
Why We’re Pivoting from Mobile-first to Web-first - olivercameron
http://philosophically.com/why-were-pivoting-from-mobile-first-to-web-first
======
eytanlevit
A very interesting read indeed.

The question that keeps bugging me is that maybe this guy is blaming the
platform, but the real problem was that they built something people didn't
really need.

Look at <http://any.do>, these guys launched mobile first and hit millions of
users in an extremely crowded market(todo lists) because they've created a
great product a lot of people want and use daily.

In the end, it sounds like(and I don't know their story from close, only
judging from things written in this post) they raised too much money early on
because they are a YC company(raising a lot of money actually makes you much
slower), launched a product with a shitty signup funnel and took a lot of time
to fix that.

Apple taking their time to approve new versions isn't new, anyone(especially a
YC company surrounded with top mentors) knows that a/b testing in a mobile app
is a problem that should be tackled upfront.

Personally, I'm tackling that problem by testing everything I can BEFORE I
even start to write code.

I'm running ads on FB/Google, testing CTRs for different value
propositions/positioning, driving users to a landing page where I'm testing
different mockup ideas I have for each value proposition, testing the icon,
testing price, testing feature list.

I'm talking with as many customers in my customer segment I can not only to
understand their needs and problems, but also to create an initial user base
that likes me enough to agree to install my app BEFORE I launch it in the
appstore using TestFlight.

This will enable me to discover a lot of UX problems upfront and to test a
very very very important question - Is what I've built a painkiller or a
vitamin, which is the most important question (I think) mobile app devs should
ask since it's clear that most apps are downloaded and then forgotten in the
abyss of unused apps.

If someone has read this long reply and has more ideas on how to test this
question before launching, I'd love to collect more ideas.

~~~
na85
>The question that keeps bugging me is that maybe this guy is blaming the
platform, but the real problem was that they built something people didn't
really need.

A thousand times yes. The market is way past saturation. It doesn't need yet
another social network that will never ever be as successful as facebook.

------
pclark
This post seems to conflate two issues:

* Churn is high, optimising user flow is mediocre at best, and iteration speed is slow, on mobile.

and

* Free is bad because of privacy blah blah blah.

I personally view the first issue as kind of un-solveable. Life is hard, etc.
What are you going to do, make a HTML5 mobile application? good one.

The second, ehhhhh. Users don't give a shit about privacy. Really. Really.
Like, really. Hell: I'd rather use Facebook for free and let them "sell my
data" versus pay $50 a year.

Anyway, I'll reiterate my #1 learning of how startups grow into businesses.
There are _two_ ways to build a $100M company:

#1 Your users have a high LTV (=$5k+) and you can afford to spend significant
(=$100+) capital on acquiring the user.

#2 Your business is massively (=10) viral, allowing you to acquire users
insanely cheaply.

The reason why it is – always – very questionable to charge for a B2C user is
that it's generally rather difficult to have a story that makes individual
people = high LTV, ironically, without having millions of them.

You need to wrap your legs around one of these two approaches and never ever
stray from it.

~~~
vnorby
I am making two points, the first that we are web-first, and the second that
we are revenue-first. I'm not conflating them; that's the point of the
article.

In any case, they are related in my mind. In order to justify why we are
switching to a paid model, I bring up privacy because I think you are trading
the loss of privacy for that of cash when you choose between ad-supported and
a paid model on a consumer app. As for going web-first, I think I made the
reason clear.

~~~
ssebro
I agree with most of what you said. Sharing needs to be #1 to have viral
growth. Large audiences are required for IAP and Advertising to make sense
(I'd also add freemium to that list). An intrinsically leaky funnel needs even
heavier viral growth to get to those large audiences. Heavy viral growth is
probably going to be at odds with privacy.

But I think you need to pay attention to what others are saying. If you can't
get users to complete a series of tasks to get to your value proposition,
either the (expected) value you're offering is too low, or the expected
probability of getting that value is too low.

In other words, with a high enough value proposition, you should theoretically
be able to get someone to do something EXTREMELY difficult.

------
jamiequint
I think the points about slow and frustrating iteration on mobile are valid,
which is my argument for going mobile second (<http://jamiequint.com/why-i-
believe-in-mobile-second>) However, I'm dubious that the issue with mobile is
a more difficult conversion funnel.

The issue is not that mobile screens are too small to show more than one step
at a time. I've done many landing page experiences on the web that would have
only fit on a mobile screen and seen upwards of 75% conversion (for a 16
question onboarding process) and often find that multiple steps convert much
better than a single step (asking for email first, then asking for a password,
for example). The key is to get buy-in, which is a combination of value
proposition and the give-and-take nature of whatever signup flow you are
developing. You can't just ask the user for things over and over, give nothing
back and expect 50% conversion. You have to make the process feel like a game,
get buy in, ask for a bit more, give value early then ask for more. This is
hard if you have a social product because you have to have strong social
pressure to signup or a good "single player mode"
([http://cdixon.org/2010/06/12/designing-products-for-
single-a...](http://cdixon.org/2010/06/12/designing-products-for-single-and-
multiplayer-modes/)) or you are dead.

~~~
vnorby
Great points, your article was spot on. No, definitely that's not the main
issue, although it is one. You can't keep reinforcing why the user is signing
up throughout the process the same way you can on the web. All mobile sign-up
screens pretty much look the same and I see a lot of users look at it and just
delete the app, or delay until later at which point they forget why they
downloaded it. And even when they get past it, if they see something else they
perceive as a "this is going to take a while" moment, they are going to leave
and delete your app. On the web, the time to signup and get use from your app
is faster and perceived as faster so I think given a choice between the two,
more users would do it on the web.

~~~
jamiequint
Most landing pages on the web look the same too. The best signup flows I've
seen or created don't need to continually re-enforce why the user is signing
up, they just need to lead the user down a logical path towards fulfilling the
original value proposition, the reason they typed their password into the App
Store and took the time to download your app in the first place.

If the user is bouncing because they think "this is going to take a while"
then you either don't have a strong enough value proposition or you're making
the user think too hard. Most things can be reduced to simple, one-decision
steps, and when you do that things will generally convert better for you.

------
gfodor
Elephant in the room is payments. Was sad to not see this mentioned. Sure,
building a web app might have a better chance of onboarding folks. But now try
to get them to enter their credit card number. On mobile, they tap the "Buy"
button.

~~~
vnorby
That's fair. I do have something data about that, however. We tried making our
app paid and found that we were now trading 100 free downloads for 2 at $0.99.
So now we have 5% of 2 people instead of 100. Regular people are really price
sensitive and the problem is they can find something that does something
similar to what your app does for free. Like I said, they will not value their
own privacy when making that decision, hence they will always choose the free
version on mobile. I think in that future that will change, at least that's
what we're betting on.

------
zaidf
From my reading, you are going from App-first to Browser-first, and less so
from mobile-first to web-first.

I think it is critical make the subtle distinctions. We are in the business of
serving doctors. For most doctors, having a native app makes very little
sense. And yet, having a responsive mobile-friendly website is becoming more
important than the desktop websites they presently have.

~~~
papsosouid
I agree that it is critical, but don't think it is actually a subtle
distinction. It is a huge, glaringly obvious distinction. Which makes it all
the more unfortunate that so many people reinforce incorrect terminology. I
find it hard to believe people seriously don't realize their phones can access
web pages, and that web pages can be designed correctly so they are accessible
on all platforms.

------
lnanek2
Heh, he describes this long grueling conversion funnel, with bizarre steps
like creating a group with no one in it. Their UI shouldn't even allow that.
Reminds me of the founder of Path speaking at a recent conference. He said
they were coming from the web and they had all these pre-conceived notions
about how to interact with their users. When a user posts a photo on the web
there's a whole process of getting it from their desktop or wherever, tagging
where it was, tagging their friends, etc.. He said with Path they had to throw
all that out because mobile users don't want that. They want a single push
button remote control for their lives on their phones, and you don't put
complex steps in that.

Another kind of strange comment was about how ad/virtual goods companies make
most of their money from poorer, less informed clients. That's simply not
true. Often half or more of the profit is from the whales in freemium games
and a lot of stuff is put into the game just to support these whales. In one
game with virtual goods that I write, I make a heck of a lot more money from
the diehard fans that buy multiple $5 coin packs compared to the free users
who slog it out earning those coins through play, or the cheap tourist who
just uses the starting coins or maybe buys once and never again to try out
playing with full bonuses for a bit.

~~~
killermonkeys
Link to the path talk?

------
earroway
Read your entire article. If you weren't so parsimonious with words, I suspect
I would be reading well into the night. :-)

More seriously: It is a given that app stores primarily generate free content
for the platform-owner and enhances the value of supported platforms.
(Additional outlays for dev+test hardware+licensing+developer-hours add insult
to injury) Surprisingly not many developers seem to care or account for. With
the amount of free noise in there, it is not surprising that you guys
experienced what you did. Thanks for confirming what we had deduced
indirectly.

Our startup launched deliberately as a web-app even though it would've been
easier to get more (initial) eyeballs with a mobile-first strategy. For
reasons you develop (and more), mobile apps aren't part of our current road-
map (although we do address form-factor related nuances). We did consider
expending resources to go mobile a few weeks ago but it made more sense to
focus on creating new "content".

Last, the level of control gained (as you allude to) by owning A-Z of the
product+distribution is truly empowering. That said, there is an undeniable
development and eyeball cost associated with it. We should acknowledge this.

~~~
vnorby
I think you need mobile. Leaving it out is a mistake because you need to be
where your customers are (to me - of course it depends on your app). I just
think that mobile is the wrong place to start right now.

Sorry for the word overdose. I have a degree in philosophy and computer
science; just the right combination to produce overly lengthy and verbose blog
posts.

~~~
earroway
1\. Hope you didn't keep your response short merely on account of my
comment...i was only jesting.

2\. A huge fraction (imo) of the apps available in the app-stores did not need
to go native mobile.

Mobile app-stores have mountains of apps that really have nothing mobile
specific about them. This astounds me. Yet developers spent serious
time/effort building these native apps. Why? I suspect it is the web-noise
that continually dangles stats about gazzillion smartphone app downloads that
triggers a greed hormone in philosophers and scientists alike, which begins to
make them see mobile everywhere.

I am not suggesting that there's no need to address the form-factor issue.
Only that "native mobile" of the app-store variety is frequently not a good
strategy. Certainly not, as you point out, as a first-option.

Aside: You state "you need to be where your customers are". Yes, but if you
define customers as those that play a role in generating revenue (either by
paying directly for services rendered, or by permitting you to arbitrage
someway), is mobile the place to be? This is obviously only a rhetorical
question...you address this in your original article. I am just a bit outraged
that the ios store has a million deluded worker bees building apps for it when
they won't see a penny. Instead, they could've leveraged their work by owning
the entire stack.

~~~
cageface
It's easy to make money on either the App Store or google play - work
freelance for other people.

------
OoTheNigerian
So Nigerians get the jab again.

Dear HN, how do we get rid of this reputation?

~~~
logn
Hello Kind Sir,

I have great proposition to help you rid this undeserved reputation. To begin,
please mail me soonest your telephone contact and address as well as account
number so I can deposit funds to assist in our work. Once this has been
obtained by me we will work together greatest outcome deserved.

Sincerest Regards, John Williamson, III

~~~
crucialfelix
That was kind of insensitive considering the positive question hat he asked.
Nigeria is a huge vibrant economy.

~~~
logn
I guess I was just trying to illustrate in a creative way why people keep
bagging on Nigeria. Once the spam stops people will forget all about it. And
it's not just email spam, eBay and Craigslist are overrun too.

Sure it's a bit unfair as all countries have spammers. In fact, US and UK
outrank Nigeria for scams, but those are two huge places and have a lot of
other notable things, and Nigeria is #3.

So I think if Nigeria boosts its economy and provides alternatives for people
to make money then the spam dies down and people forget all about it.

~~~
crucialfelix
Well I'm just pointing it out : he's a tech entrepreneur and I'm sure he's
really sick and sad to have that brought up all the time.

As punishment I ask you to go check out the tech hubs and the start up scene
there <http://cchubnigeria.com/about-cchub/>
[http://techloy.com/2011/06/27/5-reasons-nigeria-needs-
tech-i...](http://techloy.com/2011/06/27/5-reasons-nigeria-needs-tech-
innovation-hubs-right-now/)

:)

Nigeria has 175m people, GDP grew 6.5 pct since last year. They have huge
amounts of oil money and they are the financial hub of west Africa. Large
middle class, skyscrapers, online shopping, massive film industry.

One day soon you will probably be trying to optimize your on boarding of
Nigerian middle class users.

and 419 scams are an old tradition dating back to the 60s when they would
write letters. So don't knock traditional culture ;)

~~~
OoTheNigerian
Ha! Nice punishment. Thanks man.

I actually joke about it sometimes but it is really messing things up for
legitimate people.

The fact we do not have other renowned stories makes the spam one stand out so
much.

~~~
crucialfelix
Rocket Internet did an online clothing store in Nigeria. Not sure how well its
done. They are famous for cloning sites into different foreign markets. German
company. Not the most honorable business model just to clone, but it pays the
bills.

------
pjungwir
> you can test easily, cheaply, and fast enough to make a difference. > You
> can fix a critical bug that crashes your app on load 15 minutes after
> discovery (See Circa). > You can show 10 different landing pages and decide
> in real-time which one is working the best > for a particular user. You can
> also close a viral loop > . . .

I've always been skeptical of mobile-first, but so many people love their
phones, I'd say if you know how to solve any of these problems (or the others
listed in that paragraph), then _that's_ a business right there. What an
amazing list of pain points for anyone who wants to sell shovels!

------
argumentum
_I’m certainly not clicking that many Google ads per year and neither are
you._

Are you sure? I used to think that, but I wrote a chrome plugin to test the
hypothesis and found I clicked at least 1 or 2 ads most days.. I do 30+
searches per day. As a heavy internet user, you may click less on a particular
ad, but you see a lot more because you search a lot more.

------
killermonkeys
"I usually know where content stops and ads begin, partly because I’ve had
access to the Internet longer than others. I think ads target the same
audience that Nigerian scammers do"

It is hard to take someone seriously when they begin by claiming that ads are
not useful to any party, and then gives a treatise on ads. But what's most
offensive the fundamental assumption that only stupid people click on ads.
(see references to "lower income" and "lower education"). Not to mention
switching between the personal and the accusative ("We retain 5%" / "you're
really paying $20").

My summary, I continue to be amazed at how important advertising is to the
Internet economy, but that said, I understand it very well. Smart people click
on ads. Smart people buy ads. Smart people build ads products and smart people
measure and validate their effectiveness. If you go in to the ads or an ads-
funded business with these assumptions, you will not attract good ads, and
will get the incredible low RPMs you believe exist.

~~~
adrianmn
I am thinking along the same lines.

If OP reads this I would like to challenge him to count how many ad supported
sites or apps compared to paid he uses and from the free ones how many would
he stil use if they all become paid.

Also this comes from someone that has not run an ad based business. I wonder
what happens if paid app model doesn't work out and they pivot again. Suddenly
free becomes the greatest model ???

Things are never white and black when it comes to internet business, every
business model has it's own place. Let's not forget that the no.1 web company
uses ads for monetization. Would people pay to have google ads free? Do you
think they feel taken advantage off because of the ads?

------
programminggeek
So, why not build mobile SAAS apps and charge for them? It seems like
companies like Evernote, Remember The Milk, etc. that charge a premium for
mobile as a value add are making money there.

My guess is the next big wave of mobile-first startups will be charging
monthly subscriptions through IAP to small, but loyal users. Like 37Signals,
but mobile.

~~~
sumukh1
It would make sense, but for now Apple is restricting monthly subscriptions
through IAP to only Newsstand magazines/publications

------
mvkel
The real pivot here is pivoting from free to paid. The medium isn't an
inherent shift in the business model.

~~~
kunle
Agreed - a natural shift (somewhat mirroring what App.net is doing vis-a-vis
Twitter). Curious to see how it turns out.

Separately it looks like this argument carries more water when talking about
digital-only/communication products? Because when considering apps/services
such as Uber, HotelTonight and Cherry (I hate picking exceptions) that provide
an offline product or service, mobile first seems to have worked just fine.
Perhaps the true underlying argument is that mobile first works best when the
LTV of your customer is massive.

~~~
mvkel
Perhaps. Every startup, mobile or web, start with a non-existent customer
base, so I don't think one way or the other spells "more successful"
necessarily.

That said, mobile-first companies are certainly unchartered waters compared to
their traditional web brethren. I think they're a bit ahead of their time.

One distressing thing I can see happening: traditional web going the way of
the newspaper industry. We're already seeing it with Google. They took a hit
in this past quarter's earning's report because their traffic skyrocketed via
mobile, but advertisers wouldn't pay the same CPM they were paying on the
traditional web.

Sound familiar? Newspapers hit the same dilemma. They went from getting easy
$30k tickets for single-run full-page ads to $3k/month online ads (to
$300/month mobile-only ads).

Of course, this is a pure advertising model, which is separate from the OP.
So... I'll stop here :)

------
xoail
It all comes down to what you are building and how your target audience will
interact with it. Being mobile first is definitely hard when you are trying to
penetrate into a sea of tough competition in the market especially if there is
better use case to be web-first. For you, I feel you gained enough traction
and very positive response by being mobile-first. I am sure that helped you
get 1M or so users quickly on board and now that you want to go from 1M to
10M, you obviously need to think of entering new markets and platforms while
maintaining your lead in mobile. This becomes hard and frustrating. We are a
mobile-first startup trying to bring business cards onto mobile. It wouldnt
make sense for us to be web-first, hence we are mobile-first.

------
oelmekki
I think you have a point with the registering user retention problem. Nothing
is more painful than typing a password on a phone (especially if you use
strong enough passwords).

But this very first step (I'm talking about choosing a nickname and password,
not the social connection step) is clearly something derivated from what we do
in browser apps. We could do that better on mobile apps.

For example, launching an app for the first time could generate some random
login and password, and let the user instantly play with the app. When we
consider he had enough time to get the picture, we notify him he must choose a
password to be able to login from other devices, and he should probably choose
a nickname to customize his experience.

That would be way more mobile friendly to me.

------
Joeri
I think many of the people who are deploying through the app store would be
better off deploying through the browser. Mobile web apps are surprisingly
capable. I've ported one of my desktop web apps to mobile using appcache for
offline support, and it works great. Especially on iOS where a homescreen web
app launches chromeless there's almost no difference to a phonegap app except
for the hardware / api access, which i didn't need because as pointed out i
was porting a web app.

~~~
sbronstein
Yeah, I kept reading down to see where he would clarify that by 'web-first' he
meant 'mobile-web-first' but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The tools for building mobile web apps aren't as good as they should (and
hopefully will soon) be but it's certainly possible and gives you the
flexibility to rapidly iterate, get the user up-and-running as fast as
possible, etc.

------
nailer
I do not understand how the author's words relate to the topic.

Mobile first design is designing core functionality og websites for small
screen, big target devices first and using techniques like progressive
enhancement / responsive design to scale up for desktop experiences.

Mobile first already means web. Are they going from mobile first to desktop
first?

Or do they mean mobile apps to web apps?

These terms have established meanings. By sticking to them we help simplify
our discussions.

------
scottmagdalein
I agree, not with every point, but with your conclusion.

My company (PicDigest) is betting on a paid web-first model and planning a
mobile app as a companion, even in the crowded space of photo sharing where
incumbents supposedly have the market sewn up. Yes, it's a long-shot play, but
the wager is based on the assumption that many people will pay a little money
for what I'm offering.

------
patja
The statement "I’ve had access to the Internet longer than others" sure reads
funny coming from someone born in 1988

~~~
vnorby
Even if that wasn't true, which it is (there are still billions of people
without internet access), I've spent the majority of my time on the internet
and I think I can tell the difference between ads and content.

------
tyang
Making this required reading for startups before they talk to me again about
mobile and other non-revenue ideas.

------
gitabites
Why not build an HTML5 site? You'll be device- and platform agnostic, and you
can still iterate quickly.

~~~
stephengillie
Didn't FB try that?

~~~
jemka
Yes, but don't jump to conclusions.

....

As others have been pointing out feverishly on Twitter: the problem wasn't
them betting too much on HTML5. Their problem was developing piece of shit
apps that happened to use HTML5. They tasked amateurs who didn't know what
they were doing into building a hybrid native app container which in turn
embedded HTML5 content. Plenty of other developers (Instagram and LinkedIn
come to mind) have figured out how to do that right, and in a way where it is
seamless to the end user and for all intents and purposes feels exactly the
same as a native app. I'm not saying that it's an easy problem. You have to
find the right balance between which components should be native or not. It's
clear from the other problems that Facebook's been able to solve that they
know how to hire top-notch developers. They just failed to do so for their
mobile efforts, which just reinforces the stereotype that they don't "get"
mobile.

-<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4507960>

------
__abc
The term "pivot" has clearly "jumped the shark".

I've also viewed "mobile first" as thought/design methodology that doesn't
mandate you must then "build" mobile first.

------
snogglethorpe
What's with the word "pivoting", anyway?

I think I've seen it used more often on HN in the last month than in many
years before that...

------
camus
It's a matter of what your product is, really. If you have an innovative
product that solves a specific problem or need , then it can work. It doesnt
work for all products. Mobile development wether it is native or a web app ,
is hard ,and yes you have to go through all these processes on some plateform.
Is there some money to be maid ? i definetly think so , but it is not really
an el dorado with easy money. It is easier to make money on the "desktop" web
than on mobile right now. Things may change in the future.

