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Ask HN: How important is install #s vs. usage/retention in funding right now?
I know it's a buyer's market at the moment but I have a project I've been working on for awhile that is starting to show some pretty impressive stats on the usage/retention front, although our actual growth has been slow and steady. It's self-funded right now, so to stop treating it like a side project and take things to the next level I'll need to raise $150,000-$200,000.
My question is, is anyone finding that good usage/retention stats and a detailed plan to get to the next milestone is enough to raise that amount from angels right now or is it a fool's errand to start reaching out to people without crazy install numbers? Feeling a little stuck without being able to hire some help.
Average user/device/day is higher than Twitter right now and closing in on Instagram and SC, clocking in at about 15.2 min/day.
Retention is a little noisy with only a few thousand users but stays between 50-75% day 1 and 15-33% day 30. Fall off is nearly non-existant after day 30.
It's a B2C "social photography game" on iOS only right now with a small but friendly and totally engaged community with active users in over 50 countries.
- brianwawok 10y agoSo you have an app with users. How much money does it make? What would 200k let you do?
- amtrekker 10y agoIt makes $0. It's a social app just getting its legs so we're focused on growth right now. We do have some outside the box ideas for monetization down the road though. We've reached a manpower ceiling with just two of us working on it daily so the 200k is about double what we need for a few hires that would allow us to build out the desktop experience, some general design/UI updates, get off of Parse and onto our own backend and complete two large features that will make the overall experience a more shareable and viral experience. It should also be enough to take us to our first 1mil users. The other half is a buffer against the 1000s of things that can go wrong and to give us a little runway while we raise a real round if things go right.
- brianwawok 10y agoGotcha. I don't know anything about the value of customers that dont pay yet. Obviously they have a value but no idea what that is. Twitter good good valuations without making money because of very fast growth. Slow growth and people not paying money? Not sure.
- amtrekker 10y agoRight. And obviously the plan is that we would be ramping up growth with these iterations. Of course, that means someone with more money than us also has to believe those plans will work.
- brudgers 10y agoCurious if there are 'inside the box' monetization ideas, because those might be more easily understood and evaluated by an investor. And if there are reasons that they would not work with the product, that would be a good starting point for explaining why the 'out of the box' ideas might.
- amtrekker 10y agoThat's an interesting take. Thank you. Yeah, there are definitely plenty of "inside the box" routes that often seem like a known quantity but that doesn't mean they aren't worth discussing and exploring.
- brudgers 10y agoBeing profitable, or having growing revenue, or both, is not something that investors tend to discount. Something like a high user growth ad supported website might even imply that the value users get from the site is so high that they put up with an advertising model...not that I'm suggesting the ad model, the ability to monetize something is a good way to filter for viability as a business.
- arikr 10y ago> We've reached a manpower ceiling with just two of us working on it daily so the 200k is about double what we need for a few hires that would allow us to build out the desktop experience, some general design/UI updates, get off of Parse and onto our own backend and complete two large features that will make the overall experience a more shareable and viral experience. It should also be enough to take us to our first 1mil users. An investor would certainly prefer investing if it was the case that you were growing so fast that you couldn't handle the growth. The skeptical investor in me would ask: why can't you two get it growing faster without other people? How much longer would it take you to build these two large features with just you two? Which other things are you spending time on right now that you could stop using time for? I feel these are valid questions given you are building a social application that makes money from advertisements, where to make large amounts of revenue requires extreme scale -- therefore why would an investor want to invest unless they believed you were excellent at growth?