Ask HN: How many signups should an app realistically expect in the first month?

12 points by surfertas 6 years ago | 17 comments

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.

My write up of results and steps taken in the past month can be found below.

http://surfertas.github.io/korabo/2020/02/14/korabo-users.html

photawe 6 years ago |

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/ - 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 6 years ago | |

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 6 years ago | | |

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 6 years ago |

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 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 as an example, the top two paragraphs say a lot in very readable language. Compare Flesch Reading Ease using https://datayze.com/readability-analyzer and try to come up with a pitch that does better than your blog post :)

surfertas 6 years ago | |

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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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 6 years ago |

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.

photon_off 6 years ago |

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.