Ask IH: Would you pay for a service that sends mobile notifications to your customers?
Blatant ask! Honesty appreciated.
This idea came from another business idea I had. For that idea, I couldn't get around the fact that I knew mobile notifications would be important for the service, but I had zero desire to maintain both a web app and two mobile apps.
I also know others must be in this boat, so I'm wondering if web app developers would pay for a solution that sent branded, specific, personalized mobile notifications to their customers. (Edited to add:) This way, they would get access to mobile notifications without having to build a mobile app.
I mentioned this here and got a couple "yes" responses: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/do-you-have-a-mobile-app-to-accompany-your-web-app-why-or-why-not-6c42d1bd2e
But two isn't nearly enough to make me want to look into the idea more. Any thoughts you want to share would be appreciated!
My soon(!) to be released app for eCommerce has a companion mobile app. It didn't take me long to create and push notifications work well. I ruled out OneSignal due to privacy concerns (it's free, they sell the data!) and Pushover as the client has to pay for the app (or you can provide and take the hit!).
The V1 of the app is really an MVP and plan is to offer more functionality once I receive feedback etc.
Also, I'd love to take a look at your eCommerce app when the MVP is available!
Will do. This week is focused on getting all the bits submitted to various providers for approval.
Yeah I saw that OneSignal does that and that just doesn't jive really well with me 😬
I'm also not a fan of having the end user pay for the app. I think the best way to do it is to guarantee privacy and have the company pay for the service.
So as a developer you don't mind developing for multiple platforms? I don't like the idea of doing that personally, but maybe I'm just extra lazy? 😂
I am lazy :-) so I have a grandfathered Indie plan on Appcelerator, so was able to develop iOS and Android at same time with minimal platform tweaks.
It’s a fair bit of work to integrate push notifications into an app so I guess it’s have to be really worth it compared to say Onesignal (free and good) or AWS SNS (cheap and ok). There are many more too. Outside of integration direct into own apps, you’d have to get users to download a third app for it which I don’t see anyone doing. The other option I guess would be to plug in at a level above delivery but each service has very specific formats for their API so that might be tricky. I could see something working at that level though.
Thanks for the feedback! Definitely see where you're coming from here.
Just to clarify: the thinking is that web app developers wouldn't have to build a mobile app at all - they would just send notification info through the API, which would then trigger branded notifications in the notification app. 👈That is the hard part, though, like you said. Users would have to download an app just to serve their notifications. Theoretically, if numerous companies used it, then it would reduce the number of app downloads a user had to complete over time - just one app to serve all their notifications instead of 10 apps for the different services.
Building a user base for a notification app will be challenging.
Why not notifying on apps 90% of users do have: Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, ... ?
Huh, that's another interesting concept I hadn't thought of. Good idea! My concern with this is that it wouldn't give the end user as much control over what kinds of notifications they received, but it's possible that it could. I'll look into this!
I thought you can send a web push notification to mobile without an app?. Although it only works for android currently.
Yeah, with Chrome notifications. There are services to create this integration, also, some of which are really well-done.
However, as another person I talked to about this put it, "The only experience I have with Chrome notifications is blocking them." And as a user, I really agree. I find them intrusive and overused.
This notification idea I have would be limited to verified, user-centric applications - the notifications would specifically be for personalized information for the end-user. For example, here on Indie Hackers, you could get a mobile notification about a reply to one of your threads. @csallen wanna weigh in? 😂
This whole idea — of a notifications app — has actually been in my list of project ideas for ages. As you guys have already discussed, it'll be difficult to get people to download the app at first, but that's fine. I would go about targeting one website at a time, and getting their users onto the platform, like Facebook did with colleges.
You could benefit from these websites' promotion, too. For example, if I took the time to implement this for IH, I would definitely promote the app to my visitors.
However, people probably won't pay for a notifications app. And I would be hesitant to ask IH users to pay for a notifications app, unless I was getting some cut and providing some extra value on top of just plain old notifications. So you'd have to figure something out there, or use the notifications app as a loss-leader to springboard into some other idea.
One danger of this idea is that you're basically doing market research for Apple/Google. If you get popular enough, you run the risk of them developing a competitive native feature for free. For example, Shazam is basically built into my Android phone, now.
Hey @csallen! Fun to hear from the man in charge around here :)
Thanks a bunch for your feedback. Cool to know you've thought about this kind of thing in the past as well.
Do you mean that you don't think companies would pay to have notifications sent to their users? I agree that end-users (the people receiving the notifications) wouldn't want to and shouldn't be expected to pay for it.
I guess the question I would need to answer is "How valuable are mobile notifications for businesses that already use them?" If those businesses find them extremely valuable because of engagement rates or whatever, then that would indicate that the service would be worth the money. But ROI might be difficult to track. How much is an engagement work? Depends on the company..
Alternatively, if companies who use them don't find them that valuable, then that puts this idea into the loss-leader category.
Yeah, this is something I've thought about, too. I think if they did come up with a competing native feature like this, then I'd have to pivot and start offering the integration to the native feature as the service. Kind of like companies do for Chrome notifications right now.
Whoops, misread your thread, I thought you were asking if users would pay to download the app so they could receive notifications.
Yes, I think it's a much better bet that companies will want to pay you to send notifications, especially if it's easy to set up. I already pay SparkPost to send people email notifications, so I don't need to be sold too hard on the value. The main difference is that everyone has email, but not everyone has your notifications app, so the challenge would be getting a company to spend the time implementing a system that might only appeal to a small subset of their userbase.
Right, although that doesn't seem like too exciting of a business for very long. I might think of some strong, creative ways to pivot well in advance. Assuming a lot of people use your notifications app, you can go build off of that to go in a lot of unique directions. Or, alternatively, it's definitely possible that you can provide some unique notification formats/features that native OSes are unlikely to ever implement, especially if you go toward a niche.
Might be fun to think about what niches need this most. Probably people with large audiences, but who are unlikely to build their own app. WordPress blogs?
Great things to think about. Thanks Courtland! Really appreciate it!
I see what you mean and there’s a couple of similar apps out there like Pushover - though they are more generic. If you could brand it well enough as a central point for cool stuff from various places then I can see it working but it’ll be tricky - such is life I guess!
Oh, interesting! I hadn't come across Pushover. I will look more into it. I'm actually really happy to see another company in this space - helps validate my idea a bit!