How to get your first 100k active users
blog.winnie.com
How to get your first 100k active users
1–10 of 159 posts
Re: How to get your first 100k active users
#2BTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!
Re: How to get your first 100k active users
#3BTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!
Canadian here, great to hear about your success, I'm on google play store and couldn't download, guess its US-only at this point?
Re: How to get your first 100k active users
#4BTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!
As well, got other questions, but understand if you don't want to answer, what did you think was the most important problem you solved for your users and how did you get people to really download your app after the beta stage?
This also sounds like a good link that can go on indiehackers.com
Re: How to get your first 100k active users
#5Not that you need my vote, but I agree with all of this. In particular:
- Go true native, not hybrid
- Use ads for testing ideas
- Don't forget about email!
I'm also intrigued by your approach of not going market-by-market like a lot of local-focused marketplaces do. Your approach seems to make sense, and obviously worked for you. I particularly like that you had a different onboarding flow for users in new markets, that's smart.
But still, I'm not sure that this approach would make sense for a lot of local-focused apps? I think the fear would be that it would be relatively easy to get 100k users but they'd be spread out so thin that they'd find little utility in the app and stop using it. So you'd have 100k users in your database, but a tiny fraction of that in terms of actual active users. But maybe that doesn't even matter, since you wouldn't have had all those inactive users anyway?
Could you speak to that? I'd love to hear how many of those 100k users are DAU or MAU, but understand if you can't share that :)
Congrats!
Re: How to get your first 100k active users
#6"Relying on push notifications alone"
Yeah no. Apps using push notification for marketing/dark purposes is super irritating and for that reason I block notifications by default from all apps.
Re: How to get your first 100k active users
#7BTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!
I think this page completely embodies your core values and primary onboarding flows. It should be your homepage.
Re: How to get your first 100k active users
#8The advice to not only rely on push and native mobile hits home hard - despite it being cool - email, text, and the web still work really well to bring the customers in!
Re: How to get your first 100k active users
#9BTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!
What's a "very modest spend" when it comes to advertising? How much is enough to validate whether and ad is or isn't working in your experience? Also did a majority of your new users come from being featured on app stores or was it primarily through turning the modest spend into a serious spend once the ad was converting?
Re: How to get your first 100k active users
#10Not that you need my vote, but I agree with all of this. In particular: - Go true native, not hybrid - Use ads for testing ideas - Don't forget about email! I'm also intrigued by your approach of not going market-by-market like a lot of local-focused marketplaces do. Your approach seems to make sense, and obviously worked for you. I particularly like that you had a different onboarding flow for users in new markets,…
Sure, of course! So this is one thing that might be unique to Winnie — local data is one of our value props (and the best one) but it's not the only one. We discovered pretty early on that even in the local communities people were asking not-local questions like "what's the best diaper?". This told us that there was some demand to be part of a parenting community, even if it wasn't giving you particularly local insights. This is one feature of Winnie that works anywhere in the world, and we do have an active cohort of users who just use us to talk and get advice from other parents.
We also did something that I forgot to mention in the article that helped us grow nationally before we had a lot of proprietary data. One of the nice things about starting a company in 2017 is that there are tons of great resources available to you. Free or cheap services that solve what used to be really hard problems are readily available. One such service is Foursquare. When we launched Winnie, if you opened the app in an area where we didn't have data, instead of showing you nothing we instead showed you results from Foursquare. This was admittedly not the best experience, but it gave people affordance to still find places and write reviews.
Refusing to go market-by-market also forced us to build a bunch of proprietary and very cool infrastructure that collects data at scale. One early system we built could actually figure out which restaurants had changing tables and highchairs, nationally and instantaneously, at a VERY low cost. I can't say how we did that but you'd be surprised at what's possible if you have the will and ambition :)