How to completely screw up a successful product 😀
When I was 18 years old, I launched a photo editing app called Photo Magik. It was early in the AppStore days. It was considerably better than Instagram, the uncontested photo editing leader at that time.
My app topped Instagram in rank & downloads in 80 countries. Here's how I completely screwed it up.
Steps:
-
Recruit a bad team. This is easy to do, and hard to undo. It will help you hate working on your product and will surely cause poor productivity.
-
Never talk to your customers. After all, they don't know how to build things. They are muggles in the world of creating. You surely know best and will enjoy building useless features.
-
Offer no customer support whatsoever. It's only an app after all. It costs only a few bucks to purchase. Who could possibly want any support, or have any questions?
-
Last but not least, focus on monetization. Monetization must come before retention.
Now, I won't be too hard on myself. The app grew way faster than I was growing myself, and I was barely 18. And I had no one around me to guide me on funding, or startups. But, that experience ignited something in me about startups to this day. But it's fun to think back. Instagram must've had a bit of scare seeing how fast my app grew, and they must've been so happy to see it go down after that. Little did they know who was behind it 😀.
Now I build classtra (https://classtra.org), an all-in-one, A.I. powered live academy platform to help academies and instructors conduct engaging live sessions. Check us out.
As an app creator, I love these kind of stories, thank you for sharing. Don't worry you weren't the only one, I was on the top with fitness apps, those happy days are long gone :-)
How many downloads did end up getting over time?
Thanks @Mikron . What's funny is I really felt like that was kinda the only one who did something like this. But you live and learn I guess.
I don't remember the total overall downloads, but it used to get north of 20,000 a day for some time.
Amazing =)
What are your thoughts about launching a new app in today's market?
It's a crowded space. But certainly penetrable. The key difference here is, are you launching an app, or are you launching a business?
Launching an app is easy, but not sustainable, and if you want to be successful, you'll need to transition to a business.
For example, if you're launching a simple, appealing game that people pay once to unlock and there's no data processing, or a simple background removal (just as an example) where it's simple processing and export, (or some app of that level) you can get away with launching just an app. The advantage here is that it's a lot less headache and operations. The disadvantage is you'll see many competing apps as soon as you're successful.
Launching a business obviously comes with all the above, support, customer research, and what have you. It's hard, but the competition is smaller and the reward is greater. I personally now prefer launching a business over launching an app. Or at least transitioning into a business from an app.
Love this break down and having built a complex ios app I completely agree with your assessment of the market regarding app vs business.
Thanks Dan. Please feel free to share your app here.
Great answer, thanks.
You're welcome! Feel free to add me on LinkedIn and share what you're working on (or will be working on). https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmedmukbilsaleh/
Great this will be really helpful for few
https://justtoplist.com/
Real nice and Classtra too!
Your post and approach as to how NOT to build crappy products resonated so much better then the countless posts out there. We're all probably doing atleast one of the things you mentioned. Looking forward to seeing how Classtra works out.. What research did you do, how do you differentiate yourself from the others.
Thank you @Rishi_Uttam. I read your post on scaling the DB and breaking the app. Sadly we've done that too 🥲.
Answering your questions on Classtra:
We launched an MVP with a good deal, and we're aiming to get the first 100 paying customers. If we did, that'd be a good market product fit. We got 1,500 instead 🤯 . So the next step was to improve the product.
To truly hold engaging live sessions, the current tools are fragmented (registration on a website, live session on another, feedback somewhere else, and files yet in another place), cause low engagement, and have terrible analytics to help you improve. So we put them all in one place, and made a live session software specifically tailored for education with an A.I. assistant to help teachers improve skills and engagement. And we added analytics built-in.
Would love your feedback 🙏
I love this post because it tells me what not to do, it's the "via negativa" concept in the book Antifragile. Thank you brother.
I'd debate 4. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is not focusing on monetisation soon enough. I've personally wasted 4 years on my own journey because I didn't monetise stuff sooner.
You make a fair point. But there's a balance, 4 years might be too long. but also 2 months might be too soon. There's a balance and a sweet spot. Get it wrong and it will backfire.
Good point. Also, the amount of resources/funds that you have can have a say in it. Bootstrap founders should not wait long enough. In fact, they can charge before they've built their products too. Sort of like a PRE-SALE.
There is no benchmark. You now your market and customers the best.
Interesting story. Appreciate you sharing it.
What made your team "bad" and what would you do differently to not let it happen again?
Glad to hear that.
Well, it’s easier to list good qualities of a team rather than bad ones because the bad ones are too many.
But here’s my quick points on team building. (Can go in details into it perhaps in a separate post)
You're ultimately responsible for your bad product. If you have a bad team, you're the one who hired and kept them.
Compensate well. If you cannot compensate in money, then compensate in equity. But make sure it's worth the time of a qualified person.
One mighty person is worth 10 mediocre. Get the one, not the ten. Appreciate them as much, and pay them as much.
A good hire is someone who can (and will) do their responsibilities better than you could if you were in their position.
I love "one mighty person is worth ten mediocre."
I would also argue that one "bad" person can completely destroy and dismantle a previously good team. Their rotten attitude can become infectious, and negative emotions can really kill morale.
It's amazing how one person can have such a profound impact on a team: the mighty person inspiring others and spreading their great influence, or the one bad person poisoning the well, so to speak.
Really love this post!
Well said @Weaves87 and I agree. Bad apples are infectious.
As someone who's worked in both good teams and bad teams I couldn't agree more with your point about hiring the right people.
In the good teams I stayed for a lot longer because I enjoyed working with the people and was learning so much whilst in the bad teams I watched as each of the good people left one by one due to a terrible toxic culture.
Having the right people around can really make or break a company.
Thanks for sharing!
I could not agree more @ryanwyllie
A success story overall, you concluded what you had to and achieved what many strive for
Thanks! I mean it paid for my collage so I’m happy 😃
As a buyer, one thing that makes me give my money or continue using an app is support. It's tough though as the tight margins don't allow for it. Tricky balance!
Here's my rule of thumb:
You should always provide support.
If you store user data, you should provide organized support and increase your price.
If you don't store user data, you can get away with just yourself for support.
Yeah. Even a help centre, good docs, and youtube video are better than nothing.
Support deflection at its finest!
I had similar experience. I launched 5 apps on Play Store around 2015-2016.
All were started getting traction after some months and in 2018, most of them had minimum 60k downloads. I didn't cared about customer support and doesn't even cared to open developer emails. Due to some policy violations and a fake copyright claim on logo I lost my account.
When I noticed my revenue going down, I opened my email and found the warning and time limit to fix it. But it was already late. I was maybe 17 at that time.
Oh wow! And impressive that you were only 17 too. That's quite the story. I'm surprised how many people this happened to. I'm glad I shared this. And thanks for sharing your experience too.
Excellent thoughts and insights Ahmed. Thank you for sharing.
Glad you liked them @Takis. You're very welcome
Any suggestions how do I target numbers of users and operational cost in the beginning, if I dont focus on monetization but growing users first?
thanks for sharing, I got a lot of insights thanks! 💪
I'm glad it helped @nirkopler . Best of luck! Feel free to drop a comment with what you're working on.
Im still planning but when I will I hope youll see it, excited to keep in touch :)
Bad team members are the worst.
What were the lessons you learned from this and how has your hiring criteria changed after this?
That's a deep question. It can be an entire post (or a book really). But some highlights:
You're ultimately responsible for your bad product. If you have a bad team, you're the one who hired and kept them.
Compensate well. If you cannot compensate in money, then compensate in equity. But make sure it's worth the time of a qualified person.
One mighty person is worth 10 mediocre. Get the one, not the ten. Appreciate them as much, and pay them as much.
A good hire is someone who can (and will) do their responsibilities better than you could if you were in their position.