What kind of buzz do I actually need ahead of launching my app?
Hi All,
We are getting ready to launch the product that we have been working on for an embarrassingly long time. The team is just my partner and I. He is the developer and I am the UX and everything else person. Given that it is a fintech app, we have had to jump through numerous legal and technical hoops, but we are close now and launching the end of this month which sounds really exciting.
However, when we talk about launching the product, my partner and I always end up arguing upon what other things we should be doing other than fixing all the bugs in our app. He doesn't want to think of marketing it in any way and wants to see how we can promote it using word of mouth from early users who have helped us build the app.
We have some users on our waitlist and I plan to send them an email and let them know. I am not sure about press or sites like product hunt because our app has a super niche user base (immigrants who save in savings group) so not everyone would want to use us. Anything else we could be doing or does my partners ' let us wait and watch' technique might work?
We also want to target more tolerant and friendly folks earlier on given that it is our first foray into the big bad world and the app is far from perfect.
Any thoughts and advice on this, or what you did ahead of launching your product would be great!
Thanks!
Shagun
How long have you been working on this? I would agree your partner. Just let your initial users try it out. Buzz doesn't usually work if product didn't find a fit yet.
Thanks @damon, we have been working on the app for about 2 years now. This includes all our research as well as a major technical pivot. I think we will wait and watch if we get any traction with early users and go from there.
Oh boy, personally I think marketing is always a good idea whether the product has bugs or not. In fact, I would market the shit out of it. If there are bugs users will point them out and you can fix them. Getting PAID to fix the bugs is better than NOT getting paid to fix the bugs.
My 2 cents, you need to ship the product and market the shit out of it. You will learn real quick if people are willing to pay for it or not. If the answer is they are NOT willing to pay then there is no reason to fix the bugs.
I tend to lean more toward shipping a half baked product and making changes on the fly, then shipping a fully baked product that could miss the target. The only way to get users is through marketing and sales. Go all-in on sales and the rest will solve itself. Sales cure all problems.
@squb thanks for your comment. My thinking is that marketing is a good idea as well however I have no clue how and where to market it since our app is super niche (immigrants saving in groups). And contrary to 'move fast and break things' the app is fully baked because we had to jump through a few hoops to just get a financial partner onboard who could power the app and they wanted everything ship-shape before they gave us a go-ahead. All the legal needed to be in place as well.
So we are in a bit of a bind and dependent on our early users to support us and give us feedback. I am thinking of looking at some immigrant bloggers and Instagram folks to see if they would want to check us out and promote us. Please let me know if you have other modes that have worked for you.
@shagunster I think that is a super super smart idea. In the startup phase, I would advise against paying money for marketing and instead do gorilla marketing (sweet equity marketing). Meaning it does not cost you anything to send an email to a blogger or influencer.
I would set a goal to email 100 people a day. I bet you have more success with non-influencers, people who would be encouraged to invite their friends. Influencers can be hard to reach and too often are only interested in money upfront. Instead of trying to guess what will work and what wont, just start emailing and messaging everyone you know and don't know. Then you will learn what works.
@squb I love the idea of emailing a certain number of folks every day, especially people who fit our user profile but are not necessarily influencers. I'll plan on using that as a strategy to see what comes up.
Just curious why this is the case: "super niche user base (immigrants who save in savings group) so not everyone would want to use us."? Is this an assumption? Or is this an initial goal or hypothesis on how to focus early user acquisition efforts? Or maybe the app/company mission is to provide more financial solutions to immigrant communities only? Just some questions that come to my mind on this.
This is merely an observation of working with mobile apps, but with mobile apps if you make it available to other countries besides the US you may get random people in the world that are curious about it, try to download it, and become frustrated leaving you bad reviews early (which is most harmful on Google's Play Store since public ratings are aggregated & shown to everyone). So I would look at other apps in the financial goal saving space and see how they write their app store listings and adjust for your business / mission. A few apps I know of from my own fintech research that is for financial goal saving (by individuals though not as a group) are Qapital, Digit, and Twine. There are several more & most banking apps now have some sort of automated saving feature. I tried to create an individual financial goal tracking app like 5 months ago but I gave it up to focus more on other stuff.
Some ideas I had for early growth were to find financial podcasts, blogs, subreddits that users may be hanging out at to share the app and learn from the people. Maybe you can find people that line up with your mission that can provide help for early testers.
I also made this launch checklist for app store optimization that covers iOS & Android apps. Hope this can help some: ASOchecklist.com.
@rene it is great to know that you were working on a similar product. Why did you stop? We did look at Qapital, Digit, and Twine. All great products! Thanks for bringing them up. The reason this audience is super niche and focused on immigrants is that group savings is a popular immigrant practice and it will be easier to get this user base on our platform first since they are familiar with it. Educating new users unaware of community-based savings might be tough to do in the beginning.
Also, thanks for your ideas around early growth. They look promising. I also checked out ASO checklist. It is a great resource and we will be referring to it when we launch. Thanks for building it and passing it along.
Thanks also for the bit about international users and bad reviews. We are definitely concerned about that but the app, for now, is the US only since our financial provider just works in the US.
Stopped working on the idea since the early energy for the project died down, seemed like a more long-term project & something we couldn't generate revenue early so I refocused on all my existing live projects & where I felt my skill sets / knowledge were stronger for now.
Thanks for sharing your comments & thoughts on my questions. All the best!
I think the goal should usually be to get it in people's hands as soon as possible so you can start getting feedback.
IMO, a launch is just a public marketing push that gets the app in front of as many people at one time (for the first time). This doesn't have to be at the same time the app goes live for use. Also, launches are most important when there is a viral or social component that can help the app grow. It's so damn hard to get attention to a product that putting it out for use generally isn't going to waste any opportunities.
@wavve 've been working on this for 2 years now and we've put various iterations of the product in front of early users and made changes accordingly. That said it has been a very select group of people, so I am not sure what the response will be when we release to a bigger audience. I guess we will find out. It's really helpful to hear that a so-called "launch" and putting the app in the app store can be two different things. I feel less pressure releasing the app now.
I think I agree with your partner. I think the effort to generate buzz and chasing a big-splash launch day are only worth it for general interest products (like the ones that do well on Product Hunt).
Thanks @levidxyz, we have a very niche product and probably need to see how early users do with our product and go from there. Your comment helps validate some of the things my co-founder has been talking about.
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@shiva_prabhakaran that's good to hear. We have a good set of early users and collecting their feedback and making changes accordingly will be the first thing we do, so thanks for validating that approach.