
Ask HN: How many signups should an app realistically expect in the first month? - surfertas
I released a MVP web app on Jan. 18th. Sign ups have been disappointing, but wondering if this slow pace is expected or if its an indication that there is simply no need for this.<p>My write up of results and steps taken in the past month can be found below.<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;surfertas.github.io&#x2F;korabo&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;14&#x2F;korabo-users.html
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photawe
1\. Don't get discouraged. As a founder myself, I can tell you this: "this is
just the Beginning of the beginning of the beginning"

2\. If you truly believe your idea is worth it, and have some cash set aside,
I highly recommend you hire someone to build a decent website. I actually went
with [https://draftss.com/](https://draftss.com/) \- if you truly know what
you want, you should have a logo + website ready within one month or so. I
know it sounds like a lot of time, but in the long run, it'll feel like
nothing.

3\. Either do marketing yourself, or hire someone - to truly see if there's
interest, you should spend at least $500-1000 / month, and see what that gets
you (feedback, subscriptions, etc). Then decide how to continue.

4\. A bit more detail on marketing - be sure you do it correctly, if you
decide to do it yourself. It took me a looong time to realize I was wasting
money big time, until I hired a marketing person.

Good luck!

~~~
surfertas
Thanks a lot! Yes, its sometimes easy to get discouraged, especially when you
realize there is a gap between personal expectations and reality.

I wasn't aware of the service draftss but it seems like I can outsource the
branding, which I really need help with.

With regards to marketing, it really may be best to out source once I get the
landing page in order per @photon_off comments.

Trying to do everything by oneself might not be the best course of action...

Thanks a lot for the input.

~~~
photawe
Glad to help! Yeah, about that service - as I said, once you know exactly what
you want, they're awesome.

For sure, doing everything yourself is not the way to go -- there's simply too
much to do :)

------
46Bit
I am no expert in this but have worked at a few early-stage startups so
hopefully my advice can help a bit.

Marketing is really, really hard. Even user research is an entire profession.
You've done well to attract your first signups, but looking to grow
organically from zero may let you down. If you can trial this with a real
person then you have a user and case study to write about. You can start
thinking, talking and designing for users rather than analysis.

The [https://www.korabo.io](https://www.korabo.io) homepage looks like a
holding page rather than a signup page for a live product. I think a lot of
this is because the background is too stock-image-y. It isn't fantastic that
it leads to a signup form with no context, but one improvement at a time.

For a new product it probably isn't worth building a flashy homepage. But you
need to have some sort of intro to draw people into the site and state that
it's a functioning product. Taking
[https://basecamp.com](https://basecamp.com) as an example, the top two
paragraphs say a lot in very readable language. Compare Flesch Reading Ease
using [https://datayze.com/readability-
analyzer](https://datayze.com/readability-analyzer) and try to come up with a
pitch that does better than your blog post :)

~~~
surfertas
Thanks very much. Yeah, I may go back and just focus on the 1 user I know that
specifically had the problem build out the application, and confirm its of
some use and think about marketing.

The 2 examples you provided are great...thanks a lot. Think its going to take
some time flesh things out!

------
codingdave
You've gotten 7 signups in a month by doing nothing but a couple posts on a
few sites. There is nothing wrong with that, because you haven't done any
marketing yet. Posting !== Marketing. You need to figure out who your audience
is, what their pains are, how they talk about them, and get your name out
where they are a looking while using their language to describe their own
problems.

The list you posted of what actions you took is not that - it is you sharing a
couple posts on sites that are not great for conversions. HN and reddit are
good for driving traffic, but that is not the same thing. I have no idea if
your product has a market or not, but you'll only find that answer if you
start actually looking for the market.

~~~
surfertas
Thanks for the clarity. Very true. Ive been getting good feedback on HN and
reddit, but as you state its not feedback from the apps target audience. I am
going to iterate on the feedback provided by others and see how the results
pan out.

------
muzani
I got a thousand users the first month on an app that went well. And about
200/month on something that doesn't go so well. This is also a small market,
about 1/10 the size of the US.

I'll be frank here. It's like a date. If you don't think it's going well, it
probably isn't. It _might_ be doing okay, but it's probably better to move on.

If people aren't lining up to give you their money, it's likely not working.
If it is working, your focus would be scaling, dealing with complaints,
getting frustrated yet excited that there's too much to do.

That doesn't necessarily mean the _product_ is wrong. It could mean you have
the wrong market, wrong marketing channel, wrong pricing model (imagine if
Facebook tried to charge membership or Netflix tried to monetize from
microtransactions), wrong pitch.

One thing that always works for me is asking, who is the best competitor? And
trying to build a product that is 10x better.

How do people do split proceeds now? They write out the math on a piece of
paper, transfer to friends. Cash or click click bank account details. Is your
product 10x better? Probably not. It's not too hard to do as it is, and it's
more effort to sign up.

What about someone who does this a lot? Course seller, or freelance teachers
for a studio. Well, they probably have done it in a contract, where they
collect a sum and then pay it out. It's a burden, but is it a burden worth
paying 6% + the cost of figuring out a new system?

Your fee system could be off too - I strongly dislike pushing fees to
customers, because it feels like a dodgy 'hidden cost' thing. The reason
people offer "free" shipping (i.e. write costs into the price) is because this
puts off customers.

Alright, so who would actually have this issue so badly that they would be
_happy_ to pay 6% to get it off their hands?

A large scale company probably has integrated it into payroll, and at some
point it's cheaper to just hire someone to split the bill. So you'll want
something medium sized, maybe hectic and complex. Event management perhaps? Or
training. If so, you'll actually want to be approaching those target clients
directly and asking them. Asking your friends and family, or posting on HN
will likely just give you fake data - your effective customer base could be 0,
but is being floated up by supportive people.

~~~
surfertas
First off, thank you for taking the time reply.

I would be ecstatic with 1000 users, and would definitely give me motivation
to continue to build. Out of curiosity what was the state of the 1000 user 1st
month vs. 200 user 1st month? Were they both pretty much complete apps? Or
still in a MVPish state?

I was torn between spending more time developing before releasing or get some
sort of validation to avoid the “building a solution for no ones problem”, and
really was getting drained spending hours on developing. Maybe a bit of
burnout being a solo dev working on this. I wanted to be reinvigorated by some
level of validation.

Generally feels like the bar for getting any validation/feedback is higher, as
the general consumer wants a shiny, not buggy, fully functioning app before
even dipping their toe in.

Agreed its not 10x better for most people, but do think there is a convenience
factor and some price that someone might be willing to pay for that maybe not
6%, but the 6% covers stripe charges (processing & payouts to connected
accounts)

With regards to the pushing fee to customers, my logic was that a possible
user would be pushed off by the 6% charge, and not even try out the
application (albeit everything else about the app is pushing them away
anyway!)

Thanks again.

~~~
muzani
The app with 1000 users was horribly buggy. Statistically, it crashed 3 times
per active user per day (memory leak with photo scrolling). But the thing is
that it was crashing 3 times/day and not 1 time/day, meaning that users kept
using it. This was 2015, but even today, I'm working on a glitchy unpolished
app, and customers just keep using it.

The app with 200 users is [http://random-character-
generator.com](http://random-character-generator.com)

So generally, I disagree that customers want something fully functional. But
fintech is a big exception, because people want something solid before
trusting it their money to it. We made up for our glitches by handling payment
in person (Automated WhatsApp messages and bank account transfers, rather than
shopping carts).

I still think that validation is #1 priority, because you'll probably have to
build a dozen prototypes before you get to something people want. Our app with
1k users was ironically a low risk prototype. We were making a recipe app, but
decided to test user behaviour by making a low carb variation first. Turned
out that there's a lot more demand for low carb recipes than any recipes.

------
photon_off
I have no idea, but I can say with certainty it depends on the size of your
target audience. Find a way to reach them and continually refine your landing
page so that your funnel is as optimized as possible. Speaking of which...

I can give you my initial first impressions of your landing page:

1) I am utterly confused as to what this is or how it works. Something about
splitting proceeds. I will scroll, surely it will be explained.

2) I scrolled past the gigantic top fold and found "Find members, set
percentage share, and get paid Let Korabo handle the splitting of proceeds and
delivering actionable analytics to you". What are members, and how does Korabo
help me find them? Splitting proceeds of what? Analytics?

I managed to find the tiny menu in the upper right, and now I better
understand what this app is for, and actually I think it could be useful to
some groups of people. __On further thought, is anybody willing to pay
somebody else to split the proceeds? It seems easier for some group of people
to simply do this manually, as organizations have been doing since the dawn of
time. __

Anyway here 's my feedback:

\- Your landing page is about 1/50th as good as it could be. It's not bad, but
to actually get people to trust you enough to do work (eg: sign up), you need
to get them excited.

\- Having somebody sign up requires a very high degree of interest. You're
lucky if somebody cares enough to scroll past the fold, or even click on a
link for more info. Signing up is an order of magnitude more difficult. So
you're going to have to put a lot of work into showcasing the right things in
the right places.

\- Show the key points above the fold -- all the stuff on your "how it works"
and "what it costs" pages should just be on the front page, and clicking
should scroll down.

\- A picture is worth 1000 words, so feature the product, and not a stock
photo. If you could show one killer screenshot that immediately shows me what
the app does and makes it clear that it's useful for my use case, then you'll
see 10x improvement in conversion rate from what you have now.

\- Improve your tagline. "Sell together" is fine, but I cannot fathom how an
app would help me do that -- so maybe "Sell together, split the proceeds".

\- To improve trust factor -- Get a logo and favicon.

\- If you could show a demo of the app without forcing me to sign in, I'll be
more likely to actually sign in.

Suggestions for finding users:

\- Firstly, do the things above. You only get one chance at a first
impression, and as it stands I would not trust your app with doing checkout
processing for me.

\- For yourself, clearly define your target audience. It seems to be small
groups of people bootstrapping some service or products. You should have a
better idea of this than me, but for example say it's "yoga studios". Reach
out to management in yoga studios and ask for feedback. Go to a relevant
subreddit and find users that work at yoga studios and ask for feedback.

\- Asking for feedback, and parsing feedback is a whole game, too. Realize
that you are incredibly biased in your knowledge of your problem domain and
your apps features. Assume everybody you show this to knows nothing, even if
it's something they'd be interested in. So if you want general landing page
feedback, you'd ask: "Is it clear what this does?" \-- if you want feedback
from prospective customers you'd ask: "Do you think this could help you?
Why/Why not?" or "What would prevent you from using this?"

Good luck.

~~~
surfertas
Thanks a lot for the detailed and constructive feedback.

Yes, I have been struggling in trying to communicate the functionality of the
application in a few words & images. This resulted in including the “tiny”
menu (LOL!), which is becoming more clear that it's probably not the correct
medium for delivery.

All the ideas you mentioned with respect to the landing page, I am going to
take into account for sure. They all make sense. One reason, I was trying to
keep it as simple as possible was that I just don't have the skills to design
and integrate a well-flowing landing page. The current landing page is only
using React components and MaterialUI for styling which probably is very
apparent to the professional eye. I think with more work I can get it into the
right form, but was trying to balance timing of spending money for
professional work and user acquisition. In other words, I wanted to see that
the app was getting some sign ups before actually spending cash, but seems
like I am dealing with a chicken and egg problem to a certain extent.

Your comment “as it stands I would not trust your app with doing checkout
processing for me.” really resonates. Will put more work in for sure.

Thanks again for the candid response.

~~~
photon_off
You're welcome, and I'm glad I could revive this post a bit, too :)

I am genuinely curious though, who is this app for? For what group of people
is splitting proceeds really so daunting of a task that they would prefer to
pay a company to do it for them?

~~~
surfertas
The idea literally came up as I watched my wife split proceeds from a workshop
she held with a couple of other instructors.

Seemed like a hassle to translate the % splits to actual amounts, figure
out/confirm wiring details, and then decide when to wire...I would also think
the other instructors were wondering when their share was going to hit.

So I stood there thinking, what if she could pre-set percentage share, and
have software split the proceeds on a per payment basis so she doesn't have to
worry about getting the split amounts right and the disbursement of proceeds.
Her partners wouldn't have to wait either.

Felt like the software solution would be killing many birds with one stone.

A light bulb went off in my head, as I registered a problem, and as any sane
individual would nose-dived into building an app!

My wife isn't using it at the moment as her yoga studio/business is in Japan,
and Stripe doesn't allow for a platform to be in a different country then its
connected accounts and I chose the US to release.

The users aren't being charged to use the application. The app will absorb the
costs and lump it into a fee that is charged to the final consumer.

That all said, maybe this doesn't generalize outside this particular example
and the problem is too specific to her situation...

In summary, the app is for any group that is receiving proceeds from the sale
of a service or product, that wants to avoid the hassles of splitting proceeds
after the fact.

~~~
photon_off
I think I understand when this is most relevant: when there are many different
things being sold that each need to have a different split. In my mind I was
thinking of a team that sold multiple products, but where the split would
always remain the same.

> In summary, the app is for any group that is receiving proceeds from the
> sale of a service or product, that wants to avoid the hassles of splitting
> proceeds after the fact.

Be careful here. The app is for a narrower group than that. As mentioned
above, it's probably only relevant if the group has multiple offerings where
the splits are different... otherwise you're just a middleman that does, um,
division.

> The users aren't being charged to use the application.

While this is technically true, the app adds a cost to the final consumer,
which is the same as the business "charging" the user. I don't see this as a
"feature". Basically, it's an additional cost to the business -- it should be
up to the business to include a separate line item on the charge vs. just
increasing their price to the consumer.

In other words, allow the business to choose "show additional fee" or not.
Businesses probably prefer just increasing prices to showing the user an
additional "fee".

~~~
surfertas
Thanks again for the feedback. The middleman that does division is a good
one!...but actually may be the simple reality...

I am going to take all this feedback and have a think.

Thanks again.

