My app failed: lessons learned

Post by orasis » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

yoble wrote: post #130

Regarding lesson 4 (Distribution), the author links to a tweet by Justin Kan saying "First time founders are obsessed with products. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution". Justin Kan posted[0] today a video of himself criticizing that very tweet, saying that it didn't age well and he now believes product is 99% of the work, and the reason that many unicorns are founded by first-time founders is they do…

Post by seanwilson » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 7:56 PM UTC

allenu wrote: post #59

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've posted on ProductHunt as well and so many of the upvotes I get and comments that I get are clearly spambots.

Post by allenu » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 7:58 PM UTC

throwawayboise wrote: post #115

drewolbrich wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Post by cercatrova » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

throwinawaysoon wrote: post #110

rexreed wrote: post #15

Good lessons. But so many common mistakes To summarize: 1) Build something people really need, not a nice-to-have 2) Keeping customers is more important than just acquiring them 3) If you're not keeping your customers that means they don't want or need what you have 4) Changing people's behavior is really hard. Unless you have a significant amount of marketing budget, don't try to change people 5) "Distribution" is k…

8.In hindsight, it's easy to give advice to others on their flaws than making it a reality on your own. Making a list really sells it to people. 9.Stop making products, start writing personal development/marketing books that contain things that seem obvious in your head but you've never really tried it yourself. 10. Make your fluff seem as authentic as you can

Post by lambo2991 » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 8:15 PM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #78

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…

Also OT: I built something very similar, but with text messages and asking for a positive thing that happened during the day rather than a journal entry (forcing myself to look for positive things in a day helped snap me out of a spiral toward depression in the early days of lockdowns). I spent a weekend getting it to the point where it was good enough to share with friends and family, and about a dozen of them signe…