How to get users for your app?
As a software engineer I always built apps, not necessarily mobile apps, but web apps (websites) desktop apps and other things, being an engineer is the perfect mix of solving problems and building things. Building was a great challenge, but having people using it was a difficult challenge.
The Idea
It all start with an idea, something new, something challenging we want to build, maybe to learn a new technology, or just to put in practice something we are interested about. We can see an explosion of new apps related to AI, it is a trending topic, many people will fall in love with it and try to learn everything around it. For sure within those playing with the new stuff will then start appearing some ideas in mind, that isn't specific to AI, but any new and challenging topic.
Then, the new idea, the new project start coming to your mind, you start navigating in your own mind around your thoughts about what you could do do solve a problem, to create, what you think that people would find interesting or useful. I'd personally share a truth that might probably be similar to you as well, but imagining people using something I created by myself and being an useful tool is rewarding.
Then after some thought you decide it totally worth the effort to start working on it, you don't clearly know exactly 100% what your app or service will have when finished, but you know exactly where to start and are sure that you'll find the answers through the way.
After working a couple days or weeks in your project depending on the complexity, of course there is also the chance of us abandoning it, is a common thing, but let's keep it for another post, today we'll only focus on talking about the project we're able to keep going until we decide is minimally usable or MVP if you prefer.
There's not necessarily a big release date, we just feel that is good enough to share with someone. Then we start sharing with some friends and trying to make it happen, it's not that hard to get very first few clicks, the real hard part is to maintain them on the long run.
Where are my users?
A couple of weeks or months later if you still have your project online you keep looking at some dashboards to see how many users are actually interacting with your app and what you see? Some users here and there but actually no growth. Wha's missing? You ask. Then without knowing the exact reason, you let the project sit there indefinitely just expecting that some day you'll be lucky for Google to index it in a good position and you'll be fine and have many users. Unfortunately that's not what really happens on vast majority of projects. The hard end of a project is beign forgotten.
Having a project which is ready to welcome some new users is something we can do, but keeping a healthy growth rate is hard, what are the next steps? Well, if you're from engineering as me, we learn a lot about problem solving, about concepts of computer science maybe, algorithms, data structures, performance, optimization etc. Even if we go a little further, on our professional side we learn some soft skills like communication, how to impress on interviews, how to improve our LinkedIn profile to get match on more job positions. That's perfect for building a career and working for a company, but when trying to go public with a new website or app and you are the only owner of it, the scope of skills required changes drastically, from engineering we dive into marketing, making a good application is totally different than bringing users to it. Here is the gap, usually we learn a lot from engineering but lack essential knowledge around marketing, SEO optimization by providing better keywords or structure to be found easily on search engines, acquisition to use social media or paid ads for bringing users to the app, conversion to measure the sign ups and checkouts, retention by knowing how many users actually come back after 1 week, and revenue by how many users actually pay something after some time using the app, email marketing to bring them back after a couple days, for sure this is a very superficial overview of concepts but are all related to key factors which might differentiate a successful app from an unknown app.
How to solve It
The first image on the post is actually a screenshot I took now from my Google Analytics account, is not a famous webpage but the long term chart is starting to show some growth. Then I'll share some tips if you ever want to play this game of building a product or service again and hopefully I might help you to get some users.
If you really want to take things serious, think about marketing before building your application, it is an essential part of the success and having some understanding of it might change your product or the ideas you have, believe me, is better to have them changing in the beginning than having to pivot after a completed project.
Build a plan, how will users come to your app when it's finished? A couple of suggestions are:
Use resources you have easily available, do you have a good social network which you can share and recommend a link and people will use it? Then do! This was not my case so I had to find alternatives. SEO is key for the long term but doesn't provide results fast enough as we're expecting, usually we might end up losing interest on our project before actually receiving some return from SEO strategies.
Paid Ads, the last option! For me this was the path, initially I wasn't much comfortable about using it since I didn't like the idea of investing much money in something that have a high chance of not growing. But being realistic, if we don't have any other easier method and want fast results, that's the way.
After studying a little about Google Ads and putting in practice, I did some tests and was able to get around 1k new users a month by spending around U$2 a day. That was an impressive number for me! I could never get that many users by just sharing a link on my social network. Here is the key, don't make it expensive, if you're willing to try, set your budget to U$1 a day or less, something you can get some users and analyze their behavior on your app and improve it before paying more.
Learn about marketing strategies, initially learning about Google Ads is good you might consider Facebook Ads as well, the better you are managing it, better your ads efficiency will be and spend less money.
Receiving some initial users might be good enough for you to understand some problems with your application and also to understand what's really valuable to your users, you can use tools like Hotjar to see where are users clicking or if there is something broken. Us tools to help you as much as you can, try to understand the path they are going and you might notice improvements or new features from that.
In summary:
- Learn marketing for your application
- Create a plan to get users BEFORE building it
- Build!
- Invest little initially WHILE you are building, don't wait for it to be fully complete or perfect, keep improving by looking on users activity.
- Keep improving.
My Project
In case you are interested in taking a look on my app, here it is:
It is a pomodoro style productivity app. The initial version I used when creating a campaign on Google Ads had almost no features, just the Clock, now you see a couple more start appearing, that's the path, start small and keep improving.
I hope you enjoyed it and also, any feedback for the app or the article is always welcome!
