What I learned from my beta with over 500 people from one Reddit post

I want to start off by saying posting on Reddit is all luck. If you happen to post at the right time and the right person sees it at the beginning it can do really well. I had a post where this happened:

https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/jxc6z2/i_made_an_app_to_improve_your_mental_health/

I’ll mostly be talking about the feedback from people and what I noticed during the beta and the changes I made to improve the experience.

Feedback from people

The feedback I got was really positive. People liked the idea and a lot of people felt that not enough developers create mental health focused applications. A lot of this feedback was through TestFlight and it was cool to see people explain what they talked about in the app, one person even had an entire conversation about what they liked about the app. In terms of feature requests it was mostly bug fixes and also a few user experience improvements (like adding pop ups to make sure you want to report someone before actually reporting them). These were easy to implement and I added in most of them for the launch.

One thing some people brought up during the beta is that people with worse mental health are also more vulnerable. It’s hard to know what kind of conversation would actually improve their mental health. The idea for the app isn’t necessarily for people with really bad mental health, more for people with average mental health having a bad day. Usually for more severe cases it’s important to see a professional but this was still a fair call out. I made a major change to the app so that app conversations are reset daily. This means that every day you are talking to a different person. The variety in conversation will hopefully help reduce those kind of problems.

What I noticed during the beta

This is where most of my time was spent prior to launch. I noticed a lot of things that need to be improved.

One thing was that I had opened up my beta to every region/country but that caused conversations to be in various languages. I found this experience to be confusing since there was no way to filter by language and the conversations in languages I didn’t understand were basically pointless to me. This time I added in a language filter and also am only launching in the us and Canada so the language will be more consistent.

I also noticed a few posts that were inappropriate during the beta. I started using an auto mod api when you create a conversation that makes sure your title isn’t toxic before creating it.

On the topic of creating conversations, it was easy to see that most people were creating conversations and not responding to them. I did a few things to try to improve this. One, I moved the page where you can find conversations other people created to the middle tab instead of the right tab. That way it’s more visible. I also notify more people every time a conversation is created, it used to be that just one person got notified.

The last thing I noticed was the lack of quality in conversation titles. A lot of them just said hi. I tried to improve this by changing the prompt for the creating page to say “what do you want to talk about” instead of “something on your mind”. I also added in tags with categories to inspire people about different topics to talk about.

Question for the community

Can anyone point me in the right direction for how to spread the word about the app? I don’t think Reddit is the best way because of what I mentioned, a lot of it is luck. I’m not against paid ads, but if I was to use paid ads what kind of places would be smart to post on? Thanks for reading :)