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My app failed: lessons learned

rithm.app

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Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#21

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Here's my take on selling:

1) Sell to people who can write the check, and have a budget to spend

That's my entire advice. It seems obvious. If you're selling to an individual, choose a demographic with money to spend. And charge a price to fit into their budget.

If you're selling to a team, don't. Sell to the person buying products/tools for the team, the one with signing authority. They make the ultimate decision. And they have a budget to spend, and will likely spend it all on something.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#22

Post by yorwba »

koalala wrote: post #8
mcraiha wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the only question that needs to be asked nowadays. You need user acquisition money. Sad fact is that otherwise it is almost impossible to do anything.

Exactly, I would recommend spending a few thousand on a good PPC marketing agency and let them set up your marketing. You might be amazed at what this would accomplish since your product seems fine.

"100% churn" doesn't sound like a product that is fine and just needs more marketing.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#23

Post by Cantinflas »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #21

Here's my take on selling: 1) Sell to people who can write the check, and have a budget to spend That's my entire advice. It seems obvious. If you're selling to an individual, choose a demographic with money to spend. And charge a price to fit into their budget. If you're selling to a team, don't. Sell to the person buying products/tools for the team, the one with signing authority. They make the ultimate decision. A…

This is 100% on point... For selling to big companies. B2C is another game!

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#24

Post by cpcat »

Retric wrote: post #17
cpcat wrote: post #9

From 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)

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.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#26

Post by forbiddenvoid »

Retric wrote: post #17
cpcat wrote: post #9

From 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)

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.

Stardew Valley might be the ultimate example for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardew_Valley

I think it's also important to recognize how much survivorship bias there is in these stories, too, though.

There are plenty of people who have spent similar amounts of time working on games or projects with nothing much to show for it. The experience might be worth something to someone, though, in terms of resume building, etc.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#27

Post by rexreed »

bko wrote: post #18

He mentions a false positive of paying customers. I have some personal experience of customers paying for a product and not using it. We're all guilty of it in one way or another. What percentage of paying customers should be active? 100% is unrealistic, but 0% is troubling since they are not getting any value from it and its not validating your idea. How does this depend on price of the product or whether its a subs…

There will always be inactive customers, but if your customer growth month-over-month is not greater than your % of inactive users (the inverse of % active users), then you will stall and enter decline.

For example: if 80% of current customers login on a regular basis (monthly, daily), and you're growing at 10% per month new users, you will actually decline at some point because your 20% inactive users is greater than 10% new customers. It might take some time, but at some point customer churn will outpace new customer growth.

So you have to measure new customer acquisition as a % of current installed base, total % of actives (measured on a logical period relevant for your solution), and total churn % (non-renewals divided by renewals). If the churn measure is measured differently you can think of it as the renewal rate because you want to measure retention vs. acquisition.

To simplify: if acquisition is not greater than retention, then you have problems. Retention is dependent on active use with some factor and with some delay.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#28

Post by nkrisc »

nicoburns wrote: post #11

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

For a chat bot product to succeed, it has to be indistinguishable from a real human in every way. Otherwise the user will know its capabilities are limited, but won’t know in what way exactly they are limited. This is a perfect recipe for endless frustration as you slowly uncover every way in which it does not work how you expected it to, impeding whatever simple talk you wanted to complete.

If I had nickel for every time a chat bot or phone bot told me to speak to it like a human, and then was completely incapable of handling that, I’d be rich.

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