100 signups the first week, then a month of drought. How can I grow my app?
A month ago, I launched Breakout, an app for skincare enthusiasts to easily share their routines, after many months working on it. The feature is very minimal, but I was hoping people will share their profile links with friends and in skin care communities and make more people come to the platform, etc. Eventually my goal was to evolve it into a social media for skin care.
I posted on skin care communities on reddit, and it was pretty well-received. (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/30PlusSkinCare/comments/tdxo7p/i_created_a_web_app_to_help_skin_care_enthusiasts/)
I got a hundred signups in the first week, people were actually spending their time filling out the product info and reviews to their profile like https://www.breakout.so/u/milktea. I have one person who is very excited about my product and 2~3 people who I think actually bring other visitors. Around 5~8% occasionally come back.
I took this as a validation for my product, so I spent the last month adding small features and enhancements day and night.
However on the growth side, things are looking gloomy.
The first thing that shocked me was how people signed up after seeing my Reddit post, but no one signed up from Reddit ads targeting the same demographics. I do have high click-through rates, but no sign ups. This hurts because the main use case I had in mind was redditors sharing routines when asking questions on Reddit.
The Google keywords ('skin care inventory spreadsheet') I am targeting have extremely low search volume, and this one hurts again since this invalidates the demand for that inventory spreadsheet which I was planning to focus on.
My budget is limited, and search engine marketing and social media ads are not working.
Content marketing is one marketing channel I did not explore enough but the biggest problem is that I am not good at writing interesting contents, especially on skin care. Should I still try my best to write anything? Should I hire someone?
I'm losing my confidence in this especially since a competitor called Picky is venture-funded and doing everything better than I'm doing. My app is slightly different but I'm not sure if I can build and market mine better than they can with my very limited resources.
Given the fact that you don't have unlimited financial resources I think you should focus more on driving organic traffic mainly through content creation (blog, reddit, quora etc).
Content marketing is a tremendously powerful lead generation tool, that’s because relevant content can help customers understand your product or service without making you sound ‘salesy’ and once your rank on Google you'll have a pretty organic source of traffic and that's what will keep your product growing.
Thank you for your advice. Content marketing sounds like the way to go.
I tried posting comments on Reddit with links to my website, and the number of signups did increase, but it's only increasing proportionally to the number of hours I put in. I spent about 10 hours commenting for 10 signups.
This is not scalable if it goes on like this. I hope there will be times when I spend less time and get a lot of signups and backlinks.
Hi! 👋. I have a Dermatology background. Maybe we can discuss or work together or write content etc. Also, I have some ideas on how to differentiate it from others. Let me know. Thanks! melindabchu@gmail.com
Thank you! I emailed you
As someone who suffers from acne, i'm one of those people you mentioned that visits skincare subreddits. I had a similar idea but did not move ahead due to my lack of technical skills and the effort it would take to 'grow' it.
First off, what would your value proposition be?
If I was looking at the routine of a random user on reddit, I wouldn't bother to click on a link and visit another website. You may work with skincare youtubers to advertise your site. Frankly i don't see much value in a routine-sharing website if there's no interaction with the community.
Also, the profile page is so cluttered with content that it drowns out the product name, which is actually what people are looking for. People are looking to see if the product is something they are currently using or planning to use, so the first thing one would be looking for is the product brand or name, before looking at the actual review.
Last but not least, have a look at "network effect". Personally I feel that viral marketing as well as partnerships with newsletters and content sites is the way to go.
Cheers!
Thank you @JustaRandomGoofball! They are all valid points that you are bringing up.
I thought routine sharing was a good starting point, so I implemented the routine sharing functionality, but now I'm asking myself 'now what?'. I don't know where to take this. I could just make the website into a review site and refine my recommendation engine, or I could make it into a social network site for skincare. However, they both require a lot of time and effort.
I definitely see more potential into building a community/social network as the UGC are more "genuine" than a review site where it can be fake. Besides, there are dozens of beauty care review sites out there.
Would love to see such as a site grow into something meaningful. HMU if there's any progress in your site!
In the same boat as you not getting customers after few initial paying clients