16 ms·

My app failed: lessons learned

221 points by kylebolt 5y ago

kylebolt 5y ago
So early 2020, I launched Rithm, an app that helps you build habits, reach your goals and stay motivated. The 1st version was a chatbot app, think of it like an accountability coach that you text with to track habits and stay accountable. Rithm landed as the #4 product of the day on ProductHunt, had some good initial traction which proceeded to fall off a cliff. Here are the 8 lessons for a failed version 1, see video and blog post. Hope this helps some makers out there!
- OJFord 5y ago
  Just a minor copy note: > There are a million and 1 habit and goal apps out there and I made the mistake to think that just because there are a lot of products in this space, doesn’t mean that there is a lot of businesses in that space. I think you were thinking of two different ways to phrase that, mixed them up, and the result is that it says the opposite? As in, either remove 'I made the mistake to think that', or 'doesn't mean that'.
  - kylebolt 5y ago
    Good spot, thank you!
- somenewaccount1 5y ago
  Looks like you are still working on learning distribution. I'm typing on a mac, but own an android. i still can't use or try your app :(
  - kylebolt 5y ago
    I thought failing on 1 platform would be more economical than failing on 2 :)
    - allenu 5y ago
      For mobile apps, if you're a single developer, I think going with a single platform is fine. You can only do so much, and if you're familiar with the platform, you can move much more quickly than having to support two. That's the strategy I've chosen and it's helped a lot because I was already an expert in iOS and a lot of the work is just "figuring out what users want" and it's easier to change your code on a single platform that you know really well.
    - somenewaccount1 5y ago
      Then.....extending distribution wasn't really a problem or lesson learned. It's a nice to have.
      - kylebolt 5y ago
        Yes, no point in more distribution when users were not retaining. Although, it was hard to even get those first few thousand users to try the product.
  - drewolbrich 5y ago
    At least for this particular flavor of app, building an Android version is an optimization that should be made once the product has been proven successful. Until that happens, it would be a huge waste of time and money for the developer to build an Android version, since it too would fail as a product, just like the iOS version. Multiplying 0 by 2 is still 0. The situation might be different for an app whose success depended on the user's ability to use the app to communicate with all of their friends, some of which had Android phones.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Why not build something like this cross-platform? The functionality sounds simple enough that you don't really need a native app for each platform.
      - realusername 5y ago
        Even when using about cross-platform frameworks, there's quirks, store pages and time to invest to maintain the other platform. My Flutter app is still not available on iOS for example.
      - allenu 5y ago
        It seems like it would be simple enough, but it's death by a thousand cuts. Supporting Android means having to keep track of even more screen sizes, OS versions, updates, app store releases and so on. It just adds on more and more. For one developer who is trying to prove out an idea, the work to support the app on multiple platforms just eats up your time and focus when you really should be focusing on features and adjusting what the product is as you get more info from your existing customers. There are of course frameworks out there to help you build one codebase for multiple platforms, but if you go down that route, if you aren't familiar with the framework, you have to learn it. There are going to be quirks in them that you're not aware of. Maybe framework version X only works with iOS version Y and Android version Z. It just goes on and on. Frameworks aren't perfect either, and things don't work exactly the same across platforms even with the framework.
  - somenewaccount1 5y ago
    aaaaaahhhh.... negative 4 points for actually reading the article/watching the video, and being accurate. hacker news blowing steve jobs as usual. that's the type of exclusionary behavior i like to see!
  - somenewaccount1 5y ago
    aaaaaahhhh.... negative 4 points for actually reading the article/watching the video, and being accurate. hacker news blowing steve jobs as usual. that's the type of exclusionary behavior i like to see! if anyone payed attention - i even own an mac AND HIS APP DOES NOT WORK ON IT. That barely requires a frigin flag to compile and distribute for, it doesn't even take extra work. But fuck me, right?
- pacman2 5y ago
  You app with the chatbot is a bad nightmare. I would never use something like it. Combine a Tamagotchi with your app, have the user "feed" them with his "habbits". At least you would combine two things. With the chat bot? Move on.
klausjensen 5y ago
Thanks for the openhearted blogpost. It is very important to also see some of these failures, where the stars did not suddenly align and sparkling rainbows started raining money. I think I learned more from your post than from 10 success posts, honestly.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Thanks for reading! “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
kranner 5y ago
Nice writeup! I see that the app is available only in English. In my experience with indie apps (admittedly not recent), localisation in at least Spanish and Portuguese can help drive a lot of sales. It can also be easier to rank higher with localised keywords, and it's easier to get featured in country-specific App Stores in non-English languages as well.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Good point! I'm working on localizing for Spanish, German and Portuguese in next version.
bluedino 5y ago
How was this product marketed/advertised?
- mcraiha 5y ago
  This is the only question that needs to be asked nowadays. You need user acquisition money. Sad fact is that otherwise it is almost impossible to do anything.
  - koalala 5y ago
    Exactly, I would recommend spending a few thousand on a good PPC marketing agency and let them set up your marketing. You might be amazed at what this would accomplish since your product seems fine.
    - jpf0 5y ago
      I'd be interested in hearing of any experience or recommendations. If you have them available, please do send me a message.
    - yorwba 5y ago
      "100% churn" doesn't sound like a product that is fine and just needs more marketing.
      - kylebolt 5y ago
        This is exactly the moment I figured out this version is dead. At first I was thinking "ok I have a good product and now all I need are more folks in the top of funnel" but when all users chured out within 60-90 days... adding more marketing wasn't going to save it.
    - asdev 5y ago
      very interested if you know how to find a good agency for this as well. please DM/message if you can, thanks
  - 5y ago
carlgreene 5y ago
This was really great and love the video with it as well! Best of luck on this new version
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Thanks Carl, appreciate you taking the time to check it out!
cpcat 5y ago
From my experience, if an app takes more than a few months to build and launch, the risk is no longer worth it. Large companies also do this (years building before launching and i have yet to hear of a success)
- Retric 5y ago
  Games generally take significant time to build sometimes years, but can be quite successful. You wider point is reasonable though as many people waste a lot of time building something that never gets traction.
  - cpcat 5y ago
    Totally agree about certain games. You can't have certain games before years of building, it's like making a movie.
    - kylebolt 5y ago
      Yes this is the confusing thing about creative endeavours. Lean start up says to learn quickly and pivot yet so many artists work on the movies, games, and books for years and years. I guess we need to realize that most of us are not James Cameron :)
  - forbiddenvoid 5y ago
    Stardew Valley might be the ultimate example for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardew_Valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardew_Valley I think it's also important to recognize how much survivorship bias there is in these stories, too, though. There are plenty of people who have spent similar amounts of time working on games or projects with nothing much to show for it. The experience might be worth something to someone, though, in terms of resume building, etc.
  - canniballectern 5y ago
    Games are really easy to test viability for, though. The game has perfect information about itself, rarely connects in a complex way to anything outside the game, and it's easy to replicate the user's context just by sitting in a dark room on your own. The test is simple - is it fun? By contrast, most apps need to connect to people, software and things outside themselves - they're part of complex systems, and it's really hard to know if they work well without putting them into use and seeing how they perform - and that means selling and talking to users, not something you can do in isolation.
nicoburns 5y ago
I've yet to see a single product that was improved by being a chatbot.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  You also increase the revenue of Acme Chatbots Inc, who will use those proceeds to hire more people to sell you a better, more comprehensive package.
- forbiddenvoid 5y ago
  Google Search is better as a chatbot when using a voice UI. I don't know of any others that I would put in the same category.
- nkrisc 5y ago
  For a chat bot product to succeed, it has to be indistinguishable from a real human in every way. Otherwise the user will know its capabilities are limited, but won’t know in what way exactly they are limited. This is a perfect recipe for endless frustration as you slowly uncover every way in which it does not work how you expected it to, impeding whatever simple talk you wanted to complete. If I had nickel for every time a chat bot or phone bot told me to speak to it like a human, and then was completely incapable of handling that, I’d be rich.
  - conductr 5y ago
    Being indistinguishable from human is a high and low bar. Chat is just a medium and it's not usually the best medium (for me). When I use it, I expect speed and care less if it's a human or AI. For example, I had a billing issue with my electric company. I used chat because I didn't have a week to ping-pong emails back and forth (they might cut my power). I also didn't have time to call them and sit on the phone for 30+ minutes. I knew it was something a human would need to get involved with. So, it's really just chat that is helpful as a medium. The bot part almost always gets in the way of speed to answer/solution. That my personal experience anyways, would love to hear more about how a chatbot was actually helpful to someone. Whenever I see those chat pop ups on a SaaS home page, it makes me think do people actually type "show me the pricing page please" instead of just clicking the link to the pricing page. It has to be just a friendlier nicer way to collect emails and phone #s for sales to follow up with (?). I totally don't get it.
henvic 5y ago
I know this pain. In my case, I spent most of my life around 18-23 years old living in my parents' working about 100% of my time on something of my own I had a lot of negative support from friends, colleagues, and extended family as many don't see entrepreneurship with good eyes in Brazil. The last project I worked (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dML0FQIUcTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dML0FQIUcTY, I spent 2013-2014 on it), was heading to the right direction, but then my business partner (first and last one so far) always wanted more and more. In the end I had other opportunities (go back to college, and start a new job), and we just ditched all our efforts. Of course, we both regret it. Especially each time when we see something similar sold for a couple of millions. Good luck to us next time!
- halflings 5y ago
  I wouldn't have any regrets re:seeing something "similar" sold for millions of $. Unless "heading in the right direction" means that you had a growing user base and/or solid revenue, in all likelihood the product you were building just wasn't succeeding. The idea in itself is not worth much: think Uber, Coursera, Airbnb, ... these are not novel ideas, many many people had the same ideas but didn't manage to make them a success (bad execution, or just bad luck/timing). You seem to still be very very young, most successful companies are founded by people in their mid 30s, so don't despair just because a couple of your attempts were not successful. The best is still ahead of you.
  - henvic 5y ago
    tl;dr: I don't regret working on it. Just not even trying to market it! By heading in the right direction, I mean that I've built the 'minimum viable product' entirely in one year. Now it was time to go after putting it in the market somehow, search for a venture capitalist or anything like that. But, no, we didn't even try. We had many features that other sites didn't have back then. Such as the 'Google-like' search with auto-complete, auto-refresh appeal, etc. not so common back then, but we never went out after a single potential consumer or investor. I was in a situation that I had to stop developing on my own and focus on other things in my life. However, my business partner didn't want to stop adding new features. He wanted a few more things that I could achieve in a month or two to start looking for an investor, but I just didn't have the throughput (no time due to new endeavors + saturated), and things died off. I blame him for chickening out when we had possibly a tremendous competitive advantage that might make it an easy sell. I blame myself for not doing my own research for investors once I noticed that we reached a point of stagnation. Context: He had great designing ideas but was not technical. I wasn't good at communication back then and counted on him too much to make this happen. If this was today, it wouldn't happen again, thanks to my experience now.
rexreed 5y ago
Good lessons. But so many common mistakes To summarize: 1) Build something people really need, not a nice-to-have 2) Keeping customers is more important than just acquiring them 3) If you're not keeping your customers that means they don't want or need what you have 4) Changing people's behavior is really hard. Unless you have a significant amount of marketing budget, don't try to change people 5) "Distribution" is key. I have a hard time with the word "distribution" when often people mean "marketing" or "promotion" or "channels". That's what is usually meant. If you can't get an audience with the people you are trying to sell to, you might as well be invisible. I still don't get why people use the awkward term distribution for this. 6) You have to be better than what's already out there. If you're just as good, or worse, than the alternatives, then it's going to be really hard to make a sale. Alternatives don't mean direct competition. Anything that is an alternative for a customer to buy or use your product is real competition. This is especially the case if you're requiring the customer to change their habits to switch to your offering. You have to be MUCH better than the status quo and alternatives to do that. 7) Know who your customer is. Your user might not be your customer. Your customer might not have the itch to scratch even if the user does. A lot of these are pretty common reasons for business failure but I suppose everyone has to go through their own personal challenges to internalize them.
- jfengel 5y ago
  Is it really realistic to build something people "need"? Humanity survived millions of years without a single piece of software; it's unlikely that anything you write is ever going to be a "need". People buy stuff they don't need all the time. Games and other entertainment are the very definition of "nice to have", and they're vast markets. Even business tools are usually not "needs" if all they do is improve an existing product. It's incredibly hard to know what will attract people. Even if you know categorically that a thing will make their lives better, people often won't get it, and instead spend their money on something objectively useless. It seems to be luck as much as anything else, being in the right place at the right time. It catches a "buzz" for whatever reason and becomes popular, or fails to and doesn't. Knowing it beforehand would be great, but nobody ever does.
  - 5y ago
smoldesu 5y ago
The first red flag I see is that the app isn't multiplatform. I know there's plenty of iPhone/Android exclusive apps, but I will very rarely use (much less spend money on) something that is locked-in to one app. Also, does anyone else find it ironic that a habit tracking app has a monthly subscription? Feels darkly ironic looking at the IAP block towards the bottom.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Totally, relying on the apple app store alone was a mistake. Next product I make will be cross platform. I was blinded by the handful of successful ios apps out there.
- handrous 5y ago
  > The first red flag I see is that the app isn't multiplatform. This doesn't matter to most users (of a given target platform), and if you're charging money for an app—rather than making money with ads, or providing a service that needs maximum reach or user base, or relying on network effects to somehow make money as e.g. a messenger or social network might—then you only need/want iOS until you are seeing enough traction to be confident that the lower sales rate on Android will nonetheless be high enough to make it worth it.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  A few months ago I looked for a habit tracker, I don't recall if this was one of those I looked at. As with all apps, for the phone, I skip everything that has a subscription model or "in app purchases" and I suspect many will do the same. To me subscriptions and "in app purchases" has become synonymous with "low quality". Personally I don't care much if apps exclusive to iPhone, it's not going to stop me from buying an app. It's not like I'd be able to transfer the purchase to Android anyway.
bko 5y ago
He mentions a false positive of paying customers. I have some personal experience of customers paying for a product and not using it. We're all guilty of it in one way or another. What percentage of paying customers should be active? 100% is unrealistic, but 0% is troubling since they are not getting any value from it and its not validating your idea. How does this depend on price of the product or whether its a subscription or not?
- rexreed 5y ago
  There will always be inactive customers, but if your customer growth month-over-month is not greater than your % of inactive users (the inverse of % active users), then you will stall and enter decline. For example: if 80% of current customers login on a regular basis (monthly, daily), and you're growing at 10% per month new users, you will actually decline at some point because your 20% inactive users is greater than 10% new customers. It might take some time, but at some point customer churn will outpace new customer growth. So you have to measure new customer acquisition as a % of current installed base, total % of actives (measured on a logical period relevant for your solution), and total churn % (non-renewals divided by renewals). If the churn measure is measured differently you can think of it as the renewal rate because you want to measure retention vs. acquisition. To simplify: if acquisition is not greater than retention, then you have problems. Retention is dependent on active use with some factor and with some delay.
- LimaBearz 5y ago
  When I first read that it completely made sense. But my mind immediately ran to leetcodes subscription. I imagine their churn is fairly high, but they can also capitalize on new graduates or folks looking to up their game to keep revenue flowing in so that by itself is only part of the story. Likewise their active count maybe falls off a cliff after 4-6 months for users who actively engage with platform, and I’m sure some of them make the purchase and either never use it or give up fairly quickly. To toy with your question specifically let’s use LC as an example. Some percentage of users need to be engaged and referring it via word of mouth for it to be validating. As for retention and engagement, once you have a decent cycle of customers coming in that becomes a game psychology. Think Reddit emailing you on every comment you get, notifications, gamey mechanics like Robinhood, or some other mechanism to reinforce behavior
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Here's my take on selling: 1) Sell to people who can write the check, and have a budget to spend That's my entire advice. It seems obvious. If you're selling to an individual, choose a demographic with money to spend. And charge a price to fit into their budget. If you're selling to a team, don't. Sell to the person buying products/tools for the team, the one with signing authority. They make the ultimate decision. And they have a budget to spend, and will likely spend it all on something.
- Cantinflas 5y ago
  This is 100% on point... For selling to big companies. B2C is another game!
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  This reminds me of the quote: "When a great team and product meets a lousy market, market usually wins. When a mediocre team and product meets a great market, market usually wins"
  - mettamage 5y ago
    I have experienced this directly.
  - Axsuul 5y ago
    What does this mean?
    - zem 5y ago
      it means a bad market will make even a good product unsuccesful, and a good market will make even a mediocre product successful. the quality of the market wins out over the quality of the product.
      - bromuro 5y ago
        Does this mean the market works by manipulating consumers?
andreyk 5y ago
I use this sort of app, have for years. The idea of using a chatbot as UI is completely unappealing. So I think it comes down to there not being a need for this new take on this concept.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Yes totally, I thought "hey using a chatbot would be like texting an accountability friend or coach" but in reality that gimmick just doesn't work. Since tracking habits requires displaying data, a user interface with visual elements is more effective than a chat UI.
allenu 5y ago
I think the biggest myth with apps today is "if you build it, they will come". I think it was true 10 years ago when the iPhone App Store was getting started, but not today. The thing is, having a ton of competitors in the space means you will have to work extra hard for your app to be seen and then picked. "Lesson 4: Distribution" in the post is probably the most important thing here. Marketing and SEO are huge in terms of getting people to know about your app. I have an app of my own in the iOS app store and the times I've had jumps in sales have been tied to either me posting about it somewhere or someone else posting about it on their own. If I don't get the word out, nobody is going to know about my app. Like the poster, my app is in a crowded space (flash cards), and so a search in the app store doesn't even show my app, at least not until you scroll for a minute or so...
- albeebe1 5y ago
  > I think it was true 10 years ago when the iPhone App Store was getting started, but not today In 2008 before the App Store when Cydia and Installer where the only way to install apps on your iPhone, my app was getting 10,000 installs per day with 0 marketing. I refer to that period as the gold rush days.
  - allenu 5y ago
    I remember a coworker made a very basic compass app with a friend in the early days of the iPhone and he disclosed that they made something like $200k on it, which is absolutely wild.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Thanks for reading! I'm focusing more on distribution and monetization (or ability to pay) on my next product.
- granshaw 5y ago
  > the biggest myth with apps today is "if you build it, they will come" Are there really people who still think that? I thought it was common knowledge that market knowledge, sales, and marketing are an order of magnitude more important than the tech. I shudder to think of those who quit their jobs and jumped all the way in without knowing this basic fact
tommiegannert 5y ago
Thanks for sharing! > So the lesson is that while all businesses have a product, not all products are a business. And even products that look successful may not actually be good business, if they have negative net income and surviving on venture capital that eventually runs out.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Glad you enjoyed it! I've meditated on that point now for a few months... it's an important distinction in the maker community. Building a product vs. building a business.
gumby 5y ago
I appreciate that the author really did think about things that went wrong rather than making excuses.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  I've still got lots to learn! Thanks for watching / reading
deleted 5y ago
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kamilszybalski 5y ago
For a second I read $194m in revenue, is it Friday yet.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  haha let me check my numbers again
nowherebeen 5y ago
> The app landed as the #4 product of the day on ProductHunt, had some good initial traction which proceeded to fall off a cliff. This is why you don't post on ProductHunt. Your target market isn't there. Its nothing more than an ego trip for so many founders.
- allenu 5y ago
  I've posted on ProductHunt as well and so many of the upvotes I get and comments that I get are clearly spambots.
  - seanwilson 5y ago
    > so many of the upvotes I get and comments that I get are clearly spambots. Is there any data on this? I'd be interested to see what % of real users they have. Many times I've visited ProductHunt there's a top 4 app that doesn't seem useful at all that has tons of generic comments like "Great work!", "Can't wait to see what you do next!", "So useful!" (common on Twitter too). Guessing you could get bots to vote + comment occasionally to build up their reputation and then use or sell your bot army to manipulate the votes for specific product launches later?
    - allenu 5y ago
      I don't know if there's data, but I've seen other people posting about on Indie Hackers. I started noticing something was up when I saw the same generic comments you mentioned on my post as other people's posts. Another thing that's interesting is after you post on Product Hunt, you may get emails from third parties offering services to boost your upvotes.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Very true, they are more product focused vs. habit / self development focused.
- Ancapistani 5y ago
  Full disclosure: I've not been down this road, so I'm talking through my hat here. Posting a project to ProductHunt is unlikely to get it in front of your target demographic, but that doesn't mean it's worthless. People will download your app and if all goes well some of those people will leave you a positive review. That matters for ranking, which gets your app in front of people. If you get some good reviews, that matters for conversion because it lends some social credit.
tvirosi 5y ago
This makes me wish there was a version of producthunt except where the culture was ok with brutally honest replies (rather than the forced encouragement on producthunt, which is nice and has its place too but you need to hear both voices).
- phgn 5y ago
  I'm feeling the same way, also can't stand all the self-gratulating content on these sites. But if you remove the status game, why would people engage with the site instead of only posting their own questions? Shallow social validation seems to be why people use twitter, producthunt etc.
bambax 5y ago
Slightly OT: I built myself a journaling app that sends one email every day to remind me to write about that day; I respond to that email and the response gets stored in a db as an entry for that day. The system doesn't try to be clever in any way, it just sends and receives emails; it's proven quite effective. It's been running for about two years now and there are only a couple of days missing, if that. It's very interesting to be able to go back to any day in the past and know what happened, or what I was thinking about, that exact day. The system can also be set up to handle different journals at different intervals; it helped me write a novel last year. I'm the only user and it lacks many features to be called an actual product; but sometimes I wonder if others would find it useful.
- mdorazio 5y ago
  Also OT: I built something very similar, but with text messages and asking for a positive thing that happened during the day rather than a journal entry (forcing myself to look for positive things in a day helped snap me out of a spiral toward depression in the early days of lockdowns). I spent a weekend getting it to the point where it was good enough to share with friends and family, and about a dozen of them signed up. My mom and I are the only ones who still use it. I guess I have two thoughts: 1) simple, habit-based products aren't nearly as sticky as I thought without some kind of social validation component. 2) dogfooding your projects with your personal network is a great way to see if they're actually sticky and just to learn more about the market in general - I recommend it.
  - kylebolt 5y ago
    Yes people find it hard to stick to new habits let alone tracking them in an app. Good experience building these things nevertheless.
  - lambo2991 5y ago
    do you mind explaining your stack / tech a bit? would love to whip up something similar for a pet project
- kylebolt 5y ago
kfk 5y ago
My own lesson is to crunch the financials, always. Truth is when I crunch the numbers I almost always end up with the same result: if I am going to invest my own time and money, I must go b2b and charge >=100k per client. I can never find a way to fund myself and the marketing/content experts by charging a few dollars per subscription. Of course you might have a big existing audience or might find a cheap channel to get your product across quickly, I am just saying I find it easier to convince a few companies to pay tens of thousands euros than thousands of people to pay one hundred.
bastawhiz 5y ago
> I initially saw oh ok, there are a ton of people making these apps, it must be profitable. If you look at a dense market and decide to join in because you see potential profit because the market is dense, you're already destined for failure. Everyone else already has a head start, which means you need some sort of differentiating feature to be competitive. Why would I pay for blog software that's half baked or doesn't offer anything new? Or a to-do list? Or time tracker? Or invoicing tool? The author dances around this, but it honestly sounds like the product they built wasn't remarkably good or novel, and was positioned against incumbents that were plentiful and often had existing success. The failure here seems to be a lack of business plan beyond "join the pack and make money".
- kylebolt 5y ago
  I thought habits might be an interesting market to work in + using a chatbot as a novel approach but alas my approach did not pan out.
  - bastawhiz 5y ago
    But what about being a chat bot made it better? Being a chat bot doesn't make it do anything different than the competition, it's just a different interface. Being novel doesn't make it useful.
  - asimjalis 5y ago
    I suspect there are niches that you could profitably target. For example eating habits. Or exercise habits. Or studying habits for preparing for an LSAT exam. In all of these cases the niche allows you to go much deeper with the product to address specific pain points. You can also go much deeper with your advertising and marketing strategy. You can also reach out to specific podcasts and to specific blogs for marketing exposure.
asdev 5y ago
This seems like a classic case of "build and they won't come". I feel like OP could've validated that the market for a product like this is too competitive quite easily before writing a line of code.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Well I built it, they came but they did not stay! Would love to know your thoughts on how to validate something for retention.
JoblessWonder 5y ago
Stack Rank reminds me of a mistake our owner made... We purchased a tall Sprinter van for mobile work. When we went to purchase a second, he asked for feedback/complaints and heard it was "blown around in heavy winds." To compensate, the next one they bought was not a tall model. No one wants to use it because being able to stand up straight while in the rear is much more important than the few times we drive in heavy winds. Had they stack ranked the feedback they would have seen that the complaint was small compared to the new issues they were creating.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Stack rank is very underrated as a prioritization tool
collaborative 5y ago
I prefer solving my own need and curiosity than focusing on market fit. This probably means I will never be game for investors but I also won't measure my success by the money I've made. It will be measured in passion and happiness
pacifika 5y ago
Sounds like a good fail you clearly learned a lot.
djrogers 5y ago
> The app landed as the #4 product of the day on ProductHunt I honestly don't get this. I don't know a single smartphone user who looks at product hunt for new apps. None. As far as I can tell, it's just an echo chamber of ego-seeking devs showing off their apps to other devs and spambots - that's not a market (I guess unless your app is targeted at ego-seeking devs?).
- lalos 5y ago
  Exactly, or even the feedback on the comments tends to be congratulatory mostly.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Product Hunt's customer base is largely product people, designers, and a handful of developers and investors. If your product's target demographic overlaps with that of Product Hunt (design tools, project management tools) then it can be useful to get ranked well on Product Hunt. If your product targets the average consumer, Product Hunt is basically useless for anything other than maybe networking.
tdaltonc 5y ago
Great write up! I wrote a book on habit formation in apps. https://usetemper.com/digital-behavioral-design/ https://usetemper.com/digital-behavioral-design/ I run a sub-reddit that get's at least 1 post a month from someone launching a new habit tracking app. https://www.reddit.com/r/Habits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Habits/ My last company made SaaS to help app publishers understand and strengthen the habits in their app. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dopaminelabs https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dopaminelabs I'd add one item to your list: No one wants a habit tracking app. A lot of people could benefit from one, but when people have a problem in their life (sleep, diet, productivity) they almost never conceptualize it as a habits problem. They look for tools to "improve sleep," or "be more productive" but not a habit tracker. My new company (https://usetemper.com/ https://usetemper.com/) is all about habits and behavior change, but that's mentioned almost no where on the website because that's not how our customers think about their problem.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  This is true, "habits" is too general of a topic. This is why Strava chose cycling as their first sport and expanded from there. Smart of you to focus on fasting, hot topic! Wishing you all the best.
yoble 5y ago
Regarding lesson 4 (Distribution), the author links to a tweet by Justin Kan saying "First time founders are obsessed with products. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution". Justin Kan posted[0] today a video of himself criticizing that very tweet, saying that it didn't age well and he now believes product is 99% of the work, and the reason that many unicorns are founded by first-time founders is they don't get distracted by thoughts about anything other than product, like distribution. [0] https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1418003365695418373 https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1418003365695418373
- orasis 5y ago
  A good enough product with great distribution can earn you a fantastic income if you bootstrap.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
<searches thread for words 'grift' or 'hustle'>
dzonga 5y ago
one thing, the OP is missing. with consumer oriented stuff, don't make the naive mistake of launching thinking you'll make money. do it as a vanity project. yeah, every now and then shout it out but don't expect it to make money. unless you're vc funded and you're trying to corner a market. b2b is different of course - there exists people willing to pay
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Great point!
asimjalis 5y ago
I don't think the need-to-have versus want-to-have distinction is sufficient to kill a product. If you niche the product down to a very narrow market you might find people who need to change their habits. It could be a matter of life and death for them. For example, someone trying to lose weight, or break an addiction, or study for an exam that has life-changing outcomes for them.
asimjalis 5y ago
I applaud your courage in sharing your failure. You have made yourself vulnerable to people who will play monday-morning-quarterback on your story. Reading your experience is so enlightening. Thank you.

221 points by kylebolt 5y ago

So early 2020, I launched Rithm, an app that helps you build habits, reach your goals and stay motivated. The 1st version was a chatbot app, think of it like an accountability coach that you text with to track habits and stay accountable. Rithm landed as the #4 product of the day on ProductHunt, had some good initial traction which proceeded to fall off a cliff. Here are the 8 lessons for a failed version 1, see video and blog post. Hope this helps some makers out there!

OJFord 5y ago
Just a minor copy note: > There are a million and 1 habit and goal apps out there and I made the mistake to think that just because there are a lot of products in this space, doesn’t mean that there is a lot of businesses in that space. I think you were thinking of two different ways to phrase that, mixed them up, and the result is that it says the opposite? As in, either remove 'I made the mistake to think that', or 'doesn't mean that'.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Good spot, thank you!
somenewaccount1 5y ago
Looks like you are still working on learning distribution. I'm typing on a mac, but own an android. i still can't use or try your app :(
- kylebolt 5y ago
  I thought failing on 1 platform would be more economical than failing on 2 :)
  - allenu 5y ago
    For mobile apps, if you're a single developer, I think going with a single platform is fine. You can only do so much, and if you're familiar with the platform, you can move much more quickly than having to support two. That's the strategy I've chosen and it's helped a lot because I was already an expert in iOS and a lot of the work is just "figuring out what users want" and it's easier to change your code on a single platform that you know really well.
  - somenewaccount1 5y ago
    Then.....extending distribution wasn't really a problem or lesson learned. It's a nice to have.
    - kylebolt 5y ago
      Yes, no point in more distribution when users were not retaining. Although, it was hard to even get those first few thousand users to try the product.
- drewolbrich 5y ago
  At least for this particular flavor of app, building an Android version is an optimization that should be made once the product has been proven successful. Until that happens, it would be a huge waste of time and money for the developer to build an Android version, since it too would fail as a product, just like the iOS version. Multiplying 0 by 2 is still 0. The situation might be different for an app whose success depended on the user's ability to use the app to communicate with all of their friends, some of which had Android phones.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Why not build something like this cross-platform? The functionality sounds simple enough that you don't really need a native app for each platform.
    - realusername 5y ago
      Even when using about cross-platform frameworks, there's quirks, store pages and time to invest to maintain the other platform. My Flutter app is still not available on iOS for example.
    - allenu 5y ago
      It seems like it would be simple enough, but it's death by a thousand cuts. Supporting Android means having to keep track of even more screen sizes, OS versions, updates, app store releases and so on. It just adds on more and more. For one developer who is trying to prove out an idea, the work to support the app on multiple platforms just eats up your time and focus when you really should be focusing on features and adjusting what the product is as you get more info from your existing customers. There are of course frameworks out there to help you build one codebase for multiple platforms, but if you go down that route, if you aren't familiar with the framework, you have to learn it. There are going to be quirks in them that you're not aware of. Maybe framework version X only works with iOS version Y and Android version Z. It just goes on and on. Frameworks aren't perfect either, and things don't work exactly the same across platforms even with the framework.
- somenewaccount1 5y ago
  aaaaaahhhh.... negative 4 points for actually reading the article/watching the video, and being accurate. hacker news blowing steve jobs as usual. that's the type of exclusionary behavior i like to see!
- somenewaccount1 5y ago
  aaaaaahhhh.... negative 4 points for actually reading the article/watching the video, and being accurate. hacker news blowing steve jobs as usual. that's the type of exclusionary behavior i like to see! if anyone payed attention - i even own an mac AND HIS APP DOES NOT WORK ON IT. That barely requires a frigin flag to compile and distribute for, it doesn't even take extra work. But fuck me, right?
pacman2 5y ago
You app with the chatbot is a bad nightmare. I would never use something like it. Combine a Tamagotchi with your app, have the user "feed" them with his "habbits". At least you would combine two things. With the chat bot? Move on.

klausjensen 5y ago

Thanks for the openhearted blogpost. It is very important to also see some of these failures, where the stars did not suddenly align and sparkling rainbows started raining money. I think I learned more from your post than from 10 success posts, honestly.

kylebolt 5y ago
Thanks for reading! “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” - Eleanor Roosevelt

kranner 5y ago

Nice writeup! I see that the app is available only in English. In my experience with indie apps (admittedly not recent), localisation in at least Spanish and Portuguese can help drive a lot of sales. It can also be easier to rank higher with localised keywords, and it's easier to get featured in country-specific App Stores in non-English languages as well.

kylebolt 5y ago
Good point! I'm working on localizing for Spanish, German and Portuguese in next version.

bluedino 5y ago

How was this product marketed/advertised?

mcraiha 5y ago
This is the only question that needs to be asked nowadays. You need user acquisition money. Sad fact is that otherwise it is almost impossible to do anything.
- koalala 5y ago
  Exactly, I would recommend spending a few thousand on a good PPC marketing agency and let them set up your marketing. You might be amazed at what this would accomplish since your product seems fine.
  - jpf0 5y ago
    I'd be interested in hearing of any experience or recommendations. If you have them available, please do send me a message.
  - yorwba 5y ago
    "100% churn" doesn't sound like a product that is fine and just needs more marketing.
    - kylebolt 5y ago
      This is exactly the moment I figured out this version is dead. At first I was thinking "ok I have a good product and now all I need are more folks in the top of funnel" but when all users chured out within 60-90 days... adding more marketing wasn't going to save it.
  - asdev 5y ago
    very interested if you know how to find a good agency for this as well. please DM/message if you can, thanks
- 5y ago

carlgreene 5y ago

This was really great and love the video with it as well! Best of luck on this new version

kylebolt 5y ago
Thanks Carl, appreciate you taking the time to check it out!

cpcat 5y ago

From my experience, if an app takes more than a few months to build and launch, the risk is no longer worth it. Large companies also do this (years building before launching and i have yet to hear of a success)

Retric 5y ago
Games generally take significant time to build sometimes years, but can be quite successful. You wider point is reasonable though as many people waste a lot of time building something that never gets traction.
- cpcat 5y ago
  Totally agree about certain games. You can't have certain games before years of building, it's like making a movie.
  - kylebolt 5y ago
    Yes this is the confusing thing about creative endeavours. Lean start up says to learn quickly and pivot yet so many artists work on the movies, games, and books for years and years. I guess we need to realize that most of us are not James Cameron :)
- forbiddenvoid 5y ago
  Stardew Valley might be the ultimate example for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardew_Valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardew_Valley I think it's also important to recognize how much survivorship bias there is in these stories, too, though. There are plenty of people who have spent similar amounts of time working on games or projects with nothing much to show for it. The experience might be worth something to someone, though, in terms of resume building, etc.
- canniballectern 5y ago
  Games are really easy to test viability for, though. The game has perfect information about itself, rarely connects in a complex way to anything outside the game, and it's easy to replicate the user's context just by sitting in a dark room on your own. The test is simple - is it fun? By contrast, most apps need to connect to people, software and things outside themselves - they're part of complex systems, and it's really hard to know if they work well without putting them into use and seeing how they perform - and that means selling and talking to users, not something you can do in isolation.

nicoburns 5y ago

I've yet to see a single product that was improved by being a chatbot.

smoldesu 5y ago
You also increase the revenue of Acme Chatbots Inc, who will use those proceeds to hire more people to sell you a better, more comprehensive package.
forbiddenvoid 5y ago
Google Search is better as a chatbot when using a voice UI. I don't know of any others that I would put in the same category.
nkrisc 5y ago
For a chat bot product to succeed, it has to be indistinguishable from a real human in every way. Otherwise the user will know its capabilities are limited, but won’t know in what way exactly they are limited. This is a perfect recipe for endless frustration as you slowly uncover every way in which it does not work how you expected it to, impeding whatever simple talk you wanted to complete. If I had nickel for every time a chat bot or phone bot told me to speak to it like a human, and then was completely incapable of handling that, I’d be rich.
- conductr 5y ago
  Being indistinguishable from human is a high and low bar. Chat is just a medium and it's not usually the best medium (for me). When I use it, I expect speed and care less if it's a human or AI. For example, I had a billing issue with my electric company. I used chat because I didn't have a week to ping-pong emails back and forth (they might cut my power). I also didn't have time to call them and sit on the phone for 30+ minutes. I knew it was something a human would need to get involved with. So, it's really just chat that is helpful as a medium. The bot part almost always gets in the way of speed to answer/solution. That my personal experience anyways, would love to hear more about how a chatbot was actually helpful to someone. Whenever I see those chat pop ups on a SaaS home page, it makes me think do people actually type "show me the pricing page please" instead of just clicking the link to the pricing page. It has to be just a friendlier nicer way to collect emails and phone #s for sales to follow up with (?). I totally don't get it.

henvic 5y ago

I know this pain. In my case, I spent most of my life around 18-23 years old living in my parents' working about 100% of my time on something of my own I had a lot of negative support from friends, colleagues, and extended family as many don't see entrepreneurship with good eyes in Brazil. The last project I worked (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dML0FQIUcTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dML0FQIUcTY, I spent 2013-2014 on it), was heading to the right direction, but then my business partner (first and last one so far) always wanted more and more. In the end I had other opportunities (go back to college, and start a new job), and we just ditched all our efforts. Of course, we both regret it. Especially each time when we see something similar sold for a couple of millions. Good luck to us next time!

halflings 5y ago
I wouldn't have any regrets re:seeing something "similar" sold for millions of $. Unless "heading in the right direction" means that you had a growing user base and/or solid revenue, in all likelihood the product you were building just wasn't succeeding. The idea in itself is not worth much: think Uber, Coursera, Airbnb, ... these are not novel ideas, many many people had the same ideas but didn't manage to make them a success (bad execution, or just bad luck/timing). You seem to still be very very young, most successful companies are founded by people in their mid 30s, so don't despair just because a couple of your attempts were not successful. The best is still ahead of you.
- henvic 5y ago
  tl;dr: I don't regret working on it. Just not even trying to market it! By heading in the right direction, I mean that I've built the 'minimum viable product' entirely in one year. Now it was time to go after putting it in the market somehow, search for a venture capitalist or anything like that. But, no, we didn't even try. We had many features that other sites didn't have back then. Such as the 'Google-like' search with auto-complete, auto-refresh appeal, etc. not so common back then, but we never went out after a single potential consumer or investor. I was in a situation that I had to stop developing on my own and focus on other things in my life. However, my business partner didn't want to stop adding new features. He wanted a few more things that I could achieve in a month or two to start looking for an investor, but I just didn't have the throughput (no time due to new endeavors + saturated), and things died off. I blame him for chickening out when we had possibly a tremendous competitive advantage that might make it an easy sell. I blame myself for not doing my own research for investors once I noticed that we reached a point of stagnation. Context: He had great designing ideas but was not technical. I wasn't good at communication back then and counted on him too much to make this happen. If this was today, it wouldn't happen again, thanks to my experience now.

rexreed 5y ago

Good lessons. But so many common mistakes To summarize: 1) Build something people really need, not a nice-to-have 2) Keeping customers is more important than just acquiring them 3) If you're not keeping your customers that means they don't want or need what you have 4) Changing people's behavior is really hard. Unless you have a significant amount of marketing budget, don't try to change people 5) "Distribution" is key. I have a hard time with the word "distribution" when often people mean "marketing" or "promotion" or "channels". That's what is usually meant. If you can't get an audience with the people you are trying to sell to, you might as well be invisible. I still don't get why people use the awkward term distribution for this. 6) You have to be better than what's already out there. If you're just as good, or worse, than the alternatives, then it's going to be really hard to make a sale. Alternatives don't mean direct competition. Anything that is an alternative for a customer to buy or use your product is real competition. This is especially the case if you're requiring the customer to change their habits to switch to your offering. You have to be MUCH better than the status quo and alternatives to do that. 7) Know who your customer is. Your user might not be your customer. Your customer might not have the itch to scratch even if the user does. A lot of these are pretty common reasons for business failure but I suppose everyone has to go through their own personal challenges to internalize them.

jfengel 5y ago
Is it really realistic to build something people "need"? Humanity survived millions of years without a single piece of software; it's unlikely that anything you write is ever going to be a "need". People buy stuff they don't need all the time. Games and other entertainment are the very definition of "nice to have", and they're vast markets. Even business tools are usually not "needs" if all they do is improve an existing product. It's incredibly hard to know what will attract people. Even if you know categorically that a thing will make their lives better, people often won't get it, and instead spend their money on something objectively useless. It seems to be luck as much as anything else, being in the right place at the right time. It catches a "buzz" for whatever reason and becomes popular, or fails to and doesn't. Knowing it beforehand would be great, but nobody ever does.
- 5y ago

smoldesu 5y ago

The first red flag I see is that the app isn't multiplatform. I know there's plenty of iPhone/Android exclusive apps, but I will very rarely use (much less spend money on) something that is locked-in to one app. Also, does anyone else find it ironic that a habit tracking app has a monthly subscription? Feels darkly ironic looking at the IAP block towards the bottom.

kylebolt 5y ago
Totally, relying on the apple app store alone was a mistake. Next product I make will be cross platform. I was blinded by the handful of successful ios apps out there.
handrous 5y ago
> The first red flag I see is that the app isn't multiplatform. This doesn't matter to most users (of a given target platform), and if you're charging money for an app—rather than making money with ads, or providing a service that needs maximum reach or user base, or relying on network effects to somehow make money as e.g. a messenger or social network might—then you only need/want iOS until you are seeing enough traction to be confident that the lower sales rate on Android will nonetheless be high enough to make it worth it.
mrweasel 5y ago
A few months ago I looked for a habit tracker, I don't recall if this was one of those I looked at. As with all apps, for the phone, I skip everything that has a subscription model or "in app purchases" and I suspect many will do the same. To me subscriptions and "in app purchases" has become synonymous with "low quality". Personally I don't care much if apps exclusive to iPhone, it's not going to stop me from buying an app. It's not like I'd be able to transfer the purchase to Android anyway.

bko 5y ago

He mentions a false positive of paying customers. I have some personal experience of customers paying for a product and not using it. We're all guilty of it in one way or another. What percentage of paying customers should be active? 100% is unrealistic, but 0% is troubling since they are not getting any value from it and its not validating your idea. How does this depend on price of the product or whether its a subscription or not?

rexreed 5y ago
There will always be inactive customers, but if your customer growth month-over-month is not greater than your % of inactive users (the inverse of % active users), then you will stall and enter decline. For example: if 80% of current customers login on a regular basis (monthly, daily), and you're growing at 10% per month new users, you will actually decline at some point because your 20% inactive users is greater than 10% new customers. It might take some time, but at some point customer churn will outpace new customer growth. So you have to measure new customer acquisition as a % of current installed base, total % of actives (measured on a logical period relevant for your solution), and total churn % (non-renewals divided by renewals). If the churn measure is measured differently you can think of it as the renewal rate because you want to measure retention vs. acquisition. To simplify: if acquisition is not greater than retention, then you have problems. Retention is dependent on active use with some factor and with some delay.
LimaBearz 5y ago
When I first read that it completely made sense. But my mind immediately ran to leetcodes subscription. I imagine their churn is fairly high, but they can also capitalize on new graduates or folks looking to up their game to keep revenue flowing in so that by itself is only part of the story. Likewise their active count maybe falls off a cliff after 4-6 months for users who actively engage with platform, and I’m sure some of them make the purchase and either never use it or give up fairly quickly. To toy with your question specifically let’s use LC as an example. Some percentage of users need to be engaged and referring it via word of mouth for it to be validating. As for retention and engagement, once you have a decent cycle of customers coming in that becomes a game psychology. Think Reddit emailing you on every comment you get, notifications, gamey mechanics like Robinhood, or some other mechanism to reinforce behavior

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Here's my take on selling: 1) Sell to people who can write the check, and have a budget to spend That's my entire advice. It seems obvious. If you're selling to an individual, choose a demographic with money to spend. And charge a price to fit into their budget. If you're selling to a team, don't. Sell to the person buying products/tools for the team, the one with signing authority. They make the ultimate decision. And they have a budget to spend, and will likely spend it all on something.

Cantinflas 5y ago
This is 100% on point... For selling to big companies. B2C is another game!
dcolkitt 5y ago
This reminds me of the quote: "When a great team and product meets a lousy market, market usually wins. When a mediocre team and product meets a great market, market usually wins"
- mettamage 5y ago
  I have experienced this directly.
- Axsuul 5y ago
  What does this mean?
  - zem 5y ago
    it means a bad market will make even a good product unsuccesful, and a good market will make even a mediocre product successful. the quality of the market wins out over the quality of the product.
    - bromuro 5y ago
      Does this mean the market works by manipulating consumers?

andreyk 5y ago

I use this sort of app, have for years. The idea of using a chatbot as UI is completely unappealing. So I think it comes down to there not being a need for this new take on this concept.

kylebolt 5y ago
Yes totally, I thought "hey using a chatbot would be like texting an accountability friend or coach" but in reality that gimmick just doesn't work. Since tracking habits requires displaying data, a user interface with visual elements is more effective than a chat UI.

allenu 5y ago

I think the biggest myth with apps today is "if you build it, they will come". I think it was true 10 years ago when the iPhone App Store was getting started, but not today. The thing is, having a ton of competitors in the space means you will have to work extra hard for your app to be seen and then picked. "Lesson 4: Distribution" in the post is probably the most important thing here. Marketing and SEO are huge in terms of getting people to know about your app. I have an app of my own in the iOS app store and the times I've had jumps in sales have been tied to either me posting about it somewhere or someone else posting about it on their own. If I don't get the word out, nobody is going to know about my app. Like the poster, my app is in a crowded space (flash cards), and so a search in the app store doesn't even show my app, at least not until you scroll for a minute or so...

albeebe1 5y ago
> I think it was true 10 years ago when the iPhone App Store was getting started, but not today In 2008 before the App Store when Cydia and Installer where the only way to install apps on your iPhone, my app was getting 10,000 installs per day with 0 marketing. I refer to that period as the gold rush days.
- allenu 5y ago
  I remember a coworker made a very basic compass app with a friend in the early days of the iPhone and he disclosed that they made something like $200k on it, which is absolutely wild.
kylebolt 5y ago
Thanks for reading! I'm focusing more on distribution and monetization (or ability to pay) on my next product.
granshaw 5y ago
> the biggest myth with apps today is "if you build it, they will come" Are there really people who still think that? I thought it was common knowledge that market knowledge, sales, and marketing are an order of magnitude more important than the tech. I shudder to think of those who quit their jobs and jumped all the way in without knowing this basic fact

tommiegannert 5y ago

Thanks for sharing! > So the lesson is that while all businesses have a product, not all products are a business. And even products that look successful may not actually be good business, if they have negative net income and surviving on venture capital that eventually runs out.

kylebolt 5y ago
Glad you enjoyed it! I've meditated on that point now for a few months... it's an important distinction in the maker community. Building a product vs. building a business.

gumby 5y ago

I appreciate that the author really did think about things that went wrong rather than making excuses.

kylebolt 5y ago
I've still got lots to learn! Thanks for watching / reading

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kamilszybalski 5y ago

For a second I read $194m in revenue, is it Friday yet.

kylebolt 5y ago
haha let me check my numbers again

nowherebeen 5y ago

> The app landed as the #4 product of the day on ProductHunt, had some good initial traction which proceeded to fall off a cliff. This is why you don't post on ProductHunt. Your target market isn't there. Its nothing more than an ego trip for so many founders.

allenu 5y ago
I've posted on ProductHunt as well and so many of the upvotes I get and comments that I get are clearly spambots.
- seanwilson 5y ago
  > so many of the upvotes I get and comments that I get are clearly spambots. Is there any data on this? I'd be interested to see what % of real users they have. Many times I've visited ProductHunt there's a top 4 app that doesn't seem useful at all that has tons of generic comments like "Great work!", "Can't wait to see what you do next!", "So useful!" (common on Twitter too). Guessing you could get bots to vote + comment occasionally to build up their reputation and then use or sell your bot army to manipulate the votes for specific product launches later?
  - allenu 5y ago
    I don't know if there's data, but I've seen other people posting about on Indie Hackers. I started noticing something was up when I saw the same generic comments you mentioned on my post as other people's posts. Another thing that's interesting is after you post on Product Hunt, you may get emails from third parties offering services to boost your upvotes.
kylebolt 5y ago
Very true, they are more product focused vs. habit / self development focused.
Ancapistani 5y ago
Full disclosure: I've not been down this road, so I'm talking through my hat here. Posting a project to ProductHunt is unlikely to get it in front of your target demographic, but that doesn't mean it's worthless. People will download your app and if all goes well some of those people will leave you a positive review. That matters for ranking, which gets your app in front of people. If you get some good reviews, that matters for conversion because it lends some social credit.

tvirosi 5y ago

This makes me wish there was a version of producthunt except where the culture was ok with brutally honest replies (rather than the forced encouragement on producthunt, which is nice and has its place too but you need to hear both voices).

phgn 5y ago
I'm feeling the same way, also can't stand all the self-gratulating content on these sites. But if you remove the status game, why would people engage with the site instead of only posting their own questions? Shallow social validation seems to be why people use twitter, producthunt etc.

bambax 5y ago

Slightly OT: I built myself a journaling app that sends one email every day to remind me to write about that day; I respond to that email and the response gets stored in a db as an entry for that day. The system doesn't try to be clever in any way, it just sends and receives emails; it's proven quite effective. It's been running for about two years now and there are only a couple of days missing, if that. It's very interesting to be able to go back to any day in the past and know what happened, or what I was thinking about, that exact day. The system can also be set up to handle different journals at different intervals; it helped me write a novel last year. I'm the only user and it lacks many features to be called an actual product; but sometimes I wonder if others would find it useful.

mdorazio 5y ago
Also OT: I built something very similar, but with text messages and asking for a positive thing that happened during the day rather than a journal entry (forcing myself to look for positive things in a day helped snap me out of a spiral toward depression in the early days of lockdowns). I spent a weekend getting it to the point where it was good enough to share with friends and family, and about a dozen of them signed up. My mom and I are the only ones who still use it. I guess I have two thoughts: 1) simple, habit-based products aren't nearly as sticky as I thought without some kind of social validation component. 2) dogfooding your projects with your personal network is a great way to see if they're actually sticky and just to learn more about the market in general - I recommend it.
- kylebolt 5y ago
  Yes people find it hard to stick to new habits let alone tracking them in an app. Good experience building these things nevertheless.
- lambo2991 5y ago
  do you mind explaining your stack / tech a bit? would love to whip up something similar for a pet project
kylebolt 5y ago

kfk 5y ago

My own lesson is to crunch the financials, always. Truth is when I crunch the numbers I almost always end up with the same result: if I am going to invest my own time and money, I must go b2b and charge >=100k per client. I can never find a way to fund myself and the marketing/content experts by charging a few dollars per subscription. Of course you might have a big existing audience or might find a cheap channel to get your product across quickly, I am just saying I find it easier to convince a few companies to pay tens of thousands euros than thousands of people to pay one hundred.

bastawhiz 5y ago

> I initially saw oh ok, there are a ton of people making these apps, it must be profitable. If you look at a dense market and decide to join in because you see potential profit because the market is dense, you're already destined for failure. Everyone else already has a head start, which means you need some sort of differentiating feature to be competitive. Why would I pay for blog software that's half baked or doesn't offer anything new? Or a to-do list? Or time tracker? Or invoicing tool? The author dances around this, but it honestly sounds like the product they built wasn't remarkably good or novel, and was positioned against incumbents that were plentiful and often had existing success. The failure here seems to be a lack of business plan beyond "join the pack and make money".

kylebolt 5y ago
I thought habits might be an interesting market to work in + using a chatbot as a novel approach but alas my approach did not pan out.
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  But what about being a chat bot made it better? Being a chat bot doesn't make it do anything different than the competition, it's just a different interface. Being novel doesn't make it useful.
- asimjalis 5y ago
  I suspect there are niches that you could profitably target. For example eating habits. Or exercise habits. Or studying habits for preparing for an LSAT exam. In all of these cases the niche allows you to go much deeper with the product to address specific pain points. You can also go much deeper with your advertising and marketing strategy. You can also reach out to specific podcasts and to specific blogs for marketing exposure.

asdev 5y ago

This seems like a classic case of "build and they won't come". I feel like OP could've validated that the market for a product like this is too competitive quite easily before writing a line of code.

kylebolt 5y ago
Well I built it, they came but they did not stay! Would love to know your thoughts on how to validate something for retention.

JoblessWonder 5y ago

Stack Rank reminds me of a mistake our owner made... We purchased a tall Sprinter van for mobile work. When we went to purchase a second, he asked for feedback/complaints and heard it was "blown around in heavy winds." To compensate, the next one they bought was not a tall model. No one wants to use it because being able to stand up straight while in the rear is much more important than the few times we drive in heavy winds. Had they stack ranked the feedback they would have seen that the complaint was small compared to the new issues they were creating.

kylebolt 5y ago
Stack rank is very underrated as a prioritization tool

collaborative 5y ago

I prefer solving my own need and curiosity than focusing on market fit. This probably means I will never be game for investors but I also won't measure my success by the money I've made. It will be measured in passion and happiness

pacifika 5y ago

Sounds like a good fail you clearly learned a lot.

djrogers 5y ago

> The app landed as the #4 product of the day on ProductHunt I honestly don't get this. I don't know a single smartphone user who looks at product hunt for new apps. None. As far as I can tell, it's just an echo chamber of ego-seeking devs showing off their apps to other devs and spambots - that's not a market (I guess unless your app is targeted at ego-seeking devs?).

lalos 5y ago
Exactly, or even the feedback on the comments tends to be congratulatory mostly.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Product Hunt's customer base is largely product people, designers, and a handful of developers and investors. If your product's target demographic overlaps with that of Product Hunt (design tools, project management tools) then it can be useful to get ranked well on Product Hunt. If your product targets the average consumer, Product Hunt is basically useless for anything other than maybe networking.

tdaltonc 5y ago

Great write up! I wrote a book on habit formation in apps. https://usetemper.com/digital-behavioral-design/ https://usetemper.com/digital-behavioral-design/ I run a sub-reddit that get's at least 1 post a month from someone launching a new habit tracking app. https://www.reddit.com/r/Habits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Habits/ My last company made SaaS to help app publishers understand and strengthen the habits in their app. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dopaminelabs https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dopaminelabs I'd add one item to your list: No one wants a habit tracking app. A lot of people could benefit from one, but when people have a problem in their life (sleep, diet, productivity) they almost never conceptualize it as a habits problem. They look for tools to "improve sleep," or "be more productive" but not a habit tracker. My new company (https://usetemper.com/ https://usetemper.com/) is all about habits and behavior change, but that's mentioned almost no where on the website because that's not how our customers think about their problem.

kylebolt 5y ago
This is true, "habits" is too general of a topic. This is why Strava chose cycling as their first sport and expanded from there. Smart of you to focus on fasting, hot topic! Wishing you all the best.

yoble 5y ago

Regarding lesson 4 (Distribution), the author links to a tweet by Justin Kan saying "First time founders are obsessed with products. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution". Justin Kan posted[0] today a video of himself criticizing that very tweet, saying that it didn't age well and he now believes product is 99% of the work, and the reason that many unicorns are founded by first-time founders is they don't get distracted by thoughts about anything other than product, like distribution. [0] https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1418003365695418373 https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1418003365695418373

orasis 5y ago
A good enough product with great distribution can earn you a fantastic income if you bootstrap.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

dzonga 5y ago

one thing, the OP is missing. with consumer oriented stuff, don't make the naive mistake of launching thinking you'll make money. do it as a vanity project. yeah, every now and then shout it out but don't expect it to make money. unless you're vc funded and you're trying to corner a market. b2b is different of course - there exists people willing to pay

kylebolt 5y ago
Great point!

asimjalis 5y ago

I don't think the need-to-have versus want-to-have distinction is sufficient to kill a product. If you niche the product down to a very narrow market you might find people who need to change their habits. It could be a matter of life and death for them. For example, someone trying to lose weight, or break an addiction, or study for an exam that has life-changing outcomes for them.

asimjalis 5y ago

I applaud your courage in sharing your failure. You have made yourself vulnerable to people who will play monday-morning-quarterback on your story. Reading your experience is so enlightening. Thank you.