MVP shipped. 350 DAU. 6500 MAU. Passionate user base. Is this a success?
I'm exposing a ton of guts about the app I just shipped. I wanted to be blunt and get some feedback while also exposing you to how a real world MVP just shipped.
I'm posting this on my throwaway as I don't want to disclose all of these numbers yet.
The app took me 60 days to build. LONG hours... like 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.
I shipped it 30 days ago.
It's freemium. No revenue yet. Our cloud sync app should ship next week and I'm going to tell users it paid then ship payments a week after that.
Pricing will be like $5 a month and then a few tiers at +$5 after that.
DAU: 350
7day AU: 1700
21day AU: 3500
28day: AU 6500
Our user base says 40% would be VERY disappointed but only about 40 people have responded to the survey.
My thinking is that I could use this to extrapolate how much money it could convert in terms of users.
If 40% of the people value the product, and half of them convert., and we have 500 in our core user base. I guess we could assume initial revenues of like 0.2 * 500 * $5 per month or $500 per month.
Which is horrible. But I think I can easily 10x that... I'm just not sure in how long.
Anyway. Would love your thoughts on this.
Some questions that might help you answer whether your MVP is a success or not, from my experiences as a product manager:
What was the MVP built to prove?
What kind of usage proves to you that the product is viable and offers value to the users?
For example, if your product is a photo app (such as Instagram), users have to post photos for the product to be viable. It doesn't matter if millions of people log in every day. Without a significant number of users behaving in a specific way (posting photos), those users will stop coming; the product isn't viable and the MVP isn't successful.
The MVP should show you that if you strip everything away from your grand idea, there is a specific usage of your product that provides value to the user.
Hope that's helpful, happy to chat more.
Well I think that while we have a 'small' user base (compared to other products) we've only had one exposure to about 8k pageviews and we kept about 6k of those user that use it monthly.
The biggest challenge I have now is that growth is flat and I can't just rely on Hacker News for growth.
My next strategies are to focus on using our user base to grow by building in social features to encourage them to invite others to share documents.
On what exactly? Without your niche, it will be just shooting blindfolded.
Will you keep the free tier for the users?
You assume that 20% of your users will convert - that's crazy high for the freemium product. But again, maybe it's not - depending on your niche and value given to users.
As long as those are logged in users, then certainly very much yes.
... actually I think you're right. I'm aware that only about 2-5% of total user base converts but I suspect that the initial user base is more passionate but it also might be dampened by the fact that the product is new.
I still think I want to enable people purchasing our product as I can measure this to determine whether we have a viable business just don't expect it will make much money.
Sure, just adjust your expectations to more realistic ones. It is much nicer to be wrong with lowering the number of purchases, not the other way around.