesses, like an extroverted, people-oriented person with a large network who will shamelessly market the thing and isn't afraid of rejection, difficult conversations, vulnerability, etc.

The site looks great, and congrats on building something and deploying it to the world. That's hard and not many have done this, and is something to be proud of. Worst case, you have a great portfolio project to show off (maybe when pitching yourself as a technical cofounder on the next thing?) Now, if you get one paying customer and see that $ hit your bank account, that's even harder and you're doing what most people only dream and talk about, which is something to be even more proud of. Stay with it!

Re: Ask HN: I spent months building an app and now I don't know how to get users

#67

I really like the idea, actually. First, what I'd say is that a lot of people may comment here on HN with very "objective" opinions on whether it's a good or bad idea. I want to remind you that those "objective" statements are just subjective opinions, and that while those people may represent a large percentage of the population, they also might just represent a small percentage. And even if they represent a large p…

Yeah, I like this idea a lot, another user also recommended something similar. As I don't have a marketing budget right now, creating a campaign to raise funds for it makes a lot of sense and it would show people how the platform really works. Thanks a lot!

I'm glad you like it. I imagine you have plenty of services that people might want to receive from you, even I'm sitting here thinking I'd rather give money to someone like you to give me some feedback on my website UIs because I also want to support what you're working on, than a random person on TaskRabbit or fiverrr or any of those more impersonal websites.

Re: Ask HN: I spent months building an app and now I don't know how to get users

#69
post #27

I like your vision but I do not understand the fundamental proposition here. The creators in the platform are supposed to perform specific tasks to raise money -- That's called "having a job". Essentially the platform is a marketplace to hire part time workers for specific one time tasks. If so, why position it as a campaign to raising funds as if it is some sort of charity. Is the underlying assumption that creators…

Hmmm... I don't see it as a charity. Campaign creators create their campaigns and offer their services. People in their community can buy those services. Let's say a person who has a full-time job, a person you know, wants to raise $1000 to help pay her rent and offers babysitting services in return. You need this service and instead of searching for someone you don't know, you hire that person. At the same time, you…

"At the same time, you get a job done and you know you did a good things and helped her pay her rent."

You know you helped her raise money. Maybe she used that money to buy drugs. How could anyone know?

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