I have had a chance quite recently to consult a solo founder trying to reincarnate an app in the social space.
I can’t share much, just some ‘broad strokes’ and some of the ideas.
This founder already tried it before and I was asked by my pals to take a look at the revised concept of improved quality.
I was puzzled as the approach didn’t change at all since the initial failure.
The original version painfully crashed a couple of years back due to bad planning and extremely poor execution in many product terms.
Basically the founder secured some funds, hired a group of savvy but affordable coders from Poland to take that shot. Which they did with panache and loud claims they couldn’t hold. And.. after some time it crashed as it should.
It will name a couple of crumbling issues we can focus on (there are others but I won’t mention all of them here):
Extremely archaic approach to analytics
Broad rollouts of unlimited scopes
I am aware these things will be obvious for many of my colleagues but I am naive to think this post will stop a first-time founder from doing really stupid things.
I wanna prepare you for this fight as the landing in case of emergency won’t be pleasant, failed startups do crush people’s dreams and aspirations, something’s hard to recover from.
The original app was built with the US market in mind in some 3 months-worth of part-time work in Poland. The social app had everything one sees today - freemium, user scoring, swipes etc (you see it too, don’t you?..).
First issue - the rollout wasn’t staged meaning they went full ahead trying to ride a viral wave globally. That’s right, the app went live everywhere on Android/iOS with no preliminary testing in selected regions, no A/B testing or else. They just moved that royal tumbler and switched that thing open for everyone with a smartphone.
As far as I know there were no targeted marketing efforts either which can mean only one thing - a chaotic word-of-mouth-based rollout, sporadic and extremely uncontrolled.
Imagine a virus spreading (bad example, I know) and you get the idea.
With a lot of apps the momentum is important - the network effect is speeding up the adoption among peers in closed communities but if there is none, the app is getting into trouble with hundreds of frustrated users trying to find a peer on the map and failing at it.
You can’t control this chaos though, hence if at some point in time the number of users wasn’t good enough to make it usable - you are getting a cold bath in that location (if the app is location-based like in my case) and you are burning your shot at another launch for a long time in that very place (no chance to launch your app’s vol.2 anytime soon without considerable amounts invested).
In addition to that, your app on the app store gets a lot of bad reviews effectively slowing down the adoption globally.
The messages get angrier if you were brave enough to release an app with the premium someone would pay for - if there is no one to interact with, your wasted money will make it hurt more and these folks will never give it another shot. You have just burned the bridges and there is no going back.
The other side of that gloomy launch was the absence of analytics, they just didn’t have it.
Hence the only stuff they knew were breadcrumbs shared by Firebase - the intel on installs and the geography.
I couldn’t believe it but it might be understood as it was a first-time founder who didn’t know how to integrate the numbers with the launch, what to look for and so on; thus even though he had a group of investors no one went on to teach him, this was the ‘dull’ money one burns for coffee machines and ergonomic chairs.
But given the fact, this was the second try at getting it off the ground, I was seriously worried I am wasting my time.
I couldn’t explain the importance of analytics and I am afraid this founder wasn’t that curious about the backend stuff either.
A one big tragedy.
So I resigned and the moral of this story is the value of trying and your ability to… resign.
So many projects out there to make you reject offers as you see fit.
Do not take projects you don’t believe in.
I definitely won’t.
When it comes to rollouts:
consider feature flags,
closed betas,
avoid releases in locations you really care about
get a marketing budget and some rough estimations in place to test the hypothesis (i.e. ‘that’s what people need indeed’)
plan & execute your basic analytics setup as soon as possible; by picking relevant direct/indirect metrics you will be able to start monitoring your progress the very same day you go live;
Yours with esteem,
Gene Ishchuk
P.S.
If you are reading this I would like to use the occasion to ask for your help.
The product community of Ukraine is running an army support fund to defend our country from russian invaders.
If you happen to have something on your bank account - please help us all out:
https://www.koloua.com/en
Every cent counts <3
Hugs!