11 ms·

Don't bother creating a mobile app

242 points by marwann 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
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jorisw 11y ago
Is the title meant to be linkbait? Cause this is quite the blanket statement. How do you know what I'm building (if anything) and if it falls in a category that might benefit from being a native app and the distribution that comes with it? What worked or did not work for you need not apply to every other business.
lindig 11y ago
I am using a mobile app to track the milage of my car and thus pull it up only at the gas station. While a little more specific than general expense tracking, it seems to be similar enough for a comparison. According to the article these apps are a hard sell because they are used so rarely. I can't comment on how the app creator is doing but it's still an app that I would pay for. But maybe the market is too small and the simplicity of the app creates an unsustainable race to the bottom.
- marwann 11y ago
  I think you're one of the exceptions, figures showed people were mostly opening it once a month, and not contextually as we wanted them to. We're still on mobile, but without an app now! More about it here: https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-slack-as-a-platform-for-your-product-feeade7e6737#.vjjloauoo https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-sla...
- taco_emoji 11y ago
  Me too! It's an Android app called aCar which I did end up spending the $5 on (for no ads and IIRC more advanced backup options). I use it infrequently, but A) it takes less than a minute to enter a new "fill-up" record right after I get gas, and B) I programmed in all the reminders for oil change, tire rotation, etc., so entering the fill-up records (with mileage) means I keep on top of maintenance. It provides value (B) with no friction (A), so pretty much a no-brainer.
  - ajeet_dhaliwal 11y ago
    To track car mileage I get out the manual and look up the size of my tank. Every time I fill up I reset the trip odometer in the car. At fill up I calculate the mileage. It's so easy, why is an app needed for this? May be the calculator app but that's all that should be required unless it's doing something else.
    - taco_emoji 11y ago
      A) Why would you need to look up the size of your tank? The gas pump tells you quite precisely how much you used since last fill-up B) Nobody said they needed an app for this C) I'm not really sure how pulling up the calculator app and punching in numbers is any easier than pulling up the mileage app and punching in numbers D) If you use your imagination very slightly, you can come up with other obvious features such an app would provide, such as tracking average miles driven per day/month/year, average MPG per day/month/year, gas prices over time, service records (when was the last oil change/tire rotation/brake job), etc. E) I also explicitly talked about another feature it provides (reminders), so I don't get the impression you actually read my comment before replying
brlewis 11y ago
Might a monthly reminder notification have helped?
- marwann 11y ago
  Every user received a monthly reminder, and it did help, but having an idle app on your phone for the other 29 days didn't, unfortunately
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - drdaeman 11y ago
    Why unsolicited? User had set up an app that they care about just once a month, and that's a long time, so reminders are actually helpful - from end-user perspective. I have an app that I run about just once in a few months, and I'm actually grateful that it does ping me.
mdorazio 11y ago
I can't find the app to see exactly how it worked, but did it have any integrations with expense reporting systems? As someone who files expense reports monthly for work, that would be the biggest issue for me - if it doesn't have a hook into QuickBooks or whatever system the company is using, then it's not going to get an enterprise following since users still have to manually enter info, which decreases value a lot. The other issue is that if, like me, you travel a lot then a large number of your receipts will be in emails or PDFs (I book airfare and hotels online, and take Uber instead of cabs), so taking pictures of paper receipts and tracking driving miles would only get me half-way to completion.
- marwann 11y ago
  True that. Before moving to an "invisible app", we were developing integrations for such accounting software, and we had an email forwarding function as Uber was also a big part of the expenses filed on our app. Still, a SaaS like ours had a hard time living only on mobile, and through our own mobile app
- codazoda 11y ago
  They didn't mention this in the article, which makes me wonder if they really understood it. Companies have specific tools they require you to use to file expense reports. You would have to get the entire company to embrace this solution. Although they talk about the CTO trying to get it installed, I wonder if they ever really got the whole company on board. You've got to get the CTO and the CFO in this case.
  - mpeg 11y ago
    It just doesn't work that way, the best audience for this is big co (because the combination of strict expense rules and big sales force makes it perfect) and yet it is absolutely impossible to get an enterprise signed into something like this. Yet when the sales guys are putting in their expense reports every month (because it's too much money to ignore it for longer than a month) you could save them time with something like this, and guess what, they can expense the cost too, but only if you give them a report that is ready to send in the format they need it.
niklas_a 11y ago
Really weird to read this being someone who's using Expensify on a daily basis in exactly the use cases they describe.
- win_ini 11y ago
  LOL - totally. However, their interface actually looked sexy compared to expensify. But epensify works and I can use it on desktop....that's the killer. The mobile app is awesome for capturing but I like desktop for putting together reports. Ultimately - I believe in Expensify's VISION - which is to GET RID OF EXPENSE REPORTS! That's why I'll stick with Expensify - and I'm now at my third company that I am bringing it into....that is how software expands its footprint. By excited users bringing it into new businesses.
dade_ 11y ago
OneNote & OfficeLens has replaced many apps on my phone. It's true that the other apps were better tailored to the problem, but the effort to install and maintain so many apps with a couple mobile devices (tablet and phone) is just too much: app features and layouts keep changing, credential info needs to be re-entered and then I get to my desktop and there is no application for Windows or Mac. For better or worse, if the requirement can even partially be met with OneNote or Evernote, they will probably just use it.
at-fates-hands 11y ago
It looks like you made the right pivot, moving away from a native app to a web app. FYI - your mobile navigation isn't working.
- meestaahjoshee 11y ago
  I too was expecting a web app but it looks like it's just a slack bot now which is...interesting.
niklas_a 11y ago
Really weird to read this being someone who is using the Expensify app on a daily basis. Super simple, I just photo the receipts as I go about during the month and then at the beginning of the next month I create my expense report.
- marwann 11y ago
  If all of our users were like you, we would have kept it I guess, but figures showed batch uses once a month instead
  - niklas_a 11y ago
    In that case you didn't go after the right users. Expensify just did a $17m Series C so must obviously be a lot of people like me.
- dagw 11y ago
  For me the main pain point of expenses is feeding the data into the archaic web app the company uses for expenses and matching every receipt with the right project number and project activity. Any solution that doesn't remove my need to interact with that web app isn't solving my main problem.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
seibelj 11y ago
Do users actually hate "app clutter"? I have plenty of apps I only use rarely, but when I need them, I need them. Space isn't a concern unless it's a huge game or downloads tons of media. 100MB or less is nothing.
- PatentTroll 11y ago
  Completely anecdotally: if I haven't used an app in a week then I delete it. I can't really justify it, I have 64gb of space on my phone - it's more of an OCD thing than anything else.
  - fharper1961 11y ago
    I'm guessing you're using an iPhone. On iOS all the apps are displayed somewhere on your homescreens. When I tried iOS that bothered me, because coming from Android I was used to being able to choose which app icons are displayed on the homescreens.
  - wdmeldon 11y ago
    I'm similar, but instead of a week of not using it, I wait until it upsets me some way. Completely irrational, but that's what I do.
- knodi123 11y ago
  I do get sick of the updates. Every day, "14 apps updated" or even worse, "3 apps need your approval to update". Whenever there's an update pending, I ask myself, "have I opened this app since the last update?" If no, then I delete it.
  - natch 11y ago
    Auto update option... no approval needed.
    - elbigbad 11y ago
      And then suddenly one day you notice that Facebook now has access to your phone logs, microphone, and camera without your knowledge.
mwexler 11y ago
Is the problem more that this is a feature, not a product? That is, integrated with expense report systems, tax management, any other business tools, this makes sense. But as a standalone, it feels like an island. This was similar to TripIt which organized your trip based on parsing confirmations. At the end of the day, it was a great feature, but struggled to grow beyond a certain point as a product. Love the idea behind Birdly... but I think it belongs in other apps/tools used for more frequent and broader business needs. (i.e., here's hoping for a great acquisition and adoption for you!)
drdaeman 11y ago
Sorry, but this article is pointless. There are no numbers whatsoever, everything can be squeezed down to "if it's not a messenger or a game¹, people won't use it", and there's not even meaningful comparison to any alternative approaches. Like the users that forgot the app magically won't forget to talk to that Slack bot once in a month. Literally, this article is nothing but an advertising for a refreshed product, with some wanna-be-viral-marketing attempt at sparking discussion by somewhat controversial statement of "not on app store". (Uh, sorry for being cynical here, but seriously...) ___ [1] Not a full list.
- marwann 11y ago
  Sorry you feel this way. It would be nice to update the article with actual figures indeed. And if I had to squeeze down the article, that'd be : "if you app doesn't imply repeated use, doesn't leverage context, takes room in your phone, if you don't have the necessary resources to develop it and update it on all platforms, and if it has to be integrated to a professional workflow for many users at once, don't go for it"
  - codazoda 11y ago
    Without numbers, however, it reads like you're just making educated guesses.
    - rambambam 11y ago
      Even with numbers, a whole lot of things in this world are nothing more than educated guesses. Or did you already find the meaning of life?
TYPE_FASTER 11y ago
Saving four hours a month is great, and if you have a captive audience who is being told to use the mobile app to submit expenses, that will force adoption. Trying to get individual users to adopt a workflow is going to be much harder. The target audience for the mobile app might not be the users themselves, but their managers. Also, your workflow of using Slack to enter expenses, which looks awesome btw, might actually be easier for people to use than stopping midstream to use a mobile app.
- drajan 11y ago
  Completely agree with the point that the managers are the target audience. People use all kinds of poorly-designed an inconvenient software at work because they're forced to by their boss are the company IT department. Well-designed software is already a leg up, but only if you can properly sell it to the correct decision makers and make it easy for them to switch over. This app wasn't inherently flawed — if it had started to get traction from a couple companies using it, then word-of-mouth spread because of how easy the app was to use, it could have gone a lot better. I can imagine my friends who are management consultants using this to keep track of all the expenses they're playing on the company card or billing the client.
- Micoloth 11y ago
  I cant believe i'm reading this.. How is saving 4 hours per month useful, and how in the world is it worth learning a new app for that. Maybe this isn't really the right place to say this, but the moment the world will realize how crazy this whole startups thing is getting..
  - win_ini 11y ago
    I think your place of wonderment is misplaced. If someone can save 4 MINUTES of an activity they HATE to do - it is worth learning an app. There are all kinds of companies that basically help you save time doing what you hate: Premium Pickup Laundry Services, On-demand Valets, On-demand cars. When was the last time you said "fuck it I'm going to take a taxi because I don't want to learn this new UBER app"? Companies reimburse BILLIONS of dollars to employees every year.
kfk 11y ago
It's worth noticing that this is not only an app problem. When it comes to Corporate systems, the fact that a user has to work with different systems is incredibly painful. In fact, it's so painful that having 1 person managing the system and everybody else just sending email requests to this person works wonderfully. One thing they could have tried is human support. Like let's give them a human who takes care of things or helps out or is always available to give training.
hmate9 11y ago
And what has it been like moving to Slack? Are people using Birdly more?
- marwann 11y ago
  Yes they do, and I think it's also because of the "emotional" factors. People talk to a bot and have this feeling they have a personal assistant guiding them through the process.
guhcampos 11y ago
This looks like someone trying to take the blame of failure out of their shoulders. The questions are right, the answers are wrong. The app did not (judging by the text, I never heard of it before) add the value they thought. Maybe it did not even work as well as they thought. Actually, I doubt that. I won't argue too much into it, instead I will give you counterexamples: 1. I should be on the target audience, and I have never heard of the app before. 2. Concur seems to be doing really fine, working on the same problem - so they have either a better marketing or a better solution. Bottomline: don't shy people away of doing anything because you failed.
- marwann 11y ago
  The app was only distributed on the French app stores, which is why you may not have heard about it. We're not trying to prevent anyone from creating mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and sure, making many mistakes on the way), we're just sharing our humble piece of advice
  - RyanZAG 11y ago
    Wait, what? Hang on, this should be the number 1 point of your entire blog post. Honestly, if your post was titled the obvious "Don't make mobile apps only for one region" then you'd be getting a lot of comments saying "Well, obviously". Seriously your problem here is not that you made a mobile app. Your problem is very clearly that you excluded 99% of your user base. Any chance you can explain the reasoning behind this..? I can't even begin to understand it. Outside of government required tax applications, I cannot think of a single successful single-region productivity app ever.
    - eljimmy 11y ago
      I am baffled as well. My brain is hurting trying to understand this decision.
      - marwann 11y ago
        It's a decision that may seem obvious for many, many product categories. But I can assure you that regarding anything finance-wise, it's simply impossible to launch an app that that complies with local laws everywhere at the same time, especially without proper funding. Take Quickbooks, it exists for 5-10 years, and they're still postponing their launch in the French market. We've gone global since then, and we've grown in 10 weeks way faster than we did in 1 year.
vinceguidry 11y ago
This is a productivity app, and productivity apps are a real hard sell on mobile. Think about it, you're asking someone to embed a particular piece of software directly into their life. It has to provide so much value over not having any app that they have to remember to use to make using it a no-brainer. Your app isn't really competing against other productivity apps, it's competing against the fact that an app is not going to be most people's best approach for improving their lives. The process of integrating a tool with life is not fun, it takes work and there's only so much that things like reminders can do for you. I use two productivity apps on my phone. Reminders and the one I'm building. It's an ongoing experiment in how one can use software to improve life. Right now the only thing I've managed to integrate is spending tracking, and even that took months of back and forth consideration. Do I want to tag individual expenditures? How do I want to categorize them? How do I want to add an expenditure to a category? What should I call the act of spending something and what should I call the category? How do I want my reports to look like? Do I want reports in the database, or should they be generated dynamically? How should I represent common transactions that I do every day in a way that doesn't clutter up the main interface? The whole exercise has left me unenthused about productivity software as a viable product category. Adding an expenditure now is easy as pie, for me, and only me. All of the work I had to do to figure out how I spend money and how I should build an app to manage it essentially has to be redone for every single person who wants to use software to help them manage their life. The domain seems simple, but it's actually incredibly complicated, because it's different for everyone.
- junto 11y ago
  There is plenty of money to be made in this space. KDS [1] for example are selling their solution into large enterprise clients, each with thousands of users paying per user pricing. Enterprise money and enterprise deals. Expense management is a challenging market with lots of issues that need to be addressed. For example, there are lots of legal taxation rules concerning the digitisation of receipts and invoices, and each country does it differently. Now they've built their new app on top of Slack's API. I can't see that going well long term. Haven't people learned already not to build businesses on top of walled gardens? [1] http://www.kds.com/ http://www.kds.com/
flyosity 11y ago
If you think "build it and they will come" applies in the mobile space, you're completely wrong and about to light a bunch money on fire. I'd be very interested to know if this team talked to 25+ people smack in the middle of their target audience about their expense-tracking pains before starting to think about building the app. It really seems like they thought of a problem (or what they perceived as a problem) and then built the app. If they dove deep on the problem and talked directly to people who they thought would most benefit from the app, they certainly would have uncovered more information about why Birdly would or would not work for them and could make important product choices based on that feedback.
benologist 11y ago
Yesterday I put together a guide for making profitable mobile apps that might interest people - https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-money-on-android-4ada61d127ed https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-mone...
radnam 11y ago
This is a sincere question. Is number of times app is used per week/month/year a good metric to build an app? Wouldn't that be a typical utility for a Uber/Lyft?
jordanpg 11y ago
A productivity app that involves the camera? The slowest workflow on the phone? No thanks. The right answer is to get those receipts into a digital format some other way, not with the camera. I would have deleted this app after I tried wasting 30 seconds taking a nice little picture of a $20 receipt the first time.
- aggieben 11y ago
  The way I track expenses is using Scannable (it's an Evernote app). The main point there is to capture the receipt - and it's really, really good at that one thing: capturing. Then I throw away the receipts and fill in the expense report later in whatever system I'm told to use. I can't imagine an easier way to digitize a receipt, short of a receipt that's emailed to you from the get-go.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    >I can't imagine an easier way to digitize a receipt For me, it ends up being sticking them in a wallet/envelope and then scanning then in bulk when I get back. If I had a phone app that integrated with a back-end expenses system, I could probably be persuaded to use it because it would largely eliminate the manual process of creating an expense report. However, as it is, something like Expensify trades a one-time batch operation for a bunch more fiddling at the point of spending.
    - win_ini 11y ago
      Are you using Expensify's "SmartScanning"? It's worth the $0.20 per receipt image. It basically send the receipt to a person, who then extracts the info from the receipt and enters into expensify FOR YOU.... Try it out!
      - ghaff 11y ago
        Well, then I would have to transfer everything from expensify into the back-end system that we use to actually turn those receipts into numbers in my bank account :-)
wehadfun 11y ago
How does Birdly/Bill do the processing of the receipts? Is it OCR software, a person,...?
aggieben 11y ago
This was a great read, and I was right with the story line. Yep, you're right. It's hard to get to your target market from the app store. Yep, they forget about your app. Yep, Yep, Yep. Oh look, there's a link at the bottom to the new Birdly! Let's see what their new approach is! It's a.....slack bot? Wut? Just being honest here: I think that's one of the stupidest pivots I've ever seen.
- win_ini 11y ago
  It's funny - I had the same reaction at the first parts, but I thought the Slack bot pivot was genius actually. Very different than expensify and the "others". No UI...is the New UI.
  - aggieben 11y ago
    Very different, and I imagine probably even more frustrating than a high-friction data entry form. It would take a lot of convincing for me to think submitting an expense report via bot would be better than, say, putting receipts as attachment in an email and sending to a person.
  - djrogers 11y ago
    Genius? So your new business model is to exclude a huge number of people (despite what you may see here on HN, most people writing expense reports don't use slack), and tie your business to a third party closed platform. Ok...
corv 11y ago
The new service looks really useful but I'm bummed out it's only available as a chat bot?!
- win_ini 11y ago
  Would you prefer it to be a mobile app?
  - corv 11y ago
    I'd prefer it to be open sauce self hosted web app
Gorbzel 11y ago
It's always obvious when you are dealing with founders who likely won't make it. Specifically, when they're so so close to their own product that they start to blame anything else for failures rather than take an objective look at their own missteps. In this case, buried among some semi-coherent arguments, we reach the point where one should ask "Was this product compelling compared to other solutions that tackle this pain point?" Obviously not, but don't expect the company to smell the coffee. In their opinion, their "few competitor apps" didn't matter, but they lasted longer, so they probably did. Oh, but of course "they weren’t doing it as well." Take a look at the comments rolling in here, some of which note that the product didn't seem like compelling standalone option but that would have done well as part of a larger solution. Others inquire why certain features were left out that would have adequately addressed the entire pain point, but left the product feeling incomplete otherwise. Of course, these potential customers were all wrong, because "other apps felt heavy and complicated." Founders considering mobile, don't make the same mistake(s) this company is making. Rather than write some clickbait Mediun post after the fact, remember that a great UIX, onboarding and maybe even a mascot might be necessary for mobile success, but they definitely aren't sufficient. Nothing beats product market fit, and if a mobile app is necessary for said fit, you better not only bother with mobile, you should embrace it...objectively.
- dhimes 11y ago
  ... we reach the point where one should ask "Was this product compelling compared to other solutions that tackle this pain point?" Or even, as might be the case here, "is this even a pain point that needs a product?"
- drb311 11y ago
  "the product didn't seem like compelling standalone option but that would have done well as part of a larger solution" The new approach as a Slack bot addresses that issue precisely. Lots of useful things aren't a compelling standalone solution. Slack bots and other in-messenger apps mean this kind of software can become part of a larger overall experience. Don't know if Birdly will make it but their argument here is onto something. https://www.getbirdly.com/ https://www.getbirdly.com/
dboreham 11y ago
I like this article because for anyone who has not tried to sell a product, it can be very easy to become deluded about how hard it is, due to the endless noise from the press and VC community that tends to talk up successes and gloss over the difficulties (the notable exception to this being Ben Horowitz). I've found this thought experiment to be useful when evaluating new product ideas: People will buy your product for sure if a) there is a law saying they must, otherwise go to jail or b) by doing so they straight away save a significant amount of money vs something they were already doing/buying. If your product isn't close to either of these cases, you are likely to fail.
keehun 11y ago
I, for one, would love to try and use this app daily. I currently use Microsoft Office Lens to snap all my receipts. Unfortunately, it has some very awful ways to store it which is primarily in the Photo Album... Would be lovely to have a generated excel of things.
- win_ini 11y ago
  Try Expensify - take a picture of a receipt, it is automatically OCR'd, read and verified - and it becomes a row in an excel spreadsheet you can send to your accountant.
athenot 11y ago
Looks like they replaced the app with a Slack bot. That is more interesting than the article. There are some services which would be more convenient as a bot on a chat platform than a "portal" site or a mobile app. Some issues with service-specific site / apps: - password that's perpetually forgotten (unless the site plays well with the password manager) - proprietary, doesn't explicitely support integrations unless the authors implement them - yet another set of notifications to deal with.
- win_ini 11y ago
  Totally agree - when I saw the pivot to Slack, I thought "That is REALLY interesting, more interesting than their failure at mobile"
  - marwann 11y ago
    I suggest you have a look at this article we wrote about Slack as a platform: https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-slack-as-a-platform-for-your-product-feeade7e6737 https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-sla...
AndrewAllen1980 11y ago
This is a good shutdown analysis. But they didn't really mention that their sector has been pretty heavily dominated by traditional accounting software like Quickbooks for quite some time. I'm not sure how long, but I remember using Quicken in the 80's.
username223 11y ago
This guy's business was "take a photo of a receipt for every single thing you buy, then upload it to us, and (supposedly) save four hours a month." It's hard to imagine it not failing.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
It is obvious what people want. A single app that does it all. Seriously. We need a general purpose application that can be used for 80% of all use cases. When you think about it, all apps pretty much re-introduce the exact same features. Preferences, contacts, notifications, authentication, sharing, etc. I want to use the exact same interface and language to order a package from China to my house, or to hail a cab to move me from work to home. I want the estimated ETA and cost prediction to be displayed the same. Tracking a package or the real-time location of a cab should be done through the same interface. I want to be notified the same way, whether it's my package or my cab that's late and/or has arrived. I want to pay for the package and cab ride the exact same way. Reviewing the received product and reviewing the cab driver, should be identical processes. I think the same should apply to pretty much any interaction, be it to ask my coffee machine to brew a cup, to be notified that my colleague will be late to a meeting, to pay for a meal, to review a movie, to schedule an appointment, to locate a friend. My thesis is that all communication problems (which are what apps solve) are difference instances of the same one. An app is not any tool. It's a language. We need to implement a general purpose language, and then all use it to interact with different agents/services.
- draugadrotten 11y ago
  > It is obvious what people want. A single app that does it all. Seriously. This is the vision of SIRI. Now you know the goal. Please deliver.
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    Siri's mistake (which also applies to Cortana and Google Now) is to bet on natural language. I seriously believe natural language to be a mediocre interface, and we have the opportunity to do much better. We need to create a completely new language.
    - seagreen 11y ago
      This is actually a really interesting point. So we have English (optimized for person->person), standard programming languages (optimized for text->computer), and now you're saying we should make Language X, which is optimized for speech->computer. I disagree with it, but it's still interesting :)
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
But do bother to advertise your new product on Medium!
krschultz 11y ago
This tells me a lot more about the founders not understanding the market than about mobile apps in general. > The mobile app was doing something really cool: you only had to take a snap of a receipt, and tap a button to export all the data into a beautiful Excel expense report. That's a feature not a business. That feature already exists in all of the major expense tracking SAAS products that I'm familiar with. So who is the target market? The sliver of people that have enough of a problem to want to buy a solution but not enough of a problem to buy the major existing solution is just not that big.
- marwann 11y ago
  I think it's hard to give people the big picture of what the thought process looked inside the company in a 5-mn read. We've cut through some info to focus on a unique message, but we know our target market, researched as much as we could, conducted (literally) hundreds of interviews, tried to determine painpoints, use/edge cases, etc.
- Bedon292 11y ago
  I was going to say something similar, but I think you put it better. "Had it been done a million times?" They say nope, but I think they were looking in the wrong area. It may have done bad in standalone apps, but that's not where the real competition was. It was a small feature in many apps. I know I keep an app for this exact purpose on my phone all the time, even though I use it once every few months. The problem, for them, is that the app is part of the expense reporting software we use at work. I think there was no real way to sell this app as a standalone thing. It needs to be connected.
inthewoods 11y ago
I think this is a good article, but I don't like it when someone uses just one experience to generalize about something as broad as whether someone should or should not build a mobile app.
- jbcoger 11y ago
  The title was provocative on purpose. As said in the article we believe mobile is very relevant in a lot of cases. We’re definitely not trying to prevent anyone from creating mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and sure, making many mistakes on the way), we’re just sharing our humble piece of advice and lessons learned.
franze 11y ago
i believe that we - as programmers, product managers, ... - often have the wrong ideas about mobile. three examples from my experience: idea: an app that helps people find shops with offers nearby how people use it: users look up offers while they are already in the shop (nearly always inside big supermarkets.) idea: vegan restaurant finder how people use it: users look up pics of food of that restaurant while they already sat down in the restaurant (but as Instagram has more pics, they always switch to Instagram) idea: apartments for rent app with awesome "find apartments nearby" feature how people use it: to look up the newest apartment in the city while in the metro home i believe it will take a few years more until we get mobile more right than wrong, until then be prepared to question your product hypothesis! (and best do it while you are running around, stressed, on your way to work or during business travel, you know, while you actually are "mobile" / or at home at your couch (also a mobile scenario) ... not while in the office in front of your mac book pro)
pbreit 11y ago
It's not a terrible write-up but I think it may be a little delusional both ways. I'm not totally convinced that they type of app they built could not find a decent audience. The app "makes sense". And "Don't bother creating a mobile app" is terrible advice. But if you are going to create a mobile app, you have to really try an understand if it makes sense, how people are going to find it, if it's compelling enough, if it takes advantage of "mobile-ness". Etc.
- djrogers 11y ago
  Likely would/could have found a bigger audience if it hadn't been limited to the French app store only...
dankohn1 11y ago
I use Expensify to track expenses for work and WaveApps for some consulting I do on the side. I disagree with the thesis of the piece, because I'm perfectly happy to keep installed apps that I use once per month, or even once per quarter. WaveApps is great for invoicing, but their expense reporting module is ludicrously bad (it does OCR on the receipt images, but then doesn't include them in a nice report, so you have to download the images separately and convert them to a PDF manually). I would have used Birdly if I had known about it. Anyone know about another Expensify competitor, preferably one who doesn't charge for single users? As for Birdly, good luck with the Slack pivot, which looks clever.
jasonkostempski 11y ago
From my own patterns, I sort of agree with the conclusion but there's one app that I keep even though I only use it a few times a year and it's a PDF "scanner" app. The difference is it replaces an expensive piece of hardware and it does it better than the hardware. I'm not sure Birdly really solved any problems that couldn't be solved just as easily with built-in apps or even pencil and paper.
matchagaucho 11y ago
I've tried several receipt tracking apps, and they all failed to overcome the OCR challenges. If there is even a 20% chance the app cannot recognize the total amount (ignoring taxes and tips), then suddenly I am manually reconciling unrecognizable receipts. So, if I'm always manually reconciling expense reports, then why bother with an app... I'll just continue taking pictures and forwarding them to my email for manual expense reporting. 100% of the task can be done in one sitting. That being said, I SINCERELY HOPE somebody WILL develop the machine learning algorithms necessary to get 99% OCR accuracy in this space.
- lnanek2 11y ago
  There are plenty of companies that just have a human read your receipts. Hell it can even be automated with Mechanical Turk.
dkubb 11y ago
I wonder if they considered breaking the app up into smaller parts that can be sold to different markets: * API that accepts the scanned images, parses and returns the receipt data. * API (that does the above and) stores the data to allow later exporting of receipt data in Quickbooks, Excel, and other formats. * IOS and Android Libraries that integrate with the API. * Birdly app build on top of the library and API. Birdly could be used as an end-user application, but also as a showcase for the API usage. Other application developers could license the libraries and API from your service; sure it creates competition, but you'd be getting a slice from a larger pie. Also if there was a solo API plan, I would probably consider something like this for some personal expense tracking software I've been thinking about writing for myself.
- seccess 11y ago
  I've always been curious how, in this business model, you protect API tokens if the users of the API deploy mobile apps. Embedding them in an app isn't secure: anybody could reverse engineer the app and use the key for themselves free of charge. And there is no way in Android or iOS to know which app makes a request from the server.
  - striking 11y ago
    You can create a sneaky change to the protocol, or something that looks unnecessary, but still works without it temporarily. (or check the order in which the headers are formed, or something.) Then you can detect which clients don't conform exactly to the internal specs. And then you can send those accounts an email telling them they'll be banned if they continue to use external clients. This strategy only works if you have a single blessed version of a client, and it's really only because of security by obscurity. For the mentioned business model, it would not work unless you created a single authoritative server that acted as a proxy to the other API or consumed data from that API without giving the app a key. Snapchat may or may not have used this strategy. (The external client emails were real; as for the detection strategy, who knows.)
dceddia 11y ago
Reading the article, all I could think was "sounds like a problem with getting users to form new habits." Those categories they listed are apps you'd use on a daily basis, or that have some kind of notifications (read: dopamine hits) built in. They build up a habit loop by making the app fun to use, and emitting notifications to keep the users coming back during that formative early usage period. Monthly expense reporting (or monthly anything, really) seems like a rough road for building habits.
thinkling 11y ago
I'd like to use something like this to verify that my credit card statements are accurate. I don't want to give an app access to my bank logins (as I believe Mint requires). So I envision a workflow where I snap receipts, the app digitizes them and produces a transaction list which it either compares against a monthly statement PDF, or I do the verification by hand. Anyone have a good, established workflow for this?
20years 11y ago
I imagine it is very hard to make money with the types of apps that fall within those most popular app categories. Mostly free apps with advertising. I guess I don't really understand the shift of ONLY creating a mobile app for productivity or business type stuff. Seems like these types of apps can more easily be monetized with a web app and "maybe" complimented with a mobile app.
intellegacy 11y ago
I think they fell for the myth that "ideas don't matter, execution does" If you start with a flawed idea there's no saving you, no matter how hard you try.
samuell 11y ago
I'm not that surprised. I would never remember what an app named "Birdly mobile" did, when finding out I installed it last month. Neither would I find it again, if looking for that "receipt scan app I installed last month". I tend to forget what apps I have installed, what they do, and their names, and anything else than a really descriptive name, such as "RunKeeper", would not get used much in the long run.

242 points by marwann 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Is the title meant to be linkbait? Cause this is quite the blanket statement. How do you know what I'm building (if anything) and if it falls in a category that might benefit from being a native app and the distribution that comes with it? What worked or did not work for you need not apply to every other business.

lindig 11y ago

I am using a mobile app to track the milage of my car and thus pull it up only at the gas station. While a little more specific than general expense tracking, it seems to be similar enough for a comparison. According to the article these apps are a hard sell because they are used so rarely. I can't comment on how the app creator is doing but it's still an app that I would pay for. But maybe the market is too small and the simplicity of the app creates an unsustainable race to the bottom.

marwann 11y ago
I think you're one of the exceptions, figures showed people were mostly opening it once a month, and not contextually as we wanted them to. We're still on mobile, but without an app now! More about it here: https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-slack-as-a-platform-for-your-product-feeade7e6737#.vjjloauoo https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-sla...
taco_emoji 11y ago
Me too! It's an Android app called aCar which I did end up spending the $5 on (for no ads and IIRC more advanced backup options). I use it infrequently, but A) it takes less than a minute to enter a new "fill-up" record right after I get gas, and B) I programmed in all the reminders for oil change, tire rotation, etc., so entering the fill-up records (with mileage) means I keep on top of maintenance. It provides value (B) with no friction (A), so pretty much a no-brainer.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 11y ago
  To track car mileage I get out the manual and look up the size of my tank. Every time I fill up I reset the trip odometer in the car. At fill up I calculate the mileage. It's so easy, why is an app needed for this? May be the calculator app but that's all that should be required unless it's doing something else.
  - taco_emoji 11y ago
    A) Why would you need to look up the size of your tank? The gas pump tells you quite precisely how much you used since last fill-up B) Nobody said they needed an app for this C) I'm not really sure how pulling up the calculator app and punching in numbers is any easier than pulling up the mileage app and punching in numbers D) If you use your imagination very slightly, you can come up with other obvious features such an app would provide, such as tracking average miles driven per day/month/year, average MPG per day/month/year, gas prices over time, service records (when was the last oil change/tire rotation/brake job), etc. E) I also explicitly talked about another feature it provides (reminders), so I don't get the impression you actually read my comment before replying

brlewis 11y ago

Might a monthly reminder notification have helped?

marwann 11y ago
Every user received a monthly reminder, and it did help, but having an idle app on your phone for the other 29 days didn't, unfortunately
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- drdaeman 11y ago
  Why unsolicited? User had set up an app that they care about just once a month, and that's a long time, so reminders are actually helpful - from end-user perspective. I have an app that I run about just once in a few months, and I'm actually grateful that it does ping me.

mdorazio 11y ago

I can't find the app to see exactly how it worked, but did it have any integrations with expense reporting systems? As someone who files expense reports monthly for work, that would be the biggest issue for me - if it doesn't have a hook into QuickBooks or whatever system the company is using, then it's not going to get an enterprise following since users still have to manually enter info, which decreases value a lot. The other issue is that if, like me, you travel a lot then a large number of your receipts will be in emails or PDFs (I book airfare and hotels online, and take Uber instead of cabs), so taking pictures of paper receipts and tracking driving miles would only get me half-way to completion.

marwann 11y ago
True that. Before moving to an "invisible app", we were developing integrations for such accounting software, and we had an email forwarding function as Uber was also a big part of the expenses filed on our app. Still, a SaaS like ours had a hard time living only on mobile, and through our own mobile app
codazoda 11y ago
They didn't mention this in the article, which makes me wonder if they really understood it. Companies have specific tools they require you to use to file expense reports. You would have to get the entire company to embrace this solution. Although they talk about the CTO trying to get it installed, I wonder if they ever really got the whole company on board. You've got to get the CTO and the CFO in this case.
- mpeg 11y ago
  It just doesn't work that way, the best audience for this is big co (because the combination of strict expense rules and big sales force makes it perfect) and yet it is absolutely impossible to get an enterprise signed into something like this. Yet when the sales guys are putting in their expense reports every month (because it's too much money to ignore it for longer than a month) you could save them time with something like this, and guess what, they can expense the cost too, but only if you give them a report that is ready to send in the format they need it.

niklas_a 11y ago

Really weird to read this being someone who's using Expensify on a daily basis in exactly the use cases they describe.

win_ini 11y ago
LOL - totally. However, their interface actually looked sexy compared to expensify. But epensify works and I can use it on desktop....that's the killer. The mobile app is awesome for capturing but I like desktop for putting together reports. Ultimately - I believe in Expensify's VISION - which is to GET RID OF EXPENSE REPORTS! That's why I'll stick with Expensify - and I'm now at my third company that I am bringing it into....that is how software expands its footprint. By excited users bringing it into new businesses.

dade_ 11y ago

OneNote & OfficeLens has replaced many apps on my phone. It's true that the other apps were better tailored to the problem, but the effort to install and maintain so many apps with a couple mobile devices (tablet and phone) is just too much: app features and layouts keep changing, credential info needs to be re-entered and then I get to my desktop and there is no application for Windows or Mac. For better or worse, if the requirement can even partially be met with OneNote or Evernote, they will probably just use it.

at-fates-hands 11y ago

It looks like you made the right pivot, moving away from a native app to a web app. FYI - your mobile navigation isn't working.

meestaahjoshee 11y ago
I too was expecting a web app but it looks like it's just a slack bot now which is...interesting.

niklas_a 11y ago

Really weird to read this being someone who is using the Expensify app on a daily basis. Super simple, I just photo the receipts as I go about during the month and then at the beginning of the next month I create my expense report.

marwann 11y ago
If all of our users were like you, we would have kept it I guess, but figures showed batch uses once a month instead
- niklas_a 11y ago
  In that case you didn't go after the right users. Expensify just did a $17m Series C so must obviously be a lot of people like me.
dagw 11y ago
For me the main pain point of expenses is feeding the data into the archaic web app the company uses for expenses and matching every receipt with the right project number and project activity. Any solution that doesn't remove my need to interact with that web app isn't solving my main problem.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

seibelj 11y ago

Do users actually hate "app clutter"? I have plenty of apps I only use rarely, but when I need them, I need them. Space isn't a concern unless it's a huge game or downloads tons of media. 100MB or less is nothing.

PatentTroll 11y ago
Completely anecdotally: if I haven't used an app in a week then I delete it. I can't really justify it, I have 64gb of space on my phone - it's more of an OCD thing than anything else.
- fharper1961 11y ago
  I'm guessing you're using an iPhone. On iOS all the apps are displayed somewhere on your homescreens. When I tried iOS that bothered me, because coming from Android I was used to being able to choose which app icons are displayed on the homescreens.
- wdmeldon 11y ago
  I'm similar, but instead of a week of not using it, I wait until it upsets me some way. Completely irrational, but that's what I do.
knodi123 11y ago
I do get sick of the updates. Every day, "14 apps updated" or even worse, "3 apps need your approval to update". Whenever there's an update pending, I ask myself, "have I opened this app since the last update?" If no, then I delete it.
- natch 11y ago
  Auto update option... no approval needed.
  - elbigbad 11y ago
    And then suddenly one day you notice that Facebook now has access to your phone logs, microphone, and camera without your knowledge.

mwexler 11y ago

Is the problem more that this is a feature, not a product? That is, integrated with expense report systems, tax management, any other business tools, this makes sense. But as a standalone, it feels like an island. This was similar to TripIt which organized your trip based on parsing confirmations. At the end of the day, it was a great feature, but struggled to grow beyond a certain point as a product. Love the idea behind Birdly... but I think it belongs in other apps/tools used for more frequent and broader business needs. (i.e., here's hoping for a great acquisition and adoption for you!)

drdaeman 11y ago

Sorry, but this article is pointless. There are no numbers whatsoever, everything can be squeezed down to "if it's not a messenger or a game¹, people won't use it", and there's not even meaningful comparison to any alternative approaches. Like the users that forgot the app magically won't forget to talk to that Slack bot once in a month. Literally, this article is nothing but an advertising for a refreshed product, with some wanna-be-viral-marketing attempt at sparking discussion by somewhat controversial statement of "not on app store". (Uh, sorry for being cynical here, but seriously...) ___ [1] Not a full list.

marwann 11y ago
Sorry you feel this way. It would be nice to update the article with actual figures indeed. And if I had to squeeze down the article, that'd be : "if you app doesn't imply repeated use, doesn't leverage context, takes room in your phone, if you don't have the necessary resources to develop it and update it on all platforms, and if it has to be integrated to a professional workflow for many users at once, don't go for it"
- codazoda 11y ago
  Without numbers, however, it reads like you're just making educated guesses.
  - rambambam 11y ago
    Even with numbers, a whole lot of things in this world are nothing more than educated guesses. Or did you already find the meaning of life?

TYPE_FASTER 11y ago

Saving four hours a month is great, and if you have a captive audience who is being told to use the mobile app to submit expenses, that will force adoption. Trying to get individual users to adopt a workflow is going to be much harder. The target audience for the mobile app might not be the users themselves, but their managers. Also, your workflow of using Slack to enter expenses, which looks awesome btw, might actually be easier for people to use than stopping midstream to use a mobile app.

drajan 11y ago
Completely agree with the point that the managers are the target audience. People use all kinds of poorly-designed an inconvenient software at work because they're forced to by their boss are the company IT department. Well-designed software is already a leg up, but only if you can properly sell it to the correct decision makers and make it easy for them to switch over. This app wasn't inherently flawed — if it had started to get traction from a couple companies using it, then word-of-mouth spread because of how easy the app was to use, it could have gone a lot better. I can imagine my friends who are management consultants using this to keep track of all the expenses they're playing on the company card or billing the client.
Micoloth 11y ago
I cant believe i'm reading this.. How is saving 4 hours per month useful, and how in the world is it worth learning a new app for that. Maybe this isn't really the right place to say this, but the moment the world will realize how crazy this whole startups thing is getting..
- win_ini 11y ago
  I think your place of wonderment is misplaced. If someone can save 4 MINUTES of an activity they HATE to do - it is worth learning an app. There are all kinds of companies that basically help you save time doing what you hate: Premium Pickup Laundry Services, On-demand Valets, On-demand cars. When was the last time you said "fuck it I'm going to take a taxi because I don't want to learn this new UBER app"? Companies reimburse BILLIONS of dollars to employees every year.

kfk 11y ago

It's worth noticing that this is not only an app problem. When it comes to Corporate systems, the fact that a user has to work with different systems is incredibly painful. In fact, it's so painful that having 1 person managing the system and everybody else just sending email requests to this person works wonderfully. One thing they could have tried is human support. Like let's give them a human who takes care of things or helps out or is always available to give training.

hmate9 11y ago

And what has it been like moving to Slack? Are people using Birdly more?

marwann 11y ago
Yes they do, and I think it's also because of the "emotional" factors. People talk to a bot and have this feeling they have a personal assistant guiding them through the process.

guhcampos 11y ago

This looks like someone trying to take the blame of failure out of their shoulders. The questions are right, the answers are wrong. The app did not (judging by the text, I never heard of it before) add the value they thought. Maybe it did not even work as well as they thought. Actually, I doubt that. I won't argue too much into it, instead I will give you counterexamples: 1. I should be on the target audience, and I have never heard of the app before. 2. Concur seems to be doing really fine, working on the same problem - so they have either a better marketing or a better solution. Bottomline: don't shy people away of doing anything because you failed.

marwann 11y ago
The app was only distributed on the French app stores, which is why you may not have heard about it. We're not trying to prevent anyone from creating mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and sure, making many mistakes on the way), we're just sharing our humble piece of advice
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  Wait, what? Hang on, this should be the number 1 point of your entire blog post. Honestly, if your post was titled the obvious "Don't make mobile apps only for one region" then you'd be getting a lot of comments saying "Well, obviously". Seriously your problem here is not that you made a mobile app. Your problem is very clearly that you excluded 99% of your user base. Any chance you can explain the reasoning behind this..? I can't even begin to understand it. Outside of government required tax applications, I cannot think of a single successful single-region productivity app ever.
  - eljimmy 11y ago
    I am baffled as well. My brain is hurting trying to understand this decision.
    - marwann 11y ago
      It's a decision that may seem obvious for many, many product categories. But I can assure you that regarding anything finance-wise, it's simply impossible to launch an app that that complies with local laws everywhere at the same time, especially without proper funding. Take Quickbooks, it exists for 5-10 years, and they're still postponing their launch in the French market. We've gone global since then, and we've grown in 10 weeks way faster than we did in 1 year.

vinceguidry 11y ago

This is a productivity app, and productivity apps are a real hard sell on mobile. Think about it, you're asking someone to embed a particular piece of software directly into their life. It has to provide so much value over not having any app that they have to remember to use to make using it a no-brainer. Your app isn't really competing against other productivity apps, it's competing against the fact that an app is not going to be most people's best approach for improving their lives. The process of integrating a tool with life is not fun, it takes work and there's only so much that things like reminders can do for you. I use two productivity apps on my phone. Reminders and the one I'm building. It's an ongoing experiment in how one can use software to improve life. Right now the only thing I've managed to integrate is spending tracking, and even that took months of back and forth consideration. Do I want to tag individual expenditures? How do I want to categorize them? How do I want to add an expenditure to a category? What should I call the act of spending something and what should I call the category? How do I want my reports to look like? Do I want reports in the database, or should they be generated dynamically? How should I represent common transactions that I do every day in a way that doesn't clutter up the main interface? The whole exercise has left me unenthused about productivity software as a viable product category. Adding an expenditure now is easy as pie, for me, and only me. All of the work I had to do to figure out how I spend money and how I should build an app to manage it essentially has to be redone for every single person who wants to use software to help them manage their life. The domain seems simple, but it's actually incredibly complicated, because it's different for everyone.

junto 11y ago
There is plenty of money to be made in this space. KDS [1] for example are selling their solution into large enterprise clients, each with thousands of users paying per user pricing. Enterprise money and enterprise deals. Expense management is a challenging market with lots of issues that need to be addressed. For example, there are lots of legal taxation rules concerning the digitisation of receipts and invoices, and each country does it differently. Now they've built their new app on top of Slack's API. I can't see that going well long term. Haven't people learned already not to build businesses on top of walled gardens? [1] http://www.kds.com/ http://www.kds.com/

flyosity 11y ago

If you think "build it and they will come" applies in the mobile space, you're completely wrong and about to light a bunch money on fire. I'd be very interested to know if this team talked to 25+ people smack in the middle of their target audience about their expense-tracking pains before starting to think about building the app. It really seems like they thought of a problem (or what they perceived as a problem) and then built the app. If they dove deep on the problem and talked directly to people who they thought would most benefit from the app, they certainly would have uncovered more information about why Birdly would or would not work for them and could make important product choices based on that feedback.

benologist 11y ago

Yesterday I put together a guide for making profitable mobile apps that might interest people - https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-money-on-android-4ada61d127ed https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-mone...

radnam 11y ago

This is a sincere question. Is number of times app is used per week/month/year a good metric to build an app? Wouldn't that be a typical utility for a Uber/Lyft?

jordanpg 11y ago

A productivity app that involves the camera? The slowest workflow on the phone? No thanks. The right answer is to get those receipts into a digital format some other way, not with the camera. I would have deleted this app after I tried wasting 30 seconds taking a nice little picture of a $20 receipt the first time.

aggieben 11y ago
The way I track expenses is using Scannable (it's an Evernote app). The main point there is to capture the receipt - and it's really, really good at that one thing: capturing. Then I throw away the receipts and fill in the expense report later in whatever system I'm told to use. I can't imagine an easier way to digitize a receipt, short of a receipt that's emailed to you from the get-go.
- ghaff 11y ago
  >I can't imagine an easier way to digitize a receipt For me, it ends up being sticking them in a wallet/envelope and then scanning then in bulk when I get back. If I had a phone app that integrated with a back-end expenses system, I could probably be persuaded to use it because it would largely eliminate the manual process of creating an expense report. However, as it is, something like Expensify trades a one-time batch operation for a bunch more fiddling at the point of spending.
  - win_ini 11y ago
    Are you using Expensify's "SmartScanning"? It's worth the $0.20 per receipt image. It basically send the receipt to a person, who then extracts the info from the receipt and enters into expensify FOR YOU.... Try it out!
    - ghaff 11y ago
      Well, then I would have to transfer everything from expensify into the back-end system that we use to actually turn those receipts into numbers in my bank account :-)

wehadfun 11y ago

How does Birdly/Bill do the processing of the receipts? Is it OCR software, a person,...?

aggieben 11y ago

This was a great read, and I was right with the story line. Yep, you're right. It's hard to get to your target market from the app store. Yep, they forget about your app. Yep, Yep, Yep. Oh look, there's a link at the bottom to the new Birdly! Let's see what their new approach is! It's a.....slack bot? Wut? Just being honest here: I think that's one of the stupidest pivots I've ever seen.

win_ini 11y ago
It's funny - I had the same reaction at the first parts, but I thought the Slack bot pivot was genius actually. Very different than expensify and the "others". No UI...is the New UI.
- aggieben 11y ago
  Very different, and I imagine probably even more frustrating than a high-friction data entry form. It would take a lot of convincing for me to think submitting an expense report via bot would be better than, say, putting receipts as attachment in an email and sending to a person.
- djrogers 11y ago
  Genius? So your new business model is to exclude a huge number of people (despite what you may see here on HN, most people writing expense reports don't use slack), and tie your business to a third party closed platform. Ok...

corv 11y ago

The new service looks really useful but I'm bummed out it's only available as a chat bot?!

win_ini 11y ago
Would you prefer it to be a mobile app?
- corv 11y ago
  I'd prefer it to be open sauce self hosted web app

Gorbzel 11y ago

It's always obvious when you are dealing with founders who likely won't make it. Specifically, when they're so so close to their own product that they start to blame anything else for failures rather than take an objective look at their own missteps. In this case, buried among some semi-coherent arguments, we reach the point where one should ask "Was this product compelling compared to other solutions that tackle this pain point?" Obviously not, but don't expect the company to smell the coffee. In their opinion, their "few competitor apps" didn't matter, but they lasted longer, so they probably did. Oh, but of course "they weren’t doing it as well." Take a look at the comments rolling in here, some of which note that the product didn't seem like compelling standalone option but that would have done well as part of a larger solution. Others inquire why certain features were left out that would have adequately addressed the entire pain point, but left the product feeling incomplete otherwise. Of course, these potential customers were all wrong, because "other apps felt heavy and complicated." Founders considering mobile, don't make the same mistake(s) this company is making. Rather than write some clickbait Mediun post after the fact, remember that a great UIX, onboarding and maybe even a mascot might be necessary for mobile success, but they definitely aren't sufficient. Nothing beats product market fit, and if a mobile app is necessary for said fit, you better not only bother with mobile, you should embrace it...objectively.

dhimes 11y ago
... we reach the point where one should ask "Was this product compelling compared to other solutions that tackle this pain point?" Or even, as might be the case here, "is this even a pain point that needs a product?"
drb311 11y ago
"the product didn't seem like compelling standalone option but that would have done well as part of a larger solution" The new approach as a Slack bot addresses that issue precisely. Lots of useful things aren't a compelling standalone solution. Slack bots and other in-messenger apps mean this kind of software can become part of a larger overall experience. Don't know if Birdly will make it but their argument here is onto something. https://www.getbirdly.com/ https://www.getbirdly.com/

dboreham 11y ago

I like this article because for anyone who has not tried to sell a product, it can be very easy to become deluded about how hard it is, due to the endless noise from the press and VC community that tends to talk up successes and gloss over the difficulties (the notable exception to this being Ben Horowitz). I've found this thought experiment to be useful when evaluating new product ideas: People will buy your product for sure if a) there is a law saying they must, otherwise go to jail or b) by doing so they straight away save a significant amount of money vs something they were already doing/buying. If your product isn't close to either of these cases, you are likely to fail.

keehun 11y ago

I, for one, would love to try and use this app daily. I currently use Microsoft Office Lens to snap all my receipts. Unfortunately, it has some very awful ways to store it which is primarily in the Photo Album... Would be lovely to have a generated excel of things.

win_ini 11y ago
Try Expensify - take a picture of a receipt, it is automatically OCR'd, read and verified - and it becomes a row in an excel spreadsheet you can send to your accountant.

athenot 11y ago

Looks like they replaced the app with a Slack bot. That is more interesting than the article. There are some services which would be more convenient as a bot on a chat platform than a "portal" site or a mobile app. Some issues with service-specific site / apps: - password that's perpetually forgotten (unless the site plays well with the password manager) - proprietary, doesn't explicitely support integrations unless the authors implement them - yet another set of notifications to deal with.

win_ini 11y ago
Totally agree - when I saw the pivot to Slack, I thought "That is REALLY interesting, more interesting than their failure at mobile"
- marwann 11y ago
  I suggest you have a look at this article we wrote about Slack as a platform: https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-slack-as-a-platform-for-your-product-feeade7e6737 https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-sla...

AndrewAllen1980 11y ago

This is a good shutdown analysis. But they didn't really mention that their sector has been pretty heavily dominated by traditional accounting software like Quickbooks for quite some time. I'm not sure how long, but I remember using Quicken in the 80's.

username223 11y ago

This guy's business was "take a photo of a receipt for every single thing you buy, then upload it to us, and (supposedly) save four hours a month." It's hard to imagine it not failing.

miguelrochefort 11y ago

It is obvious what people want. A single app that does it all. Seriously. We need a general purpose application that can be used for 80% of all use cases. When you think about it, all apps pretty much re-introduce the exact same features. Preferences, contacts, notifications, authentication, sharing, etc. I want to use the exact same interface and language to order a package from China to my house, or to hail a cab to move me from work to home. I want the estimated ETA and cost prediction to be displayed the same. Tracking a package or the real-time location of a cab should be done through the same interface. I want to be notified the same way, whether it's my package or my cab that's late and/or has arrived. I want to pay for the package and cab ride the exact same way. Reviewing the received product and reviewing the cab driver, should be identical processes. I think the same should apply to pretty much any interaction, be it to ask my coffee machine to brew a cup, to be notified that my colleague will be late to a meeting, to pay for a meal, to review a movie, to schedule an appointment, to locate a friend. My thesis is that all communication problems (which are what apps solve) are difference instances of the same one. An app is not any tool. It's a language. We need to implement a general purpose language, and then all use it to interact with different agents/services.

draugadrotten 11y ago
> It is obvious what people want. A single app that does it all. Seriously. This is the vision of SIRI. Now you know the goal. Please deliver.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  Siri's mistake (which also applies to Cortana and Google Now) is to bet on natural language. I seriously believe natural language to be a mediocre interface, and we have the opportunity to do much better. We need to create a completely new language.
  - seagreen 11y ago
    This is actually a really interesting point. So we have English (optimized for person->person), standard programming languages (optimized for text->computer), and now you're saying we should make Language X, which is optimized for speech->computer. I disagree with it, but it's still interesting :)

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

But do bother to advertise your new product on Medium!

krschultz 11y ago

This tells me a lot more about the founders not understanding the market than about mobile apps in general. > The mobile app was doing something really cool: you only had to take a snap of a receipt, and tap a button to export all the data into a beautiful Excel expense report. That's a feature not a business. That feature already exists in all of the major expense tracking SAAS products that I'm familiar with. So who is the target market? The sliver of people that have enough of a problem to want to buy a solution but not enough of a problem to buy the major existing solution is just not that big.

marwann 11y ago
I think it's hard to give people the big picture of what the thought process looked inside the company in a 5-mn read. We've cut through some info to focus on a unique message, but we know our target market, researched as much as we could, conducted (literally) hundreds of interviews, tried to determine painpoints, use/edge cases, etc.
Bedon292 11y ago
I was going to say something similar, but I think you put it better. "Had it been done a million times?" They say nope, but I think they were looking in the wrong area. It may have done bad in standalone apps, but that's not where the real competition was. It was a small feature in many apps. I know I keep an app for this exact purpose on my phone all the time, even though I use it once every few months. The problem, for them, is that the app is part of the expense reporting software we use at work. I think there was no real way to sell this app as a standalone thing. It needs to be connected.

inthewoods 11y ago

I think this is a good article, but I don't like it when someone uses just one experience to generalize about something as broad as whether someone should or should not build a mobile app.

jbcoger 11y ago
The title was provocative on purpose. As said in the article we believe mobile is very relevant in a lot of cases. We’re definitely not trying to prevent anyone from creating mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and sure, making many mistakes on the way), we’re just sharing our humble piece of advice and lessons learned.

franze 11y ago

i believe that we - as programmers, product managers, ... - often have the wrong ideas about mobile. three examples from my experience: idea: an app that helps people find shops with offers nearby how people use it: users look up offers while they are already in the shop (nearly always inside big supermarkets.) idea: vegan restaurant finder how people use it: users look up pics of food of that restaurant while they already sat down in the restaurant (but as Instagram has more pics, they always switch to Instagram) idea: apartments for rent app with awesome "find apartments nearby" feature how people use it: to look up the newest apartment in the city while in the metro home i believe it will take a few years more until we get mobile more right than wrong, until then be prepared to question your product hypothesis! (and best do it while you are running around, stressed, on your way to work or during business travel, you know, while you actually are "mobile" / or at home at your couch (also a mobile scenario) ... not while in the office in front of your mac book pro)

pbreit 11y ago

It's not a terrible write-up but I think it may be a little delusional both ways. I'm not totally convinced that they type of app they built could not find a decent audience. The app "makes sense". And "Don't bother creating a mobile app" is terrible advice. But if you are going to create a mobile app, you have to really try an understand if it makes sense, how people are going to find it, if it's compelling enough, if it takes advantage of "mobile-ness". Etc.

djrogers 11y ago
Likely would/could have found a bigger audience if it hadn't been limited to the French app store only...

dankohn1 11y ago

I use Expensify to track expenses for work and WaveApps for some consulting I do on the side. I disagree with the thesis of the piece, because I'm perfectly happy to keep installed apps that I use once per month, or even once per quarter. WaveApps is great for invoicing, but their expense reporting module is ludicrously bad (it does OCR on the receipt images, but then doesn't include them in a nice report, so you have to download the images separately and convert them to a PDF manually). I would have used Birdly if I had known about it. Anyone know about another Expensify competitor, preferably one who doesn't charge for single users? As for Birdly, good luck with the Slack pivot, which looks clever.

jasonkostempski 11y ago

From my own patterns, I sort of agree with the conclusion but there's one app that I keep even though I only use it a few times a year and it's a PDF "scanner" app. The difference is it replaces an expensive piece of hardware and it does it better than the hardware. I'm not sure Birdly really solved any problems that couldn't be solved just as easily with built-in apps or even pencil and paper.

matchagaucho 11y ago

I've tried several receipt tracking apps, and they all failed to overcome the OCR challenges. If there is even a 20% chance the app cannot recognize the total amount (ignoring taxes and tips), then suddenly I am manually reconciling unrecognizable receipts. So, if I'm always manually reconciling expense reports, then why bother with an app... I'll just continue taking pictures and forwarding them to my email for manual expense reporting. 100% of the task can be done in one sitting. That being said, I SINCERELY HOPE somebody WILL develop the machine learning algorithms necessary to get 99% OCR accuracy in this space.

lnanek2 11y ago
There are plenty of companies that just have a human read your receipts. Hell it can even be automated with Mechanical Turk.

dkubb 11y ago

I wonder if they considered breaking the app up into smaller parts that can be sold to different markets: * API that accepts the scanned images, parses and returns the receipt data. * API (that does the above and) stores the data to allow later exporting of receipt data in Quickbooks, Excel, and other formats. * IOS and Android Libraries that integrate with the API. * Birdly app build on top of the library and API. Birdly could be used as an end-user application, but also as a showcase for the API usage. Other application developers could license the libraries and API from your service; sure it creates competition, but you'd be getting a slice from a larger pie. Also if there was a solo API plan, I would probably consider something like this for some personal expense tracking software I've been thinking about writing for myself.

seccess 11y ago
I've always been curious how, in this business model, you protect API tokens if the users of the API deploy mobile apps. Embedding them in an app isn't secure: anybody could reverse engineer the app and use the key for themselves free of charge. And there is no way in Android or iOS to know which app makes a request from the server.
- striking 11y ago
  You can create a sneaky change to the protocol, or something that looks unnecessary, but still works without it temporarily. (or check the order in which the headers are formed, or something.) Then you can detect which clients don't conform exactly to the internal specs. And then you can send those accounts an email telling them they'll be banned if they continue to use external clients. This strategy only works if you have a single blessed version of a client, and it's really only because of security by obscurity. For the mentioned business model, it would not work unless you created a single authoritative server that acted as a proxy to the other API or consumed data from that API without giving the app a key. Snapchat may or may not have used this strategy. (The external client emails were real; as for the detection strategy, who knows.)

dceddia 11y ago

Reading the article, all I could think was "sounds like a problem with getting users to form new habits." Those categories they listed are apps you'd use on a daily basis, or that have some kind of notifications (read: dopamine hits) built in. They build up a habit loop by making the app fun to use, and emitting notifications to keep the users coming back during that formative early usage period. Monthly expense reporting (or monthly anything, really) seems like a rough road for building habits.

thinkling 11y ago

I'd like to use something like this to verify that my credit card statements are accurate. I don't want to give an app access to my bank logins (as I believe Mint requires). So I envision a workflow where I snap receipts, the app digitizes them and produces a transaction list which it either compares against a monthly statement PDF, or I do the verification by hand. Anyone have a good, established workflow for this?

20years 11y ago

I imagine it is very hard to make money with the types of apps that fall within those most popular app categories. Mostly free apps with advertising. I guess I don't really understand the shift of ONLY creating a mobile app for productivity or business type stuff. Seems like these types of apps can more easily be monetized with a web app and "maybe" complimented with a mobile app.

intellegacy 11y ago

I think they fell for the myth that "ideas don't matter, execution does" If you start with a flawed idea there's no saving you, no matter how hard you try.

samuell 11y ago

I'm not that surprised. I would never remember what an app named "Birdly mobile" did, when finding out I installed it last month. Neither would I find it again, if looking for that "receipt scan app I installed last month". I tend to forget what apps I have installed, what they do, and their names, and anything else than a really descriptive name, such as "RunKeeper", would not get used much in the long run.