1
8 Comments

Need help reviewing my focus app 🙏

Hi fellow,

My first time posting here! I built an app to help stay focused, be productive and connect with other like-minded people.

I submitted the app to Hacker News got 53 upvotes and 43 comments. And it stayed on the front page for about a day. It brings me about 100 new signups (w/ real emails).

Space4 on hacker news

However, people tried it for a while then never came back again! Feedback from HN is mostly on how the landing page should be improved, but no one talked about the app itself.

So I don't know what went wrong, and I feel pretty lost. Since there are some engagements on HN and new signups, the landing page might be doing fine. The app itself might be the problem.

Here are my guesses:

  • The app is doing a bad job of helping people achieve what they want
  • It is too complicated to use
  • It was very inconvenient to open the browser every time
  • There is no "aha moment"
  • Worst, I've built something useless that no one wants it. (Probably the answer 😭 )

My main questions are:

  • Should I give up the app and move on?
  • Am I missing anything crucial?
  • How can I improve?

I need your perspective to overcome my blind spots. If you have any fresh ideas, please comment them down below. 👇

HN post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30625797
Landing page - https://space4.cc/

Thanks for your big help!

  1. 1

    As product men, we all know the user experience problems, features of the product. sometimes we split the feathers into pieces.

    At the same time, only the product man can draw the whole picture of the product. so we want to build a car, but ship to the customer a skateboard first.

    The problem is the destination is so far, how we push the product forward. salespeople give me a deep impact, in fact, some sales proud to sell the hard deals thing. every prototype is hard to deal with, try to add some simple features and send an email to sell to your user directly.

    feedback is important, but only sales could get real feedback.

  2. 1

    Hi Patz,

    Here are my thoughts after taking a good look at the landing page and using the app:

    The lading page:

    • too much info in one place.
    • it doesn’t tell me clearly what I get if I sign up
    • It doesn’t tell me how it work

    The app:

    • is to simple
    • is very unclear where should I start at
    • all groups are the same, or at least this is what I understand.
    • after stopping the “focus” time it doesn’t tell me anything about it.

    How I see everything:

    The landing page:

    • clear information about the app and how it’s working. videos and screenshot will help a lot.
    • what what I get using the app

    The app:

    • a clear user flow with intuitive UX
    • information and stats about every sessions, the second you finished it.
    • graphs about my journey using the app. (goals?)

    Vlad

    1. 1

      Hi Vlad,

      Thank you for helping me out! You found things I did not notice before. I will try my best to redesign the landing page and UX of the app.

      By the way, what did you mean by "graphs about my journey"? Is it things like goal settings or badges (gamification?)

      1. 1

        By graph I meant statistic to see how my focus is improving depending on my activities.
        By Goal setting for focus: Let's say my goal for today is to stay focused 50 minutes, but I only can 35. There should be a card telling me how to improve this.

        1. 1

          These ideas are genius! I will take them from you, and implement them in the next version. Thanks!

  3. 1

    Here's some notes:

    • Landing page certainly needs some editing. There's too much there and I wasn't interested in reading any of it. Said another way, it's not interesting. Cut cut cut.
    • I don't like the magic link email pattern, but that's probably just me.
    • Hit an error after setting a username + bio. Message said "Not signed in"
    • Second time I tried the above step I got through.
    • I was presented with a bunch of rooms. No idea what these are for.
    • I picked a room and went in. I see other people are in the room, but all I can do is look at their bios. I'm a bit confused.
    • There's a coffee cup and a sound wave button at the bottom of the room. I press these, but can't figure out what they do.

    I think you've built a bit too much without trying things out on real users. When I was a game developer, we used to get random people into the office to play our games. We'd give the people a tablet with the game at the home screen. Then we'd watch them play it without teaching them how to play it. We did this to see if people understood the how to play the game "in the wild."

    I think you should do some experiments like that.

    1. 1

      Hi Angus, thank you for spending time checking out the app. Your ideas are inspiring, and they point out things I did not see in my blind spots. I will trim things down until it is intuitive to use!

      Why do you dislike the passwordless sign-in? Is it inconvenient to check the email? Or do you concert about email privacy? Should I use Twitter sign-in only instead of email?

      By the way, I live in Foshan city, which is very close to Hong Kong (I used to go there very often). I just followed you on Twitter. Maybe we can meet up in the future after the pandemic. 😁

      1. 1

        Yeah I just personally don't like it. It's annoying to go to my email, wait for the mail, click the link. I'd rather just click a single sign on button.

        Sure! I'd be very happy to meet up once travel between HK and China opens! Followed you too.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 47 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 27 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments