Daniel K

@sandislonjsak ADHD

@brianshinsh Completely agree on the feature part. Added a feature that almost no one was asking for and got no traction. Lots of time wasted. What marketing channel did you anchor down on?

we crossed $20k/mo in 83 days instead of everything that went right, here are the mistakes we made (so you don't make them!) : 1. During the early days, we tried too many marketing channels due to fomo. - we literally tried SEO, pSEO, meta ads, google keyword ads, tiktok video, and cold email all within 4 weeks lol - even if the channel turns out to not work, we think it's worth committing and testing for at least a month to get a good understanding of it - this is especially true because there are things you start to see the more you try and bear through it. trying is different from reading about it. 2. Don't spend more than a few days on a new feature or experiment - this pertains to both product decisions and marketing decisions - honestly i get easily excited about a new idea, and as a founder you probably do too - but it's always the same pattern again and again: i get super excited about the "next big thing", spend 2 weeks on it, and totally flunk - no matter how promising the idea seems, spend max 5 days on it to release and test. if it takes more than that, it's probably too big for experimenting. 3. Stop copying and listen - with 100% accuracy, all of the features that failed were 1) ideas that just magically came from imagination and 2) ideas that were inspired from other products - ofc inspiration is good, but you HAVE TO verify it with your users. do your users really need that feature? - keep in mind the product is for your user, not for you. if you're trying to build a serious product for a real business and not a play project, this is important - on the surface, every idea seems like a good idea. but adding a new feature = more complexity. be very strict about why that feature needs to be in your product - i think this is especially true for consumer products. simplicity is key. 4. Once you start making revenue, spend more where it's needed - 2 weeks ago, our app just flat out stopped working because our servers maxed out. CPU usage went over 100%. - it was literally 1am, users emailing us nonstop, requesting refunds. i panicked. - this was a stupid mistake. a small buffer would have saved us from a bunch of users having a bad experience these are the 4 mistakes on the top of my head but as I remember more, I'll add it to the thread

@brianshinsh Hell yeah bro 🤘

Being happy means being happy right now. Future happiness is an illusion. It is fleeting at best.

@raroque Can you import it into rive?

i really should gatekeep this bc I’m worried it’ll get overused buuuuut these are the two tools im using to create (and animate) my app mascots 👀 genuinely surprised NOBODY is talking about midjourney anymore, so good for animations 😮‍💨

TLDR: 🥸 ship ugly, let users find the rest of the bugs 📅 yearly plans on high-churn apps 🧑‍💻 sign in with google + apple (not just email) 📱 show the product in your content If this helped, let me know your thoughts and own experience!

4. Show your product, not just content about your niche I posted aviation memes for weeks. Millions of views. Barely any downloads. Added a pinned comment CTA. Better, but still weak. Started thinking that no one actually wants this app. Then I made ONE video actually showing the app in a viral format. 2,000 users in a day. Demand was always there — I just wasn't showing them the supply existed.

My app sat 95% done for months. I was convinced it wasn't ready. That it would fail. Then one random day I just said fuck it and published it despite the fear. 4 months later: $10K/mo. Here's what I learned:

@Bagasy_Studio Ive found that the best converting videos always show the app in some way. An example off the top of my head are those crying girl videos for language apps

@danielkcode Hey man, do you mean that you create the UGC videos using Sora? I’ve always been curious whether these kinds of videos actually convert well for apps.

Our app is making $100 - 200 a day now. - This is from pure organic marketing on instagram and tiktok using sora 2 videos. Posting 1 video a day - every tier has a 3 day free trial - we have one of the best conversion rates out of all education apps Next steps: - Scale up marketing (make more videos)

@Bagasy_Studio Yes mainly using sora. You can pretty much copy any ugc video and make it AI

@brianshinsh But yeah let us now how the ads go!

@brianshinsh Adding on to that, I wanted to try paid ads but the LTV is sub dollar and from research it was like $1.50 or more for CPA (free trial start or convert) at least for fb ads

we reached $7.5k/mo tiktok kinda imploded rn so I really need to fix my funnels so here’s the quick updates and lessons learned: - redesigning core ux flow improved payment conversion by 40.6% (so yes, good design works. stop slop) - current arpu is still quite low (sub dollar). lots of strategic work needed here but tl;dr build a product that users really love using - still need to find a more predictable marketing channel (literally can’t sleep at night without this). I see a lot of app founders succeeding with tiktok but it’s so fragile honestly. Unless you reach a big enough volume, it’ll be unpredictable. - who’s the best person on X to talk about mobile app ads? I really need some solid advice, willing to pay - customer support has increased significantly so I’m spending much more time taking to users - users are loving the product and the experience we give + our fast customer support ads to this experience At the end of the day if you ask me “what’s the secret?” honestly it’s just consistent testing+repetition. For the past few weeks many founders reached out to me for advice and there seemed to be a common underlying problem. These guys were more focused on copying other apps (ie cal ai, quittr, etc) than building what their users needed/wanted. “but cal ai did this, quittr did that” was the kind of responses I heard most. I’ve probably said this too many times but please talk to you customers Their users ≠ your users and plus if you play catch up, you’ll never win pave your own way

I think the free trial being 4x the price will cause a lot of instant churn. Did you 4x the weekly option as well on the B treatment? The single weekly option will win in my opinion. You should try experimenting with a declining offer ladder. This is what I'm going to use in my new app. Basically full price paywall -> user exits out, we show them a discounted offer (maybe 50% or something) -> users exits out, we show them a free trial offer. RevenueCat supports at least 1 exit offer, but I think SuperWall would be able to support the entire set.

Alright gang…. We are officially trying a “3 day free trial”. Before we just had a hard paywall. We also upped our prices by 4x for users who choose to try the free trial option. Running an experiment with revenue cat: - yearly(free trial) + weekly - Just weekly Which one do y’all think is winning 🥇?

not too shabby for an app i made in 1 week three months ago :)

Does anyone have a coding tattoo that isnt cringe ?