BTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!
What's a "very modest spend" when it comes to advertising? How much is enough to validate whether and ad is or isn't working in your experience? Also did a majority of your new users come from being featured on app stores or was it primarily through turning the modest spend into a serious spend once the ad was converting?
Enough to get statistically significant data. There are programs to get $100 AdWords or FB Ads credit and that's more then enough to get a few thousand to 10k impressions on your ads and give you decent data about how well they perform. I would usually set a testing campaign to spend about $10/day for 5-7 days, and would shut it down early if it was looking particularly bad.
Our app is free, so we aren't eager to pay for installs at any price, and paid aq is not a major channel for us. The lion's share of our new users come from organic search, social sharing, and word of mouth.
Can I ask for a ballpark of what # of users it took to get to that inflection point when SEO and word of mouth takes over? At least in my experience getting to there has proven to be the main challenge.
Also- thanks for taking questions and congrats on your success :)
It entirely depends on the domain so there's no good answer for this.
Our growth has been remarkably steady, with minor seasonal factors. If the majority of your acquisition channels scale with the number of users (SEO, social, viral) then you should see a steady accumulation of momentum over time, even from a very small number — perhaps the low thousands.
We've had a strong word of mouth factor from the very beginning, but I attribute that mostly to the brand and the fact that this is an underserved market. Parents have traditionally been invisible to tech companies and they are delighted someone is finally building for them.
As well, got other questions, but understand if you don't want to answer, what did you think was the most important problem you solved for your users and how did you get people to really download your app after the beta stage?
This also sounds like a good link that can go on indiehackers.com
We solve an huge number of extremely important problems for our users. Some things just off the top of my head:
- Find local daycares that have spaces available, which is pretty important when you need to work
- Find a nearby restroom or changing table when you need one RIGHT NOW (and when you need one, it's usually RIGHT NOW)
- Get parenting advice in real time on just about any topic
- If you're someone who doesn't fit in with traditional parenting groups (mostly moms, mostly married, etc), connect with a community of parents like you (single parents, stay home dads, etc)
- Find places where you can nurse or pump safely
- Get suggestions for things to do with your kids, because they are bored and you need to get out of the house
- Locate family-friendly restaurants and businesses when traveling
Etc. In some ways this is actually a challenge as there's no single, dead-simple value prop that we can use. But I love Winnie. We're genuinely helping people be less stressed and more successful as parents.
Hi there, I can try to answer this question from a user perspective. I was an early Winnie user in their public beta and it's one of my top two favorite startups that has launched in the last couple of years.
Initially it did feel like an empty room, but this was before the ability to start discussions with other users and ask questions. Initially you could only add reviews of places. I remember adding a couple of reviews and since I didn't get any immediate engagement from other users it felt like I was adding valuable content but it wouldn't really be useful until they got a large number of users.
When discussions became available the biggest thing was that Anne and her co-founder Sara were really active users and shared their knowledge of being parents. Every single post that I added was liked and/or commented on by them. If you asked a parenting question or posted something in the early days it would be answered/commented/liked by Anne and Sara and often within minutes. They also would add valuable and engaging content on a daily basis whether it was an interesting article, something funny, or just asking a question that could be answered by users and start a discussion. When you see how active both of them were it makes you feel like posting something or commenting is okay and at least going to be acknowledged and appreciated by them even if there weren't a whole lot of other users that were active. I always knew that in the early days the biggest thing was just continuing to add valuable content and eventually the engagement would follow. After a few weeks I started to see other users become more active and start liking my posts and adding their own which just continued to grow until they got to some of their big growth events like being featured in the app store or launching their daycare directory.
A company in Chicago called Tock. It's a ticketing and reservation/table management service for restaurants started by one of the founders of Alinea and Next.
Regarding the part about native apps, would you go as far as even restraining from publishing any app, if native app developers are not available (or not in the budget) in the beginning?
I'll share an anecdotal opinion contrary to the article. I've been running the engineering team at a startup for 3 years now and our app is still 100% cordova. We passed 100k actives over a year ago.
There are many benefits to native apps from the experience polish to the community and resources surrounding them. There are 2 major negatives to native: dev time and cost.
The Native vs Cordova/SomethingElse discussion is going to have different answers depending on your use case. Let me restate that for importance. Your use case will dictate which is "correct" early on.
For us, the rapid product tests we were looking to run, in both web and mobile platforms with a very small engineering team all but required a cordova app. As our product has grown more mature, and major client features change less frequent, the appeal of native has grown. But despite that appeal, we remain firmly in cordova and will for at least another 6 months.
That sounds absurd to me, go hybrid first then go native once it takes off, you can write your app in JavaScript and have an app that runs in all major mobile devices and a website, I'm not sure how can be beat unless money isn't a problem, such as massive initial funding.
Depends on the product. Winnie's target demo is millennial parents who are mobile power users, so we knew the apps had to be best-in-class and we were prepared to invest in them.
Not all products need to invest in amazing apps or apps at all, but if you don't have a decent app than ASO and featuring are not going to be available to you. This may or may not be important to your business.