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My app failed: lessons learned

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Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#71

Post by mdorazio »

cortesoft wrote: post #61
rexreed wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're trying to run a business, then yes, it needs to be something people need, because you're asking people to give up something of value to them. Money and/or time. If you ask for something of value you have to provide something of value in return. Of course, the need can be anything that people find valuable. It could be a product or a service or just a way to stay connected or entertainment. Whatever it is, i…

I don't really understand your definition of need. You define a 'need' as anything that people find valuable, but I would classify 'nice to have' as also being things someone finds valuable. How do you distinguish something that is a 'nice to have' and a 'need'?

Nice to have is a luxury - it doesn't solve any actual problem people have, it just make life a little bit nicer. Need is an actual value proposition - people are already spending time or money to do a thing that you can do better.

I think you're using the rigid definition of "need" like the bottom of the Maslow hierarchy, but in the business world "need" is more value driven, or in the B2C side closer to the top of the hierarchy.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#72

Post by mdorazio »

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…

To your #5, I find that developers tend to be allergic to the term "marketing" because it's easy to think it's a waste of money or the department of flashy do-nothings if you've never tried to actually build a business yourself.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#73

Post by bastawhiz »

> I initially saw oh ok, there are a ton of people making these apps, it must be profitable.

If you look at a dense market and decide to join in because you see potential profit because the market is dense, you're already destined for failure. Everyone else already has a head start, which means you need some sort of differentiating feature to be competitive.

Why would I pay for blog software that's half baked or doesn't offer anything new? Or a to-do list? Or time tracker? Or invoicing tool?

The author dances around this, but it honestly sounds like the product they built wasn't remarkably good or novel, and was positioned against incumbents that were plentiful and often had existing success. The failure here seems to be a lack of business plan beyond "join the pack and make money".

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#74

Post by sombremesa »

jfengel wrote: post #34
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…

Is it really realistic to build something people "need"? Humanity survived millions of years without a single piece of software; it's unlikely that anything you write is ever going to be a "need". People buy stuff they don't need all the time. Games and other entertainment are the very definition of "nice to have", and they're vast markets. Even business tools are usually not "needs" if all they do is improve an exis…

It doesn’t have to be a Need with a capital N. I had the same questions when I first encountered this advice, but I’ve since realized that it’s perfectly fine to address vague needs like the need for entertainment.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#75

Post by canniballectern »

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.

Games are really easy to test viability for, though. The game has perfect information about itself, rarely connects in a complex way to anything outside the game, and it's easy to replicate the user's context just by sitting in a dark room on your own. The test is simple - is it fun?

By contrast, most apps need to connect to people, software and things outside themselves - they're part of complex systems, and it's really hard to know if they work well without putting them into use and seeing how they perform - and that means selling and talking to users, not something you can do in isolation.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#76

Post by ehnto »

mcraiha wrote: post #7
bluedino wrote: post #5

How was this product marketed/advertised?

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.

I think there is still paths available that don't require advertising money. I think a lot of SaaS necessarily relies on customers to come "From the ether" via the internet, and sustain their business with $9/month accounts. That means you're competing with people who can outspend you for people's attention.

If you're in an industry niche and solving a valuable problem, you can charge a lot more and afford to sell directly to your customers, potentially in person. Acquisition looks like it costs more, but if you're a one person show and it's your time, then that's a sacrifice you can make as you're trying to bootstrap your business.

Just a contrived example, if you're selling telemetry software to motorsports garages, you could have the margin and the value-add to go knock on workshop doors and sell if it's valuable enough to them.

I think there's still a lot of hard software problems to solve in grass roots industries, with customers that you can go visit in your city. I think we get stuck in the idea of selling software to the internet and software industries.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#77

Post by kylebolt »

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.

Very true, they are more product focused vs. habit / self development focused.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#78

Post by mdorazio »

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 signed up. My mom and I are the only ones who still use it.

I guess I have two thoughts: 1) simple, habit-based products aren't nearly as sticky as I thought without some kind of social validation component. 2) dogfooding your projects with your personal network is a great way to see if they're actually sticky and just to learn more about the market in general - I recommend it.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#79

Post by kylebolt »

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…

Yes great re-cap, thank you!

Even though I've read and heard about these common mistakes, sometimes we have to learn by doing to truly find out if they apply to our use case.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#80

Post by kylebolt »

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…

My next product is going to be totally focused on this single point -> Sell to people who can write the check, and have a budget to spend
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