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Ha, nice writeup. It looks like it was well organized campaign to launch app, they did everything right, yet even with all this 'cheating' involved, it is genui

• potatolicious 11y ago
  Messaging is hard, speaking from experience having been part of an attempt that failed. IMO it seems like Peach did everything they possibly could and the execution was in broad strokes excellent, but a messaging app in 2016 is the Hail Mary of Hail Maries. Firstly, there are no "new users" to messaging. Literally everyone is already using something for messaging - Hangouts, Messenger, Line, WhatsApp, etc etc. Unlike other areas of tech, social messaging is a zero-sum game where every user you gain means someone else loses a user. This is hard environment for any new product with no existing traction. Messaging is also one of those things that is used so much that it's driven heavily by habitual behavior. Which also means you have to break a user's muscle memory/habits before you can have a shot at keeping them in the long term. The default for a competent messaging app is that people try your app out, think you're cool, and then promptly go back to whatever they were using before, because you haven't broken their old habit and/or haven't formed a new one. 14-day cohort retention is going to be nearly zero in the default case. Habit-formation within users is really, really, really f'ing hard.