
Don't bother creating a mobile app - marwann
https://medium.com/inside-birdly/why-you-shouldn-t-bother-creating-a-mobile-app-328af62fe0e5#.1io8bq45r
======
vinceguidry
This is a productivity app, and productivity apps are a real hard sell on
mobile. Think about it, you're asking someone to embed a particular piece of
software _directly into their life_. It has to provide so much value over not
having any app that they have to remember to use to make using it a no-
brainer.

Your app isn't really competing against other productivity apps, it's
competing against the fact that an app is not going to be most people's best
approach for improving their lives. The process of integrating a tool with
life is not fun, it takes work and there's only so much that things like
reminders can do for you.

I use two productivity apps on my phone. Reminders and the one I'm building.
It's an ongoing experiment in how one can use software to improve life. Right
now the only thing I've managed to integrate is spending tracking, and even
that took months of back and forth consideration. Do I want to tag individual
expenditures? How do I want to categorize them? How do I want to add an
expenditure to a category? What should I call the act of spending something
and what should I call the category? How do I want my reports to look like? Do
I want reports in the database, or should they be generated dynamically? How
should I represent common transactions that I do every day in a way that
doesn't clutter up the main interface?

The whole exercise has left me unenthused about productivity software as a
viable product category. Adding an expenditure now is easy as pie, for me, and
only me. All of the work I had to do to figure out how I spend money and how I
should build an app to manage it essentially has to be redone for every single
person who wants to use software to help them manage their life. The domain
seems simple, but it's actually incredibly complicated, because it's different
for everyone.

~~~
gedrap
You touch another important issue here.

>>> Do I want to tag individual expenditures? How do I want to categorize
them?

Friction.

There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a
lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided. Ideally,
you want the app to 'just work' and that's the hard part.

~~~
vinceguidry
> There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a
> lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided.

It was an act of faith for me to structure the app around manual entry of
transactions. I thought for sure that I'd wind up abandoning it after a few
months. Didn't happen, I'm still using it, but I remember for a few weeks
struggling to eliminate the friction, and I still haven't gotten rid of all of
it. That would require implementing some kind of custom keyboard, as well as
the aforementioned interface to put in common transactions that have the same
amount each time.

There needs to be a streamlined interface for adding these common
transactions, because I might have to do it a few times a month.

I'm repeating this entire process for a to-do manager, as Reminders just
doesn't eliminate enough friction for all use cases. Now I need to figure out
how to get transactions to live on the same page as my agenda.

When I'm finally done with this three years from now, I'll need to write a
book and do a bunch of YouTube videos to teach people how to use it
productively, either that or I'll need to spend just as much time making the
interface discoverable.

What other people will need out of a dashboard is bound to be completely
different than what I need out of it. I have a list of transactions for this
week, broken down by day, someone else might need the whole month, broken down
by category. I don't have automatic recurring transactions show up, someone
else might want those. Each of these requires significant design work.

I have tried at various points to interest someone else in helping me develop
it. Ha. Ha. Ha. Nobody cares.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
The canonical budgeting advice is to simply track when you pull cash out, and
count any cash you withdraw as already "spent".

~~~
djrogers
That's hardly 'canonical', and goes directly against many budgeting/tracking
philosophies. It definitely doesn't solve the 'where'd it all go' problem, and
teaches you nothing about your spending habits and patterns.

Of course if you don't have any money problems, and don't need to break bad
spending habits, then go ahead and do it that way - I often do as well.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Of course it teaches you stuff about your spending habits and patterns. Cash
withdrawals are either earmarked as you withdraw them (for example, hitting an
ATM up before visiting a strip club or bar), or they're withdrawn for
facilitating impulsive purchases. You know the category of things they go to,
because you record it when you withdraw it - you just don't know exactly what
you did with it or when.

------
Gorbzel
It's always obvious when you are dealing with founders who likely won't make
it. Specifically, when they're so so close to their own product that they
start to blame anything else for failures rather than take an objective look
at their own missteps.

In this case, buried among some semi-coherent arguments, we reach the point
where one should ask "Was this product compelling compared to other solutions
that tackle this pain point?"

Obviously not, but don't expect the company to smell the coffee. In their
opinion, their "few competitor apps" didn't matter, but they lasted longer, so
they probably did. Oh, but of course "they weren’t doing it as well."

Take a look at the comments rolling in here, some of which note that the
product didn't seem like compelling standalone option but that would have done
well as part of a larger solution. Others inquire why certain features were
left out that would have adequately addressed the entire pain point, but left
the product feeling incomplete otherwise.

Of course, these potential customers were all wrong, because "other apps felt
heavy and complicated."

Founders considering mobile, don't make the same mistake(s) this company is
making. Rather than write some clickbait Mediun post after the fact, remember
that a great UIX, onboarding and maybe even a mascot might be necessary for
mobile success, but they definitely aren't sufficient. Nothing beats product
market fit, and if a mobile app is necessary for said fit, you better not only
bother with mobile, you should embrace it...objectively.

~~~
drb311
"the product didn't seem like compelling standalone option but that would have
done well as part of a larger solution"

The new approach as a Slack bot addresses that issue precisely. Lots of useful
things aren't a compelling standalone solution. Slack bots and other in-
messenger apps mean this kind of software can become part of a larger overall
experience.

Don't know if Birdly will make it but their argument here is onto something.

[https://www.getbirdly.com/](https://www.getbirdly.com/)

~~~
mscman
I don't know that a Slack bot is the right type of larger solution though. For
instance, I use the ExpenseIt app on my phone because it's paired with Concur.
That's got a much more flexible input when it comes time to do the actual
expense report, and it's already processed all of those receipts for me. Now I
just need to go through and pair it all up with the transactions on the card.
Is Concur perfect? No. But the ExpenseIt app works there because it allows me
to add data on the fly then toss the receipt.

I don't think I would be compelled to use a Slack bot to do the same thing,
even though we use dozens of other Slack integrations.

------
guhcampos
This looks like someone trying to take the blame of failure out of their
shoulders.

The questions are right, the answers are wrong. The app did not (judging by
the text, I never heard of it before) add the value they thought. Maybe it did
not even work as well as they thought. Actually, I doubt that.

I won't argue too much into it, instead I will give you counterexamples:

1\. I should be on the target audience, and I have never heard of the app
before. 2\. Concur seems to be doing really fine, working on the same problem
- so they have either a better marketing or a better solution.

Bottomline: don't shy people away of doing anything because you failed.

~~~
marwann
The app was only distributed on the French app stores, which is why you may
not have heard about it. We're not trying to prevent anyone from creating
mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and sure, making many
mistakes on the way), we're just sharing our humble piece of advice

~~~
RyanZAG
Wait, what?

Hang on, this should be the number 1 point of your entire blog post. Honestly,
if your post was titled the obvious "Don't make mobile apps only for one
region" then you'd be getting a lot of comments saying "Well, obviously".

Seriously your problem here is not that you made a mobile app. Your problem is
very clearly that you excluded 99% of your user base. Any chance you can
explain the reasoning behind this..? I can't even begin to understand it.
Outside of government required tax applications, I cannot think of a single
successful single-region productivity app ever.

~~~
eljimmy
I am baffled as well. My brain is hurting trying to understand this decision.

~~~
marwann
It's a decision that may seem obvious for many, many product categories.

But I can assure you that regarding anything finance-wise, it's simply
impossible to launch an app that that complies with local laws everywhere at
the same time, especially without proper funding. Take Quickbooks, it exists
for 5-10 years, and they're still postponing their launch in the French
market. We've gone global since then, and we've grown in 10 weeks way faster
than we did in 1 year.

~~~
DominikR
One suggestion: Start thinking about details like foreign laws once you
actually start to generate significant profit.

Before that no one on earth will even care about your product enough to sue
you.

On top of that it's quite expensive to go to France and sue you there as a
foreigner.

~~~
rdancer
I'd think they meant the state going after them. Not everyone wants to be a
carefree outlaw.

~~~
DominikR
I'm not an outlaw because I am ignorant of the laws and regulations of every
single state on this planet. I put an app into the store that mainly follows
Google/Apple policies/guidelines and does not break any laws in my country and
that is sufficient for the start.

These policies are reasonable and by following them you will rarely get into
trouble in Western countries.

Of course some other country might object, then the app might be modified by
me for this country or removed.

How many apps or website would exist today if checking every law everywhere
would be the standard procedure? Probably around 100 websites and 25 apps in
total would exist because only big corps can afford this.

~~~
rdancer
If you choose to sell your app in a particular App Store, you're submitting to
the law of the jurisdiction it operates in.

~~~
DominikR
No I don't, Google and Apple do. They are distributing the app and are
responsible that the content is compliant with all the countries where they
sell apps in.

Aside from that I don't understand what point you are trying to make here.

Are you suggesting that a developer should not release apps without first
making sure that the app doesn't comply with any laws of any country?

------
krschultz
This tells me a lot more about the founders not understanding the market than
about mobile apps in general.

> The mobile app was doing something really cool: you only had to take a snap
> of a receipt, and tap a button to export all the data into a beautiful Excel
> expense report.

That's a feature not a business. That feature already exists in all of the
major expense tracking SAAS products that I'm familiar with.

So who is the target market? The sliver of people that have enough of a
problem to want to buy a solution but not enough of a problem to buy the major
existing solution is just not that big.

~~~
Bedon292
I was going to say something similar, but I think you put it better. "Had it
been done a million times?" They say nope, but I think they were looking in
the wrong area. It may have done bad in standalone apps, but that's not where
the real competition was. It was a small feature in many apps. I know I keep
an app for this exact purpose on my phone all the time, even though I use it
once every few months. The problem, for them, is that the app is part of the
expense reporting software we use at work. I think there was no real way to
sell this app as a standalone thing. It needs to be connected.

------
mdorazio
I can't find the app to see exactly how it worked, but did it have any
integrations with expense reporting systems? As someone who files expense
reports monthly for work, that would be the biggest issue for me - if it
doesn't have a hook into QuickBooks or whatever system the company is using,
then it's not going to get an enterprise following since users still have to
manually enter info, which decreases value a lot.

The other issue is that if, like me, you travel a lot then a large number of
your receipts will be in emails or PDFs (I book airfare and hotels online, and
take Uber instead of cabs), so taking pictures of paper receipts and tracking
driving miles would only get me half-way to completion.

~~~
codazoda
They didn't mention this in the article, which makes me wonder if they really
understood it. Companies have specific tools they require you to use to file
expense reports. You would have to get the entire company to embrace this
solution. Although they talk about the CTO trying to get it installed, I
wonder if they ever really got the whole company on board. You've got to get
the CTO and the CFO in this case.

~~~
mpeg
It just doesn't work that way, the best audience for this is big co (because
the combination of strict expense rules and big sales force makes it perfect)
and yet it is absolutely impossible to get an enterprise signed into something
like this.

Yet when the sales guys are putting in their expense reports every month
(because it's too much money to ignore it for longer than a month) you could
save them time with something like this, and guess what, they can expense the
cost too, but only if you give them a report that is ready to send in the
format they need it.

------
drdaeman
Sorry, but this article is pointless. There are no numbers whatsoever,
everything can be squeezed down to "if it's not a messenger or a game¹, people
won't use it", and there's not even meaningful comparison to any alternative
approaches. Like the users that forgot the app magically won't forget to talk
to that Slack bot once in a month.

Literally, this article is nothing but an advertising for a refreshed product,
with some wanna-be-viral-marketing attempt at sparking discussion by somewhat
controversial statement of "not on app store". (Uh, sorry for being cynical
here, but seriously...)

___

[1] Not a full list.

~~~
marwann
Sorry you feel this way. It would be nice to update the article with actual
figures indeed.

And if I had to squeeze down the article, that'd be : "if you app doesn't
imply repeated use, doesn't leverage context, takes room in your phone, if you
don't have the necessary resources to develop it and update it on all
platforms, and if it has to be integrated to a professional workflow for many
users at once, don't go for it"

~~~
codazoda
Without numbers, however, it reads like you're just making educated guesses.

~~~
rambambam
Even with numbers, a whole lot of things in this world are nothing more than
educated guesses. Or did you already find the meaning of life?

------
athenot
Looks like they replaced the app with a Slack bot. That is more interesting
than the article.

There are some services which would be more convenient as a bot on a chat
platform than a "portal" site or a mobile app. Some issues with service-
specific site / apps:

\- password that's perpetually forgotten (unless the site plays well with the
password manager)

\- proprietary, doesn't explicitely support integrations unless the authors
implement them

\- yet another set of notifications to deal with.

~~~
win_ini
Totally agree - when I saw the pivot to Slack, I thought "That is REALLY
interesting, more interesting than their failure at mobile"

~~~
marwann
I suggest you have a look at this article we wrote about Slack as a platform:
[https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-
sla...](https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-slack-as-a-
platform-for-your-product-feeade7e6737)

------
miguelrochefort
It is obvious what people want. A single app that does it all. Seriously.

We need a general purpose application that can be used for 80% of all use
cases. When you think about it, all apps pretty much re-introduce the exact
same features. Preferences, contacts, notifications, authentication, sharing,
etc.

I want to use the exact same interface and language to order a package from
China to my house, or to hail a cab to move me from work to home. I want the
estimated ETA and cost prediction to be displayed the same. Tracking a package
or the real-time location of a cab should be done through the same interface.
I want to be notified the same way, whether it's my package or my cab that's
late and/or has arrived. I want to pay for the package and cab ride the exact
same way. Reviewing the received product and reviewing the cab driver, should
be identical processes. I think the same should apply to pretty much any
interaction, be it to ask my coffee machine to brew a cup, to be notified that
my colleague will be late to a meeting, to pay for a meal, to review a movie,
to schedule an appointment, to locate a friend.

My thesis is that all communication problems (which are what apps solve) are
difference instances of the same one.

An app is not any tool. It's a language. We need to implement a general
purpose language, and then all use it to interact with different
agents/services.

~~~
bsharitt
> It is obvious what people want. A single app that does it all. Seriously.

We need emacs mobile!

~~~
miguelrochefort
But text is an evil medium.

------
flyosity
If you think "build it and they will come" applies in the mobile space, you're
completely wrong and about to light a bunch money on fire. I'd be very
interested to know if this team talked to 25+ people smack in the middle of
their target audience about their expense-tracking pains before starting to
think about building the app. It really seems like they thought of a problem
(or what they perceived as a problem) and then built the app. If they dove
deep on the problem and talked directly to people who they thought would most
benefit from the app, they certainly would have uncovered more information
about why Birdly would or would not work for them and could make important
product choices based on that feedback.

------
dankohn1
I use Expensify to track expenses for work and WaveApps for some consulting I
do on the side. I disagree with the thesis of the piece, because I'm perfectly
happy to keep installed apps that I use once per month, or even once per
quarter.

WaveApps is great for invoicing, but their expense reporting module is
ludicrously bad (it does OCR on the receipt images, but then doesn't include
them in a nice report, so you have to download the images separately and
convert them to a PDF manually).

I would have used Birdly if I had known about it. Anyone know about another
Expensify competitor, preferably one who doesn't charge for single users?

As for Birdly, good luck with the Slack pivot, which looks clever.

------
aggieben
This was a great read, and I was right with the story line.

Yep, you're right. It's hard to get to your target market from the app store.
Yep, they forget about your app. Yep, Yep, Yep.

Oh look, there's a link at the bottom to the new Birdly! Let's see what their
new approach is!

It's a.....slack bot? Wut?

Just being honest here: I think that's one of the stupidest pivots I've ever
seen.

~~~
win_ini
It's funny - I had the same reaction at the first parts, but I thought the
Slack bot pivot was genius actually. Very different than expensify and the
"others".

No UI...is the New UI.

~~~
djrogers
Genius? So your new business model is to exclude a huge number of people
(despite what you may see here on HN, most people writing expense reports
don't use slack), and tie your business to a third party closed platform.

Ok...

------
lindig
I am using a mobile app to track the milage of my car and thus pull it up only
at the gas station. While a little more specific than general expense
tracking, it seems to be similar enough for a comparison. According to the
article these apps are a hard sell because they are used so rarely. I can't
comment on how the app creator is doing but it's still an app that I would pay
for. But maybe the market is too small and the simplicity of the app creates
an unsustainable race to the bottom.

~~~
taco_emoji
Me too! It's an Android app called aCar which I did end up spending the $5 on
(for no ads and IIRC more advanced backup options). I use it infrequently, but
A) it takes less than a minute to enter a new "fill-up" record right after I
get gas, and B) I programmed in all the reminders for oil change, tire
rotation, etc., so entering the fill-up records (with mileage) means I keep on
top of maintenance.

It provides value (B) with no friction (A), so pretty much a no-brainer.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
To track car mileage I get out the manual and look up the size of my tank.
Every time I fill up I reset the trip odometer in the car. At fill up I
calculate the mileage. It's so easy, why is an app needed for this? May be the
calculator app but that's all that should be required unless it's doing
something else.

~~~
taco_emoji
A) Why would you need to look up the size of your tank? The gas pump tells you
quite precisely how much you used since last fill-up

B) Nobody said they _needed_ an app for this

C) I'm not really sure how pulling up the calculator app and punching in
numbers is any easier than pulling up the mileage app and punching in numbers

D) If you use your imagination very slightly, you can come up with other
obvious features such an app would provide, such as tracking average miles
driven per day/month/year, average MPG per day/month/year, gas prices over
time, service records (when was the last oil change/tire rotation/brake job),
etc.

E) I also explicitly talked about another feature it provides (reminders), so
I don't get the impression you actually read my comment before replying

------
dkubb
I wonder if they considered breaking the app up into smaller parts that can be
sold to different markets:

    
    
      * API that accepts the scanned images, parses and returns the receipt data.
      * API (that does the above and) stores the data to allow later exporting of
        receipt data in Quickbooks, Excel, and other formats.
      * IOS and Android Libraries that integrate with the API.
      * Birdly app build on top of the library and API.
    

Birdly could be used as an end-user application, but also as a showcase for
the API usage. Other application developers could license the libraries and
API from your service; sure it creates competition, but you'd be getting a
slice from a larger pie.

Also if there was a solo API plan, I would probably consider something like
this for some personal expense tracking software I've been thinking about
writing for myself.

~~~
seccess
I've always been curious how, in this business model, you protect API tokens
if the users of the API deploy mobile apps. Embedding them in an app isn't
secure: anybody could reverse engineer the app and use the key for themselves
free of charge. And there is no way in Android or iOS to know which app makes
a request from the server.

~~~
striking
You can create a sneaky change to the protocol, or something that looks
unnecessary, but still works without it temporarily. (or check the order in
which the headers are formed, or something.) Then you can detect which clients
don't conform exactly to the internal specs. And then you can send those
accounts an email telling them they'll be banned if they continue to use
external clients.

This strategy only works if you have a single blessed version of a client, and
it's really only because of security by obscurity. For the mentioned business
model, it would not work unless you created a single authoritative server that
acted as a proxy to the other API or consumed data from that API without
giving the app a key.

Snapchat may or may not have used this strategy. (The external client emails
were real; as for the detection strategy, who knows.)

------
kfk
It's worth noticing that this is not only an app problem. When it comes to
Corporate systems, the fact that a user has to work with different systems is
incredibly painful. In fact, it's so painful that having 1 person managing the
system and everybody else just sending email requests to this person works
wonderfully.

One thing they could have tried is human support. Like let's give them a human
who takes care of things or helps out or is always available to give training.

------
seibelj
Do users actually hate "app clutter"? I have plenty of apps I only use rarely,
but when I need them, I need them. Space isn't a concern unless it's a huge
game or downloads tons of media. 100MB or less is nothing.

~~~
PatentTroll
Completely anecdotally: if I haven't used an app in a week then I delete it. I
can't really justify it, I have 64gb of space on my phone - it's more of an
OCD thing than anything else.

~~~
fharper1961
I'm guessing you're using an iPhone. On iOS all the apps are displayed
somewhere on your homescreens. When I tried iOS that bothered me, because
coming from Android I was used to being able to choose which app icons are
displayed on the homescreens.

------
niklas_a
Really weird to read this being someone who is using the Expensify app on a
daily basis. Super simple, I just photo the receipts as I go about during the
month and then at the beginning of the next month I create my expense report.

~~~
marwann
If all of our users were like you, we would have kept it I guess, but figures
showed batch uses once a month instead

~~~
niklas_a
In that case you didn't go after the right users. Expensify just did a $17m
Series C so must obviously be a lot of people like me.

------
jordanpg
A productivity app that involves the camera? The slowest workflow on the
phone? No thanks.

The right answer is to get those receipts into a digital format some other
way, not with the camera.

I would have deleted this app after I tried wasting 30 seconds taking a nice
little picture of a $20 receipt the first time.

~~~
crusso
I would beg to differ with that opinion.

I use JotNot Pro on my iPhone to track receipts. As soon as I get a receipt -
say at a restaurant - I immediately snap a photo of it. JotNot takes a black
and white contrast-enhancing picture of the cropped receipt that's as good as
what comes out of a scanner and adds that image to my ongoing collection of
receipts for that business trip.

At the end of my trip JotNot allows me to email a PDF of the collected
receipts (or upload it to my DropBox).

I never lose receipts. I never have to deal with receipts that have rapidly
faded because a little restaurant grease got on them (looking at you, Jimmy
Johns). I never have to worry about finding a scanner and how to place each
receipt on the scanner bed.

When I show co-travelers my process, they normally immediately download JotNot
or find some alternative on Android since JotNot is iPhone only afaik.

I would be really sad if I had to go back to holding on to paper receipts and
scanning them in via some other method.

~~~
ghaff
Maybe I'll give the "taking photo" thing another try. I always end up finding
it too fiddly and go back to sticking the receipt in my wallet but it's
probably worth reconsidering.

------
AndrewAllen1980
This is a good shutdown analysis. But they didn't really mention that their
sector has been pretty heavily dominated by traditional accounting software
like Quickbooks for quite some time. I'm not sure how long, but I remember
using Quicken in the 80's.

------
hmate9
And what has it been like moving to Slack? Are people using Birdly more?

~~~
marwann
Yes they do, and I think it's also because of the "emotional" factors. People
talk to a bot and have this feeling they have a personal assistant guiding
them through the process.

------
TYPE_FASTER
Saving four hours a month is great, and if you have a captive audience who is
being told to use the mobile app to submit expenses, that will force adoption.

Trying to get individual users to adopt a workflow is going to be much harder.

The target audience for the mobile app might not be the users themselves, but
their managers.

Also, your workflow of using Slack to enter expenses, which looks awesome btw,
might actually be easier for people to use than stopping midstream to use a
mobile app.

~~~
Micoloth
I cant believe i'm reading this.. How is saving 4 hours per month useful, and
how in the world is it worth learning a new app for that.

Maybe this isn't really the right place to say this, but the moment the world
will realize how crazy this whole startups thing is getting..

~~~
win_ini
I think your place of wonderment is misplaced. If someone can save 4 MINUTES
of an activity they HATE to do - it is worth learning an app.

There are all kinds of companies that basically help you save time doing what
you hate: Premium Pickup Laundry Services, On-demand Valets, On-demand cars.
When was the last time you said "fuck it I'm going to take a taxi because I
don't want to learn this new UBER app"?

Companies reimburse BILLIONS of dollars to employees every year.

------
corv
The new service looks really useful but I'm bummed out it's only available as
a chat bot?!

~~~
win_ini
Would you prefer it to be a mobile app?

~~~
corv
I'd prefer it to be open sauce self hosted web app

------
keehun
I, for one, would love to try and use this app daily. I currently use
Microsoft Office Lens to snap all my receipts. Unfortunately, it has some very
awful ways to store it which is primarily in the Photo Album... Would be
lovely to have a generated excel of things.

~~~
win_ini
Try Expensify - take a picture of a receipt, it is automatically OCR'd, read
and verified - and it becomes a row in an excel spreadsheet you can send to
your accountant.

------
dboreham
I like this article because for anyone who has not tried to sell a product, it
can be very easy to become deluded about how hard it is, due to the endless
noise from the press and VC community that tends to talk up successes and
gloss over the difficulties (the notable exception to this being Ben
Horowitz).

I've found this thought experiment to be useful when evaluating new product
ideas: People will buy your product for sure if a) there is a law saying they
must, otherwise go to jail or b) by doing so they straight away save a
significant amount of money vs something they were already doing/buying. If
your product isn't close to either of these cases, you are likely to fail.

------
matchagaucho
I've tried several receipt tracking apps, and they all failed to overcome the
OCR challenges.

If there is even a 20% chance the app cannot recognize the total amount
(ignoring taxes and tips), then suddenly I am manually reconciling
unrecognizable receipts.

So, if I'm always manually reconciling expense reports, then why bother with
an app... I'll just continue taking pictures and forwarding them to my email
for manual expense reporting. 100% of the task can be done in one sitting.

That being said, I SINCERELY HOPE somebody WILL develop the machine learning
algorithms necessary to get 99% OCR accuracy in this space.

~~~
lnanek2
There are plenty of companies that just have a human read your receipts. Hell
it can even be automated with Mechanical Turk.

------
mwexler
Is the problem more that this is a feature, not a product? That is, integrated
with expense report systems, tax management, any other business tools, this
makes sense. But as a standalone, it feels like an island.

This was similar to TripIt which organized your trip based on parsing
confirmations. At the end of the day, it was a great feature, but struggled to
grow beyond a certain point as a product.

Love the idea behind Birdly... but I think it belongs in other apps/tools used
for more frequent and broader business needs. (i.e., here's hoping for a great
acquisition and adoption for you!)

------
username223
This guy's business was "take a photo of a receipt for every single thing you
buy, then upload it to us, and (supposedly) save four hours a month." It's
hard to imagine it not failing.

------
dade_
OneNote & OfficeLens has replaced many apps on my phone. It's true that the
other apps were better tailored to the problem, but the effort to install and
maintain so many apps with a couple mobile devices (tablet and phone) is just
too much: app features and layouts keep changing, credential info needs to be
re-entered and then I get to my desktop and there is no application for
Windows or Mac. For better or worse, if the requirement can even partially be
met with OneNote or Evernote, they will probably just use it.

------
pbreit
It's not a terrible write-up but I think it may be a little delusional both
ways. I'm not totally convinced that they type of app they built could not
find a decent audience. The app "makes sense".

And "Don't bother creating a mobile app" is terrible advice. But if you are
going to create a mobile app, you have to really try an understand if it makes
sense, how people are going to find it, if it's compelling enough, if it takes
advantage of "mobile-ness". Etc.

~~~
djrogers
Likely would/could have found a bigger audience if it hadn't been limited to
the French app store only...

------
samuell
I'm not that surprised. I would _never_ remember what an app named "Birdly
mobile" did, when finding out I installed it last month.

Neither would I find it again, if looking for that "receipt scan app I
installed last month".

I tend to forget what apps I have installed, what they do, and their names,
and anything else than a really descriptive name, such as "RunKeeper", would
not get used much in the long run.

------
dceddia
Reading the article, all I could think was "sounds like a problem with getting
users to form new habits."

Those categories they listed are apps you'd use on a daily basis, or that have
some kind of notifications (read: dopamine hits) built in. They build up a
habit loop by making the app fun to use, and emitting notifications to keep
the users coming back during that formative early usage period.

Monthly expense reporting (or monthly anything, really) seems like a rough
road for building habits.

------
jasonkostempski
From my own patterns, I sort of agree with the conclusion but there's one app
that I keep even though I only use it a few times a year and it's a PDF
"scanner" app. The difference is it replaces an expensive piece of hardware
and it does it better than the hardware. I'm not sure Birdly really solved any
problems that couldn't be solved just as easily with built-in apps or even
pencil and paper.

------
intellegacy
I think they fell for the myth that "ideas don't matter, execution does"

If you start with a flawed idea there's no saving you, no matter how hard you
try.

------
thinkling
I'd like to use something like this to verify that my credit card statements
are accurate. I _don 't_ want to give an app access to my bank logins (as I
believe Mint requires). So I envision a workflow where I snap receipts, the
app digitizes them and produces a transaction list which it either compares
against a monthly statement PDF, or I do the verification by hand.

Anyone have a good, established workflow for this?

------
20years
I imagine it is very hard to make money with the types of apps that fall
within those most popular app categories. Mostly free apps with advertising.

I guess I don't really understand the shift of ONLY creating a mobile app for
productivity or business type stuff. Seems like these types of apps can more
easily be monetized with a web app and "maybe" complimented with a mobile app.

------
franze
i believe that we - as programmers, product managers, ... - often have the
wrong ideas about mobile. three examples from my experience:

idea: an app that helps people find shops with offers nearby

how people use it: users look up offers while they are already in the shop
(nearly always inside big supermarkets.)

idea: vegan restaurant finder

how people use it: users look up pics of food of that restaurant while they
already sat down in the restaurant (but as Instagram has more pics, they
always switch to Instagram)

idea: apartments for rent app with awesome "find apartments nearby" feature

how people use it: to look up the newest apartment in the city while in the
metro home

i believe it will take a few years more until we get mobile more right than
wrong, until then be prepared to question your product hypothesis! (and best
do it while you are running around, stressed, on your way to work or during
business travel, you know, while you actually are "mobile" / or at home at
your couch (also a mobile scenario) ... not while in the office in front of
your mac book pro)

------
niklas_a
Really weird to read this being someone who's using Expensify on a daily basis
in exactly the use cases they describe.

~~~
win_ini
LOL - totally. However, their interface actually looked sexy compared to
expensify. But epensify works and I can use it on desktop....that's the
killer. The mobile app is awesome for capturing but I like desktop for putting
together reports.

Ultimately - I believe in Expensify's VISION - which is to GET RID OF EXPENSE
REPORTS!

That's why I'll stick with Expensify - and I'm now at my third company that I
am bringing it into....that is how software expands its footprint. By excited
users bringing it into new businesses.

------
benologist
Yesterday I put together a guide for making profitable mobile apps that might
interest people - [https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-
mone...](https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-money-on-
android-4ada61d127ed)

------
at-fates-hands
It looks like you made the right pivot, moving away from a native app to a web
app.

FYI - your mobile navigation isn't working.

~~~
meestaahjoshee
I too was expecting a web app but it looks like it's just a slack bot now
which is...interesting.

------
jorisw
Is the title meant to be linkbait? Cause this is quite the blanket statement.

How do you know what I'm building (if anything) and if it falls in a category
that might benefit from being a native app and the distribution that comes
with it?

What worked or did not work for you need not apply to every other business.

------
inthewoods
I think this is a good article, but I don't like it when someone uses just one
experience to generalize about something as broad as whether someone should or
should not build a mobile app.

~~~
jbcoger
The title was provocative on purpose. As said in the article we believe mobile
is very relevant in a lot of cases. We’re definitely not trying to prevent
anyone from creating mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and
sure, making many mistakes on the way), we’re just sharing our humble piece of
advice and lessons learned.

------
radnam
This is a sincere question. Is number of times app is used per week/month/year
a good metric to build an app? Wouldn't that be a typical utility for a
Uber/Lyft?

------
JustSomeNobody
But do bother to advertise your new product on Medium!

------
brlewis
Might a monthly reminder notification have helped?

~~~
marwann
Every user received a monthly reminder, and it did help, but having an idle
app on your phone for the other 29 days didn't, unfortunately

------
wehadfun
How does Birdly/Bill do the processing of the receipts? Is it OCR software, a
person,...?

