Onboarding audit | Emotional health tracker
Hi all,
We launched our app, Ladder, 1.5 months ago and have gotten over 30k downloads. We're a mental wellness tracker powered by data.
Our mission is to foster more self-efficacy and diversity in mental health. Getting people to change their behavior in anything is challenge. It's especially challenging when it comes our mental well-being.
User acquisition has been great for us as we were fortunate to be featured by Apple under Apps We Love Right Now. We're now set to be featured as App of the Day next.
However, we really want to improve activation and retention. Would love for other hackers and builders to give feedback on our onboarding process. We knew it was lacking out the gate..if you aren't embarrassed by the first launch you launched too late!
It's one of the areas where a major redesign and update is coming. I'd appreciate any feedback :)
So I've been tracking this kind of stuff an excel spreadsheet for 7 years now. When you say you use "machine learning to quantify how factors impact your mood" Does that mean I can put in everything I do and see a score for activities and mood changes? For example if I run, it will improve my mood by 5pts?
I don't have an iPhone so I can't test your app but... When it comes to onboarding everyone talks about Time to Value (The time to your customer achieve x desired value) so if it's simply tracking what they're doing that seems relatively simple onboarding. If they want to know what to do to change that could take months and the on-boarding process would look different. At my SaaS company, onboarding takes about 3-6 months on average depending on the customer desired value. Setting expectations of our customers is really important since it changes their impression. If we told customers it typically takes a year and they got it done in 6 months they'd be happy. Hope this helps and good luck!
Hi Bobby,
That's exactly right. Basically what we've done is taken the core of Cognitive Behavior Therapy and habit formation to create a feedback loop within an app. Every day, you track your habits as you normally would and get daily reflections to notate your mood/emotions.
What Ladder then does is connect the dots for you. We show you the impact of your habits (complete vs incomplete) on your mood. The "trick" is that using the app itself is actually a form of therapy. So being more mindful of what you do and how you feel everyday can already be helpful.
Regarding the onboarding, the tasks themselves are simple (which is our goal!) but the presentation of the value is a bit more difficult. To fully realize the value of the app, you need to use it for at least 3 days to get insights from your data. So our challenge is establishing that feedback loop as quick as possible. You get exponential returns really. The more data you track, the better your insights get. But getting that data input is difficult as it usually is with health trackers.
We're trying to understand what incentives or little "wins" we can create to nudge users early on.