Should I stop my startup or not?

Salut Nima,

The issue is that free users is not an indication of willingness to pay.

The only reliable measure of whether or not your idea is viable is whether other businesses are successfully selling your product.

If yes - you need to work on your marketing, branding and distribution (all of which people here including myself can help you with).

If not - you're making life very hard for yourself because you will be trying to create a brand new category. That's very hard for funded startups to do let alone indiehackers.

Best
Chris

Hey Nima, I agree with the comments here; 1K installs is great and is a sign of demand in the consumer side. However, it may be meaningful to focus on your ad copy and segment that you chose to advertise for. In some cases, the kind of clicks on our ads might not come from interested users. They just spend your ads budget without leaving any revenue.
That being said, it may be good to understand

1. how you define conversion
2. what you are giving as "free"
3. what kind of content you are presenting inside the app that would keep them engaged inside the app
4. what other revenue models you can investigate other than a session with an expert

I am consulting a wellness app that also offers sessions with experts (in another health-related area) and they too have some major issues in converting users. We have started doing customer discovery interviews with their existing users so I agree with the suggestion from @Synergicfoods.

You can also read about the Jobs to Be Done Theory which can help you uncover the desired outcomes of your customers.

If you'd like to reach me to speak, email me at [email protected]
I'm offering free mentorship lessons here: https://app.growthmentor.com/mentors/ilke-karabogali

What worked for me was changing the business model. I was also working on a mental health community app. I also had very low retention like you but then i switched to other business model. I already had built social networking app so i reused my code and made a new community app but it was for recording yours thoughts and sharing it to the community. Just like twitter. And it was not for discussing mental health.
After i switched to the new business model, my retention rate significantly improved.

I think 1k installs is an excellent number! It might be difficult considering the topic, but maybe you can manage to convince someone for some feedback through surveys or interviews. I'm about as well to launch soon as I would feel exactly as you are, but I think you're in a better position than you think you are. Don't give up.

Keep going! The 1K installs validates that people are interested. It'll probably take a few iterations of figuring out what you need to do to get people to stay, nothing I do ever works on the first try :)

I would do the following:

1. write down semi-structured qualitative interview questions to interview people that subscribed but are not using the service or people that recently signed up. focus of the interview being: what do they think the service you're building can help them achieve and deepdown why specifically they signed up, what if anything else they have tried, pros and cons
2. contact the people mentioned above
3. perform the interview and record it and jot down main isnights during interview
4. rewatch all videos and get all insights out of it.
5. see what are the most important things you can make to make sure this is what they want
6. write an email about what you've changed and send it to previous users to see whether now they stick to it.
7. design within the existing product a way for users to get to chat to you in one click

Instead of attempting to conduct interviews, I'd create a survey to send out to subscribers. In the survey, you can ask what they liked and didn't like.

I wouldn't shutter anything until you try to make changes first! You spent 14 months on your app, so don't give up!