Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: My app is shared on Twitter every day. What should I do?

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 55 posts

Re: Ask HN: My app is shared on Twitter every day. What should I do?

#31
I'm somewhat biased, but you should consider using a crash monitoring tool like Bugsnag (https://bugsnag.com) to help you find and fix the bugs :)

Have you spent any time working out the total market size for your app? Doing some basic modeling might help you make your decision!

Re: Ask HN: My app is shared on Twitter every day. What should I do?

#32
Getting a technical co-founder might be a really good idea! That co-founder may be able to start sooner than you can. But you should definitely think about cutting bait on work and side project soon if you want to double down.

The fact that you already have market validation is huge! Many startups burn ask their energy and money just getting there.

Re: Ask HN: My app is shared on Twitter every day. What should I do?

#34

You do know that maybe 20, 10, or even less than 1% of the people who Buffer'd it actually visited your site and downloaded the app, right? Most people use their suggestions on auto-pilot. I would be excited if you saw people spontaneously praising it on Twitter, not Buffering it. When i search on Twitter, I only see the automated Buffers, not tweets like "Just found out this app.. love it!" or "Has anyone else used…

Thanks for raining on my parade. jk I know conversions are only a small percentage. Some people are excited and I still receive emails from people. Eyeballs first, conversions second right? My page visits have been growing, and Twitter is a percentage of it. It's something to build on. My honest take is that people are interested in the idea, but I need to continue working on the product. Execution is important.

What's your business model? How do you intend to make money from this?

Re: Ask HN: My app is shared on Twitter every day. What should I do?

#35

I'm in the same spot with my app (digitaldetachapp.com). I found an awesome developer overseas, but I'm at a point where I'm not sure how much money I want to put into it. I've decided to slowly keep improving based on customer feedback (I'm self-funding this). It's a great learning experience at the very least. Here's what I suggest: 1) Fix the bugs and 2.) Consider charging more (I'd probably triple the price if I…

2. Or keep the price unchanged but unlock additional functionality via in-app purchases.

Re: Ask HN: My app is shared on Twitter every day. What should I do?

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for raining on my parade. jk I know conversions are only a small percentage. Some people are excited and I still receive emails from people. Eyeballs first, conversions second right? My page visits have been growing, and Twitter is a percentage of it. It's something to build on. My honest take is that people are interested in the idea, but I need to continue working on the product. Execution is important.

What's your business model? How do you intend to make money from this?

I want to make sure I'm solving the problem before I decide how to make money.

It's useful to several different groups: business teams, coaches, people in the employment space and normal people. I only need to cover rent and other expenses.

There are a few options (in-app purchases, ads, pro account for business teams).

Re: Ask HN: My app is shared on Twitter every day. What should I do?

#37
Im not an iOS programmer, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought you could interop swift code with obj-c. In that case, write new functionality in swift and fix the obj-c with the intention to convert it to swift later down the track. A rewrite would be overkill, just fix and update where appropriate.

Also, if you need someone to port it to Android, feel free to give me a yell :P

Re: Ask HN: My app is shared on Twitter every day. What should I do?

#38
> it has bugs and it's not good enough to begin marketing yet

Measure and prioritize the bugs. If you don't know how many people are dealing with them you can't figure out how many you need to fix.

> I'm learning Swift to build the 2nd version

I won't tell you what to do, but software history is full of 2nd versions the morphed into death marches.

tl;dr Figure out the fewest amount of bugs you need to fix to make it work for 80% of your users and then market aggressively. Do not rewrite right now.

Re: Ask HN: My app is shared on Twitter every day. What should I do?

#39
Hey! I remember your app from your HN submission. Glad to see it's working out well for you.

This is tangential and not really an answer to your question, but you should probably work on your icon a little bit. At the moment, it reads to me like "sketchy website companion app". It'll be miles better just by removing the white/azure background and having the goblet a little bigger and by itself. (IMO.)

Re: Ask HN: My app is shared on Twitter every day. What should I do?

#40

Hey! I remember your app from your HN submission. Glad to see it's working out well for you. This is tangential and not really an answer to your question, but you should probably work on your icon a little bit. At the moment, it reads to me like "sketchy website companion app". It'll be miles better just by removing the white/azure background and having the goblet a little bigger and by itself. (IMO.)

Thanks! You're probably right about the icon. LOL
Post reply on HN