10
0 Comments

Launch: No Followers, No Network, No Marketing

Today, I’m going to share how I launched VoxRec Speech to Text iOS App, what I did wrong and a few things I did right (I think).

As you can guess from the title - it’s going to be a story about the struggle!
Sit tight!

TLDR: Just read the bold parts :)

Pre-Launch and Pre-Product

I’ll say this first --> Do not build the product <-- you can test and validate your hypotheses with something that looks like you have a product - e.g. screenshots that look like a completed product or even animations of it.

I did this successfully for a few clients through my consultancy business and it's now the default starting point for anyone who comes to me asking to build their product.

For apps - this means making mockups of key features that deliver value and benefits. Link them together in any prototyping tool, put them on your phone and ask people if and how they'd use it. You can even say that’s already a working prototype (even if it is not). Just don't’ hand it over to them - the moment they stop believing it’s real they will start making things up about it.

For other types of products - show the output, if the value is in the presentation data (aka report), show them a nice report that leads to insights, or show them a key feature animated. There’s no need to show them the UI unless the UI is the key benefit (e.g. speed and ease of use).

Write down your hypotheses and beliefs and then test them.
The hypothesis can be about the target market, positioning, features, anything.
Write down open-ended questions that do not skew the answers or direction.

Then go and talk to people. Set a goal to talk to 100 people with an objective of interviewing 1 person per day. Yes, you can do more, but you will be fighting your habits and environment. It’s easy to overestimate how much you can do when you have time and space.. then suddenly life throws you a curveball a few days in a row. You start to fall behind and it will feel bad when you’re not meeting your daily objectives. I personally fell short on this so many times so now I only set an objective of 1 action per day for these activities.

If you really have to build it, set yourself goals on time and spend. Then be ruthless to cut anything that is not delivering value within the product/service. People won’t miss what they’ve never seen. You can always add more later.

Do not give out access to your alpha product en masse, perception is more important than reality - people will sign up to what they believe it is, not what it is. You think you know what your product will look like and what it will do, but many times it will turn out to be something else. That’s OK. It’s not a lie, it’s seduction.
I tried this both ways and this worked for me.
An exception is when you know (and have data/proof) that your product kicks ass - by all means, show it off, give it away, build up the hype.

After you launch

Talk to people - to every single customer. Thank them when they sign up, ask them how they use it. Right now I do not do this with every user, but I do occasionally reach out to some. I personally answer every message on every channel. I spent an hour to help someone set-up a VPN on their phone in Morocco because they had a problem with accessing some services. I made videos for individual customers struggling with some features (before the UX was improved).

Ask them for an honest review but be careful who you ask and how you word your request.
I ended up with 1-star reviews similar to “No use for me” or 3-star reviews which compared VoxRec's $9 subscription to Netflix saying that you can watch Netflix 24/7. me: * rolling eyes *

I say something like this “Ratings and reviews of the app on the AppStore are very important for the app's visibility. I’d very much appreciate it if you could find 2 minutes to check out the app and write an honest review. If you really like it, please post it on the AppStore. If you do not think it deserves 5 stars, please send it to me instead.”

Ask for help (review, upvote, etc) from everyone who collaborated on the app, especially if they got paid - e.g. translators, developers, designers. They usually understand very well the value of a good reputation. I always settle the contract first and write them a good review (if they were good, otherwise I don’t bother). Then I follow up with the ask. This removes the quid-pro-quo transaction and they don’t feel forced into it by you withholding their money or references. This helps to maintain trust and respect and the relationship to work with them again.

Now, let’s get back to the story.

I needed a simple voice recorder app to capture some action points during my meetings or some of my thoughts while I am out walking. The main feature of the app needed to be that as soon as I'm done recording, it uploads the recording to the cloud folder, where my PA picks it up and converts it to actions.

When my PA left I realised I did not need a PA. Automatic transcription will do just as well.

Then I wanted features for long-form audio like audiobooks or YouTube talks (my favourite use case).

And after that more features were added.. it was awesome (for me, having a swiss-army knife of a recorder, audiobook player, that worked on my Apple watch, with auto-sync to google drive, etc.)

It was a fun project, a hobby. Until I realised that overall we spent around a thousand hours... quickly saw where this was going... Hello scope creep and overengineering!

With all this time and money already sunk. I did not want to abandon it. Instead, I decided that such a simple, generic (on the outside) product will be an ideal candidate to break my own limiting belief that “product has to be unique, special and awesome for it to be successful”, learn more about marketing and ASO. Also, it was about time that I took the advice I was so enthusiastically giving my clients.


Advice #1: Don't build it.


Well, the damage product was done. Not finished, but decent enough. So I decided that I'm going to pretend that it doesn't exist. And with that mindset, the first step is to pretend that it does - makes sense, right?

I outlined some of my hypotheses:
Would other people also get as much benefit as I do from the app?
Who are they?
What do they do?
Are they like me?
Who am I? 🤨

I have realised that I have no idea! Everybody talks about "Talk to your customers", but I did not have any, worse, I did not know who they were and how to find them. How do you find your customers for a "Voice Recorder" or "Dictaphone" - that can be literally anyone.


Advice #2: Position your product for a niche audience.


I'd love to say that I did this. I didn't.

I was lazy and impatient because I already had the product and I wanted to move fast. I went almost all generic: students recording lectures, productivity freaks, entrepreneurs, project managers, writers, journalists, ...

I should have pick one category, define a hypothesis of why and how this product provides value, speak to 10 people from that category and evaluate the feedback. Then repeat for each individual category.

I believe that this exercise, which probably could have been done over the course of 2 weeks, could have streamlined all further effort, and saved some precious time.


Advice #3: Hypothesis - Validate - Evaluate - Repeat


Personally, I know no writers, no students, just 1 productivity freak, maybe a few project managers via LinkedIn. I also have a fear of judgement from others, so I did not want to approach people on LinkedIn or some acquaintances with "My next big thing is a dictaphone!”. I did not want any biased feedback either.

What I did do: I went to Reddit and posted in several subreddits (iPhone, apple watch, productivity, writers, ...) a tailored post to match the audience. The post described an amazing app that will be released soon with all the great bells and whistles. (The posts are still out there, you can look them up.)

A few things that I did right were:

  1. I did not let anyone try the app - people tend to create positive expectations for their needs. I needed to know what the needs are.

  2. I have created scarcity and value by saying that only people who I select as testers will get a free lifetime license.

  3. I let people pitch me, why they should be selected as testers by writing up their workflows and use cases, everything from "I make apps, I'm a good tester" (bad) to "I dictate reports and spend few hours every day transcribing them" (great)

  4. I set up a landing page with a form that not only captured user details, devices and services they use, but also their browser languages, locations and sources from which posts/sites they came. This way I could see which groups responded most, what languages they speak and what devices/platforms they use.

This was a great success! About 200 people signed up over a few days. First time in my life, there are 200 people who are asking me to try my product, as opposed to me asking 200 people to try my product.

I have repeated this with a few Facebook groups. I paid about $50 to the admin of some groups for several posts pinned to the top for about a week. The engagement from them was much lower.

I felt a great sense of encouragement. Which also boosted my ego and clouded my judgement into one of the stupidest mistakes I've made...

I decided to take it further - Can I sell a product that does not exist? Will people pay first and try later? Isn’t this the true test of potential value, product-market-fit, etc.? Let's test it. (No, this wasn't the mistake.)

I knew that 200 people is not a statistically significant sample. Also, all these people were already biased on that they could get the product for free.

So let’s do a campaign that will promise this new product at a discount price if you buy before release.. sounds like something to test on Kickstarter. (Not a great idea, but not terrible either, it's all about experiments, right?)

I knew that apps rarely succeed in crowdfunding, but I could put a low goal, $5000 should do.

I knew that preparing a crowdfunding campaign will take weeks, building up an audience, relationships.. but I can growth hack it! (Here we go...)


Advice #4: Don't hire an agency. There's nothing they can do that you cannot do.


I hired an agency. It’s a sob story and you can skip this unless you’re planning to hire one too.

When you are looking for a jewellery maker to make you a custom-designed ring and you type into google "jeweller custom ring design" - you will not find the best goldsmith or jeweller. You will find the best marketer of the jewellers.

But when you are searching for a marketer, that should be the only place where they need to rock. It's a simple hypothesis and therefore I thought it was true. (it wasn't)

I also thought that an agency will have systems, methods and databases to reach thousands of backers, with options to precisely target those who would be the best potential users.

We agreed on great terms, that they will only take a commission on anything above the basic cost I pay them. It was a no brainer. I have ordered the basic package, simple page and marketing. I did the video myself - it was fun, simple and it told the story.

It went downhill from here. I had to redo the whole page they did because it did not communicate any of the values and benefits. In hindsight - they were partially right with their approach, but the execution was very poor. I expected to have some kind of conversation and input into the creative part, but they pretty much did everything on their own without trying or asking about the product. Red flag!

Despite them being very secretive, it’s easy to see who runs what adverts on Facebook (that's all they did). When I found the ads they are running, I knew I'm screwed.

I found the groups they promoted it in as well as all the adverts they run (they did not want to disclose this during the campaign, now I understand why) - They were TERRIBLE, without any basic variations to testing how different ads would perform or anything. They promoted them to non-English speaking countries for a product which only had value to English speaking users (at the time, it's multi-lingual now) - REALLY BAD SERVICE. They generated only a handful of pledges for the Kickstarter campaign, maybe as little as 2.

It was up to me. I did not want it to fail.

So I went into overdrive, learnt as much about the latest online marketing strategies (shout out to Julian @ Demand Curve) and got to work. On a £700 budget, I was able to generate about 30k impressions, in the UK and US, with a very targeted audience and some organic engagement.

The big lesson here is that I did not need to do a Kickstarter campaign to find my audience. Few hundreds of FB ads would have been enough to test a hypothesis about audiences, about features/benefits and values. And only with this information would I be equipped to do any crowdfunding.


Advice #5: Never hire (Funded Today) agency. There - I said it. Allocate $400 for FB ads, test each hypothesis as a separate ad and audience (feature/benefit/value). Then decide if the response is high enough for any crowdfunding. If yes, you will already have your marketing campaign ready and you just tweak it for your crowdfunding campaign. And if you really have to hire an agency - do some background checks on them!!


(If you plan to do a Kickstarter campaign (for any product): I wrote some simple yet effective redirection and tracking scripts for measuring traffic directed to Kickstarter. It allows for dynamic campaign tracking, logs it locally and in GA in such a way that you can correlate Kickstarter results to various campaigns and sources. It’s better than what the agency had at the time. I also kept a very detailed log and insights from the exercise. DM me if you want a copy, or I can write about it separately.)

Soo… I was really upset and disheartened. I led my own agency since 2009 and I would be ashamed to charge any money for the shitty service that I received. Yet these self-proclaimed “professionals” did exactly that. Luckily I only paid for the basic package. Their average fee was about $15k for a page with video and some other stuff.

In hindsight, a simple search on Reddit about their customer reviews would have dodged this bullet.

The campaign flopped.

It raised only £1,500. Whilst I spent 3 times that just on Funded Today agency alone. Very expensive lesson. But the show must go on.

I did not have any more ideas for once. It was time to release. If anything, the people who pledged are a good indicator that there is a market. I am sure they will sign up and purchase as soon as the app is out.

Not. A. Single. One.

One of the 200 Redditors emailed me asking about his life-time freebie. I had explained that the business model changed and I’d be happy to offer him a special plan, but there is no option for a lifetime free plan.

Somehow with fixes and testing and all, it took another 2 months before the app hit the App Store. It was the 4th of December, just in time before people unpack their new iPhones and immediately search for a better than the stock voice recorder - but this one had transcription. (haha)

The Release...

The launch was underwhelming. I asked anyone and everyone I could from the Kickstarter, Reddit and my own lists to download it and review it. It's important to generate traction for a new app within a week, while the ranking algorithms are deciding whether this is a good product or bad product and where to rank it.

This was another disappointment.

Most of the people I knew I have already approached and nagged to support the Kickstarter campaign. It was old news for them and some felt they already parted with their money because they did not know their pledge was not taken. Some people eventually downloaded it and wrote a review, except much later after the initial week. I felt frustrated.

Combo Advice Alert!


Advice #6: Make and cultivate friends and relationships, so when you one day ask for a favour, it's not the only communication you had with them for years. It's hard. “Happy Birthday!” does not count.

Advice #7: If your request is time-sensitive, explain why it’s important to do something now. People will be more understanding and not dismiss you with “I’ll do it over the weekend."

Advice #8: When approaching people cold, start with the favour, then follow up with the pleasantries - Search YouTube "Simon Sinek: Love Your Work"


Here is how it looked in terms of user acquisition numbers / daily downloads:
DNU1912-2001

A: My outreach to friends and family.
B: Promo within Facebook Groups + Search Ads

Throughout December, I have experimented with ads, to test how various keywords would perform, but the amount of data generated was very low. It was also impossible to spot any patterns with the existing analytics tools when you’re not looking at thousands, nor hundreds but only single and double-digit numbers of users. Not much of any significant results or insights.

[self-promo] This is why my new venture was born - BambooData.io. I partnered up with my data analyst and we made a bespoke analytics dashboard to investigate even the smallest patterns. More on that with a dedicated post coming out soon. Let me know if you have an app and you'd like to try it out!

Is this the end of the story? Well, it's the end of the beginning :)

After crunching some numbers, I found that it would take 80-120 years before the small organic growth reached a point where enough of the people would convert and generate profit to pay off the INITIAL development cost. Not to mention any cost generated after the release.

To make things worse, none of the active users used the transcription (the only thing that’s paid within the app). There were some people who accidentally (?) purchased the service, but NEVER used it! Why?! That was messing with my head.

I was not quitting, but I did not know what to do.

In the next chapter, you will read about the importance of product positioning, how to form and test your hypotheses, experiments, optimisation and obsession with analytics.
DNU1912-2005

The story continues...

Trending on Indie Hackers
Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 19 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments