Avocation - Habit Tracker

Avocation helps you master habit development

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September 2, 2020 Started working Full-Time on our App!

The last 6 months were pretty crazy for us. While the world around us was getting crazier day by day, we helped people around the world with our app Avocation to give them a bit of normality back.

To be honest when we started with this project we had no idea how much we can change with it. After some time we got feedback from people who thanked us because the app helped them with their depression or ADHD! Thousands of people work now every with Avocation on their habits for a better life!

I had this dream to found a company someday for a long time already but I never wanted to start a company just for the sake of being an entrepreneur.

But now the time is perfect so me and Daria decided to finally work on this dream! Together we founded our company mindvoll.com!

With Mindvoll we have a very clear goal: Help people to become the best version of themselves. Our products should support everyone and make the process easier and enjoyable. This is what we work for everyday now!

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July 13, 2020 Got featured by Apple in 112 countries

It's been a while since I shared a milestone on IH but it hast been quite a journey!

The last time I posted was for our first 13 paid users and 1500 downloads. Back than this was quite amazing but we put in a lot of work and achieved something incredible.

By now we have around 250.000 downloads worldwide and we are closing in on our first 1.000 active paid users!! 🀯

End of Feburary we got featured the first time by Apple in Canada and South Korea in a small sub-category. To be honest, we were super excited about this but quickly disappointed. The conversion was super low and we didn't even get a lot of downloads. Probably this was because we were hidden away in the sub-category and also we didn't have translations for Korean.

After that I focused a solid two months on marketing Avocation and building organic traffic. I summarised everything I've learned in this post I published a few weeks ago: https://medium.com/better-marketing/how-i-scaled-our-app-from-0-to-100000-downloads-7b88e5bce354?source=friends_link&sk=b177b66cf4922b1c5e20b4d595f7396e

Fast forward a couple months we managed to grow Avocation a lot! We currently get around 4000-5000 downloads a day just by being ranked very high in the Play Store and App Store for our most important keywords.

In addition to that Apple reached out to us and is helping us improving our app by providing valuable feedback based on their huge knowledge about what works in apps and what doesn't work.

Two weeks ago I reached out to Apple again and gave them a notice that we added six new translations to Avocation to make it accessible to even more users!

And last Friday we got the notice that we got featured in 112 countries around the world in the category "Apps We Love Right Now"!!

Of course our downloads skyrocketed again in the last couple days, which is simply incredible.

When we started working on Avocation a year ago, we would have never dreamed of what we are currently achieving. It literally changed our lives in just six months after release... πŸŽ‰

45 Comments

  1. 7

    Congratulations, this sounds amazing!

    I hope to have the same success as you when I'm done with developing my app. How did you go about researching the hashtags you were going to use on twitter? What did you do to learn about ASO, if you don't mind answering?

    1. 2

      I picked the Twitter hashtags to reach out to users based on what I personally would use and what was going on at that time. For example we launched the app two weeks before new years eve so I looked for hashtags that people use to share their new years resolutions.

      ASO is a pretty broad topic, I watched a lot of videos and read a lot about it. The most important thing for me was to add the most important keyword into the app title. Other than that you should put as many keywords as possible into your subtitle and description. There is a lot of try-and-error to do here, you kinda need to test some pages and see what works best. On Google Play you even have the possibility to A/B test store pages!

      Also make sure to create a good app icon and screenshots, since this is where you either gain or loose the download! The first impression is always the most important one.

      I will probably share more about what I've learned about ASO in some future blog posts where I will go into more detail :) Hope this helps you a bit to get started!

      1. 1

        Which videos did you watch?

        1. 2

          I don't remember in detail which ones I watched but basically everything you find on YouTube when you search for ASO :)

          1. 2

            Thanks for the answers in the different comments. Much appreciated!

  2. 3

    Congratulations! It sounds like a crazy experience. How have the downloads gone up until now?

    Just went in and downloaded the app, and it looks promising. Atomic Habits by James Clear is an amazing book and it sounds great that the app is inspired by the book. I'm looking forward to using the app a bit more πŸ˜„

    1. 2

      Thanks, it's indeed been quite crazy (it still is)! Until this featuring from Apple our userbase mostly consists of Android users (around 90%). We had a lot of organic growth through the Play Store since we managed to rank quite well very fast. So now we are at around 4000-5000 downloads per day.

      Avocation was built after we read Atomic Habits since we thought that this knowledge can be shared not only as a book but more effectively with a tool that helps you out daily.

      We have some big plans on how to take it to next level already and we are working hard to make that happen!

      1. 2

        Sounds amazing! I'm looking forward to seeing the tool evolve.

  3. 3

    Amazing, would love to see what this does to your growth chart!

    1. 2

      Will share our insights probably in a few weeks!

  4. 2

    Very cool story, especially the point you make about app localization in your article. As a creator of a new app in a similarly crowded market it's a great reminder to finally get down to translating it (I too have had the task opened since forever). Thanks for sharing!

    1. 1

      Yes, never underestimate the power of just making your app available for more people around the world!

      I wouldn't suggest though to start too early with too many translations. In the beginning the best you can do is to focus on making sure you reach some users, get some downloads and reviews. Then you can optimise your retention a bit (we are doing that far too late unfortunately. Thats one thing I would do different with my next project) and only then I would use the power of translations to reach a lot more people!

  5. 2

    Congrats! Those are really good numbers. I'm thinking of translating my app too, how did you handle ASO for languages you don't know?

    1. 1

      Thanks!

      Basically I created a small google doc template for my translators where I explain a bit what they should focus on. Some translators even have experience with ASO already, so that's usually quite easy then if you know/hire someone with experience πŸ™‚

  6. 2

    Hey David, congratulations! πŸ˜ƒ I am also an iOS app developer and I have 2 questions for you.

    1. What platform do you use for finding new keywords for your app?
    2. What is the conversion rate that you are seeing to paid subscriptions on Android?

    Thanks.

    1. 1

      Thanks!

      1.: I basically brainstormed them myself and also used a bit the Google Play auto-complete to find keywords people search for that can be related to our app. Will probably write a own article about that some time, there are a few tricks I used there!

      2.: The conversion rate in general is still pretty low (around 0.5 to 1.0% of all downloads) but iOS is of course a bit higher than Android. But never underestimate the sheer size of the Android market. You can reach a LOT more users, so in the end we still make more money from our Android app even though we have a higher conversion rate on iOS

  7. 2

    Thanks for sharing! That's very inspiring and also useful.

    How did you decide that the product is good enough and to focus on marketing?
    At what point would you add localization?

    1. 2

      It was a decision for me to see if Avocation has the potential to become something bigger or not. I wanted to know if I need to move on to something else after the growth didn't develop like we wished.

      Looking back I sometimes thought if it would have been better to still work on Avocation instead of focusing too much on marketing at this stage, but now I think it was the perfect call. I would have very likely dropped the project after 1-2 more months without growth so I think really testing how fast you can grow your product with full focus on marketing can really give you the insights if its worth more time or if you should move on to something else :)

      1. 1

        @Zwenza thanks for sharing that! How did you validate the idea initially or did you just get a MVP up and then focus on seeing if you could grow it.

        Right now I am doing something similar. I currently am testing my idea using Facebook ads and a simple landing page to capture email addresses even though the MVP isn't ready. So far I've manage to get about 60 opt ins. Would you consider this validation? πŸ€”

        1. 1

          To be honest, I didn't do a lot of validation before building the MVP. Initially we also had no big goals with our app, we mostly just built it for ourselves. So we built our MVP (which in the end was much more than a real MVP πŸ˜…) and then started focusing on growing it as much as possible. Once we saw a bit of traction we noticed there is much more potential so we put in much more work than we expected.

          To give you a proper answer for your case I would need to know a bit more, like what's your idea about and how many impressions you had to get those 60 opt-ins. But you see already that there is interest so that's already a good first sign I think πŸ™‚

          1. 1

            Yep! Absolutely. Love how you guys started off. One important thing I've read recently is about managing expectations. Your comment is a good reminder of that!

            My landing page is http://stoiclyy.com if you want to check it out.

            In terms of impressions were about 9,000-12,000 approx. Don't remember the exact number. But in that ballpark

  8. 2

    This is so great to see!! Huge congratulations David and thanks so much for taking the time to share your learnings as well.

    1. 1

      Thank you! I am happy to give back to IH πŸ™‚

  9. 2

    Great app experience. Love your UI. It is fast too.

  10. 2

    How did u get ur first download? Did the first 100 download can hard?

    1. 1

      Indeed the first 100 downloads are the hardest. I explained it in more detail in the blog post I mentioned in the milestone but basically I started reaching out to people directly on Twitter to get my first 100 downloads :)

      1. 1

        I see , cold DM?

        1. 1

          I always replied publicly to reach more people who might read the tweet and my answer

  11. 2

    Congratulations David! How did you manage to get Apple to reach out to you? 😱

    1. 1

      Thanks!

      I will copy my answer from a very similar question that I answered here:

      I can't really answer this since I really don't know much details on Apple's process. In general I think they really like products with a heavy focus on great UI/UX and where they see that the app is still active maintained.

      Also you need to let Apple know about your app which you can do with this form (only accessible if you have a dev account I think): https://developer.apple.com/contact/app-store/promote

      They look at every submission you send there (usually takes a few weeks) so you can be sure they at least check out your app which will increase your chances of catching attention for sure!

  12. 2

    Congrats on the success! Been seeing your app in the rank chart a lot and really kept me motivated to learn about marketing as well. The category of habit tracker is full of old and ugly apps that haven't been updated for years. Refreshing to see people actually care about a better experience.

    1. 1

      Thanks a lot! Wish you all the best learning about marketing!

  13. 2

    Congratulations on your app success , cool nifty tricks on ASO.

  14. 1

    Hi David and congratulations!
    so nice of you to share about what you learnt from the process, really appreciate your taking time!

    It's kind of a long shot but here goes: we're a couple of creators from London, and we've built an inclusive fitness app that provides personalised videos on demand, called Jumpy Cat.

    We recently released on iOS and got some great feedback from a few blind users, and got super inspired to work on the app to make it possible to use as audio-only workouts for these communities.

    I was wondering if you guys (you and your girlfriend) have any advice about how to reach out to them? Or maybe you know someone personally who could benefit from it? We'd really appreciate any help/pointers/ideas!

  15. 1

    Hi David,

    Thank you for doing this write up!

    Did you use any ASO software to measure your keyword changes over this time period? If not, how did you measure your changes?

    1. 1

      Yes! I tested various ASO tools but unfortunately most of them are pretty useless in their free versions. The tool I stayed with is appfollow.io which is still quite restrictive but gives you the most information for free.

      By now I could probably invest in some paid ASO service, but in the beginning these tools are quite expensive if you don't earn anything yet πŸ™‚

      1. 1

        Thanks for this feedback David!

  16. 1

    Congratulations. Just downloaded your app and it is awesome. Very nice animation with clean UI.
    Do you use React Native or Native code also want to implement this nice animation in my app so if you use react native can you share which library you use.

  17. 1

    Congratulations! Did you create separate apps for each language or one app with multi-lingual support?

    1. 1

      Thanks! No, we just have one app translated into multiple languages. That's how you usually do it as mobile app since you don't want to loose your ratings and also it would be a lot of overhead creating so many different "same" apps.

      You basically include all language files for every language and pick the one the user has configured as primary on his/her phone.

  18. 2

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago

    1. 1

      Good question, I can't really answer this since I really don't know much details on Apple's process. In general I think they really like products with a heavy focus on great UI/UX and where they see that the app is still active maintained.

      Also you need to let Apple know about your app which you can do with this form (only accessible if you have a dev account I think): https://developer.apple.com/contact/app-store/promote

      They look at every submission you send there (usually takes a few weeks) so you can be sure they at least check out your app which will increase your chances of catching attention for sure!

  19. 2

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago

    1. 2

      We currently offer a Premium Version for 2,50/month or 20,00/year

January 30, 2020 13 paid users & 1500 downloads!

Just one month ago we published our latest milestone for Avocation which was 100 downloads.

Little did we know that just one month later we would increase that number by 15 times and find our first paid users as well!

It's been an awesome month. We got a lot of feedback and published our first update after release (second coming this week).

We got a lot of feedback πŸ™‡β€β™‚οΈ
We got a lot of nice words πŸ’«
We got our first one star review πŸ˜…

Around 150-200 people use Avocation now every day (this is just users that come back, not including new ones), which I think is incredible.

If you would have told me that we would have 13 paid users by now I would have said you are crazy.

Currently we have 8 users on our monthly plan and 5 on our yearly plan. I am especially happy about the users on the yearly plan because it tells us that people are committed to use the app for a longer time, just some days after checking it out for the first time.

We are super excited about the future and we hope we can continue that growth in the upcoming months!

If you haven't checked Avocation out yet, make sure to do so! We help you in your habit development journey.

10 Comments

  1. 2

    Cute as hell

  2. 2

    Congrats. Design is awesome.

  3. 2

    Thanks for sharing this... another great example of a new app in a "crowded space" that has managed to stand out enough to get some paid users! Wow!

    1. 2

      Following up since trying it out... I feel like I learned a bit about design just by using your app just now. Amazing.

      You've provided a tutorial without having a tutorial. Your illustrations explain the concept of Frequent Habits > More Water > Grow your Plant.

      Plus the amount of polish everywhere is just beautiful.

  4. 2

    Very clean and unique Design. Good job, looks very professional ✨

  5. 2

    The design is so cool! Love the UI

  6. 1

    Congratulations!

    I did use Avocation for about a week (one month ago), but in the end I stopped using it. I liked the cute graphics and notifications telling me to complete my task, but in my case it was too limited ant the UX was not good enough (had a hard time figuring out how to do things, for example see tasks from yesterday or mark tasks from yesterday as done). I also really wanted to see my progress in the past week, see each day which of the tasks I completed and which not, but this feature was not there. I liked the plant growing idea, but didn't really understand how it grows, when, and it ended up being very repetitive each day (same notification, I have to mark it, can't really see any progress in the history). I did have only 2 habbits added, but after a week the notifications started to become more annoying than helpful.

    Maybe those habbit apps are not for me, I am not using any other app at the moment, but if I were to start using it again I would prefer for it to have more features instead of just a basic notification each day.

  7. 1

    Congratulations! I really dig the cute app and website design. Good luck with your idea!

  8. 1

    I like the design as well - it's clean and uncommon. Good job!

  9. 1

    This comment was deleted 5 years ago

January 22, 2020 Reddit loves our App!

On Sunday I was casually browsing through r/reactnative when I figured out that people actually share their apps there.

So I thought, why not try and share Avocation there as well. I might get some more downloads?

https://www.reddit.com/r/reactnative/comments/er1yt1/my_new_app_avocation_entirely_built_with_react/

Well we didn't expect this.

When I woke up the next morning and checked my App statistics I saw around 100 new installations over night! I checked Reddit and the post already had almost a hundred upvotes and a lot of people sharing nice feedback in there.

In the end this one little post gained around 200 upvotes and brought as approximately 350 downloads (distributed equally between iOS and Android) which is crazy for us, because previously we gained around 200 in total (over one month after release)!

I kinda expected users to deinstall the app right away after checking it out, since I thought a lot are only interested in the technical details, but two days later only a very tiny amount deinstalled the app yet (around 20 out of 350). So that gives us a lot of hope :)

We already prepared a list of other relevant subreddits where we try to pull of the same, let's see if it will work out πŸ™Œ

This has been an insane boost in motivation, so let's see what the future brings!

27 Comments

  1. 11

    I think the key here is you posted it in r/reactnative a ("community for learning and developing native mobile applications using React Native") and not in something like r/Habits ("a place to share news and discuss the formation, cessation, and alteration of habits in people").

    That turns your post from self promotion into a "look at this cool thing I built..." with a hidden "...but that you may also like".

    Good work

    1. 2

      I agree with this

    2. 1

      Great analysis! Makes sense looking back at it like this now, I guess that’s a good lesson learned.

  2. 5

    It's you guys who did that. I didn't know you were on indie hackers... I just installed interested in the technical details but found ot was actually a really good app. So I just said lemme try it out just to see if it's worth it. I really want to see how the tree grows!! I'm loving it so far. Thank you for a good product.

    1. 1

      Haha funny that you found us here as well! πŸ˜„
      Thanks for the awesome feedback, it’s nice to hear that you stayed because you like the product!
      Good luck with your habits! πŸ™Œ

  3. 2

    trying the app out.

  4. 2

    Beautiful app! Found you here. Got curious. Looked at the app store page. Immediately reached for my phone. Installed. More love. Decided to leave my first product review on the app store.

    Congrats on such great work!

    This is a react app? Wow, didn't know react native apps could run so seamlessly!

    1. 1

      Awesome! Thanks a lot! πŸ™‡β€β™‚οΈ

      Yes, you can do a lot of awesome stuff with React Native if you know how to do it. I already have some experience with it even thought I still learned a ton building the app.

  5. 2

    I tried to DL the app, but it isn't available from France?

    Seems like a cool product

    1. 1

      Yes unfortunately we currently do not distribute the app in France since there is a Trademark registered there on the name β€œAvocation”. Found out about it pretty late so we kept the name.

      If the app gets good traction we want to get some proper advice from a lawyer how to approach this. But for now we just do not distribute there to avoid any conflicts.

  6. 2

    Well done! Beautiful app and beautiful concept! I've been using it for a few days now and LOVE it.

  7. 2

    Congrats! Didn’t know you are here too! I saw that list and downloaded your app. It’s a beautiful app! I’ve been also using reddit as one of my main channels. It’s like posting on a shared twitter account with many existing followers. Keep up the momentum!

    1. 1

      Yep another fellow Indie Hacker πŸ™ƒ Thanks for the feedback, I am glad you like the app!

  8. 2

    That's awesome! Reddit can be a really tough crowd sometimes!

  9. 2

    Would be intersting if you could share again here after some days how many of them deinstalled the app. If you do, please do tag me

    1. 1

      Will share a follow up if I do not forget πŸ‘

  10. 2

    Congratulation, Did you follow some best practices when you post your app on Reddit?

    1. 1

      Not really, I honestly didn’t expect a lot from posting it there. @dogsbody already pointed out that is was most likely the type of subreddit I posted in and the way I formulated it that led to this success.

      1. 1

        Great, Thanks

  11. 1

    Yes, there is huge user activity on Reddit. Many can support you if you can show people something or tell your story. Some, on the contrary, will radiate only hate because you don't want to do anything. One day I decided to demonstrate my application, and all Reddit users laughed at me and lowered my account rating. I can't participate in discussions for you. I can only view them... How good that there are sites like https://www.viralboost.io/collections/reddit-accounts where you can purchase Reddit accounts with good karma! So Reddit is not always a kind and positive platform, my man...

  12. 1

    This inspired me to try this myself with my own app: https://www.reddit.com/r/vuejs/comments/esyev9/notably_a_webbased_markdown_editor_built_using/

    Normally, I get absolutely nothing from posts on Reddit (I get much better traffic from sources like Hackernews and here) but I've followed your model about posting to a tech subreddit and am genuinely intrigued to see if this works any better!

  13. 1

    That's awesome. I've never had any luck with reddit. No matter where I've posted to it invariably gets blocked/deleted by moderators for self promotion for some reason so usually end up wasting my time lol.

    1. 3

      Yeah, like I said above, Reddit has been a notoriously tough -- and negative -- crowd. One person noted that it does make a huge difference what sub you share it in. But even still.

      Ironically, I saw a person share a todo list app in one of the most popular subreddits on the site and somehow it was well-received by tons of people. Truly an anomaly. It didn't make sense to me how an app that literally didn't do anything worthy of note had gotten so much positive attention. I feel like they'd downvote the cure for cancer in that sub.

    2. 1

      Same here, I've seen big spikes with posts on other sites, the most popular being ycombinator, but my reddit posts have all fallen totally flat. Glad I'm not the only one!

    3. 1

      r/Entrepreneur is usually pretty lax about posting links...

      1. 1

        Ah cheers. Might give it a try at some point when I'm feeling brave again :)

  14. 2

    This comment was deleted 5 years ago

    1. 1

      Awesome! Let me know how you like the app! πŸ‘

  15. 1

    This comment was deleted 7 years ago

January 5, 2020 First paying user

Today it finally happened! We got our first paying user πŸ™Œ

It took us 2 and 1/2 weeks and around 150 installs for the first member who upgraded. During this time we spread the word about Avocation everyday whenever we had an opportunity to.

This is such a great boost for our motivation and helps to keep pushing for more πŸ’ͺ

Next week we will spend preparing our first bigger update after the launch, adding a lot of the initial feedback we got and getting our landing page finally out! πŸš€

If you haven’t checked it out yet, make sure to download Avocation for free on iOS and Android to keep track of your habits and to build a daily routine! 🌱

31 Comments

  1. 3

    Congratulations are in order! The first paying user is always quite something.

    I bet it feels really great ;) Keep going, it's a nice product indeed.

    1. 1

      Thank you! It feels very good receiving this kind of validation for your work πŸ™‡β€β™‚οΈ

  2. 2

    First paying user, excellent work and a great milestone!

    1. 1

      Thanks a lot!

  3. 2

    Really nice to hear. I hope, that you keep working on it ;-)

    1. 1

      Thank you! We will continue with our hard work! πŸ’ͺ

  4. 2

    First sale is a HUGE milestone for any new venture. Bask in it. You will remember today for a long time. Congrats!

    1. 1

      It's indeed something very huge for us! Looking forward to hit new milestones soon πŸ™Œ

  5. 2

    HEY! Congrats. That feels good. Keep pushing, never stop! Going to download now. I made some great resolutions and taking some real self help steps this year. Maybe this can add to that? Good luck!

    1. 1

      We will keep pushing and step our pace! πŸ’ͺ

      Don't hesitate on giving Avocation a try, I built this app for myself since I am super bad with keeping new years resolutions. Since I started using my own app I am improving constantly! The power of establishing habits is waaay to underrated!

      If you have any feedback make sure to tell me either here or via the feedback option in the app, it will anyway land directly in my mailbox πŸ™ƒ

  6. 2

    I know that every first things are difficult. After that it must be like a rocket! Congratulation!

    1. 1

      Thanks! We will do everything to keep growing πŸ’ͺ

  7. 2

    Congrats David ! The first paying customer is always the best! Keep up

    1. 1

      Thanks! Feels great that we found the first one πŸ˜„Now it's about keeping up the pace and find more πŸ™Œ

  8. 2

    Awesome stuff!! Congrats to you guys.

    1. 1

      Thank you very much πŸ™‡β€β™‚οΈ

    1. 1

      Wuhu! πŸŽ‰

  9. 2

    Congrats David!

    1. 1

      Thanks! πŸ™‡β€β™‚οΈ

  10. 2

    Big moment - congrats!

    1. 1

      Indeed! Thank you πŸ™

  11. 2

    Woohoo! Congrats

    1. 1

      Thanks a lot πŸ™Œ

  12. 2

    Congratulations to your team!. Wishing you best for your future endeavours!

    1. 1

      Thank you πŸ™‡β€β™‚οΈ

    1. 1

      Thank you!

  13. 1

    This comment was deleted 7 years ago

  14. 2

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago

    1. 1

      Thanks a lot! πŸ™‡β€β™‚οΈ Have fun checking out the app, and make sure to either write me here or with the feedback function in the app! Always excited about new feedback πŸ™Œ

December 30, 2019 100 active installations πŸŽ‰πŸ₯‘

Not even two weeks after our launch of Our app Avocation on Android and iOS reached the first 100 active installations yesterday! πŸ’ͺ

This was the first big milestone we had after launching our MVP. It was already a lot of hard work, because only the first 20 installations came from family and friends, so we acquired around 80 users who do not know us! Pretty cool for us is the fact that these users come from 36 different countries around the world! 🌍

We also already got one paying member and one In-App donation, but both are from people we know personally who want to support us. This is awesome but getting the first paying user we do not know will be a bigger milestone for us!

Our next milestone is a bigger update which addresses a lot of the feedback we got which I will work on next week and preparing our launch on ProductHunt to reach more users. Also we want to try and measure the effectiveness of paid marketing options. This is all still completely new to us so it’s a lot of trying things and see what works. I am writing down everything I am currently learning about marketing and I will publish this in a blog post when the time is right πŸ™Œ

We are both super excited about the new year and we are super determined to help as much people as possible out there 🌱

If you haven’t checked out habit development app β€œAvocation”, make sure to give it a try! It’s available on iOS and Android for free πŸ™Œ

11 Comments

  1. 2

    Strong work! The preview images on the App Store look great! Is it true there's no website yet? Your IH profile links back to indiehackers.com.

    Of the 20 friends/family you had install the app, can you convince any number of them to leave reviews? As a consumer, I find review-less apps to be lost causes/abandoned. Getting it that up front 'boost' may make the difference!

    1. 1

      Thank you πŸ™‡β€β™‚οΈ
      Oh the IH link was indeed broken, thanks for mentioning that! Currently we only have direct links to the stores, since we are still working on the actual landing page.

      Getting more reviews is definitely something really important, I will follow up on some people and ask them for reviews πŸ™Œ Also I will add a dialog in the app to give a rating after the user used the app for some days.

      Thanks for your feedback!

      1. 1

        You probably have an account (or three) that you can submit a rating from, don't you?

  2. 1

    Did they find your app organically or did you do any outreach outside of your circle for friends?

    1. 1

      I did a lot of outreach on Twitter. Basically I was looking for some keywords that fit Avocation and suggest people to give it a try. Thats a lot of manual work but worked pretty good for now.

      After this milestone we tried some small paid marketing with Apple Search Ads and Google Ads. With the Google Ads we could reach a lot of people in a very short time, but we only tried it with a very limited budget yet.

      We want to do more marketing by writing articles that are based on the articles in our app to promote it further, but we have a lot to do before tackling this πŸ˜…

      Currently we are getting around 5-10 installs a day if we don’t promote it anywhere actively, which is already quite nice for now

      1. 1

        Smart. I'm doing the same thing with Twitter.

  3. 2

    This comment was deleted 6 years ago

    1. 2

      Thanks!

      We are still working on the landing page! We have a very clear idea already but it requires more work since we will do a lot with animations πŸ’«

      1. 3

        I respect wanting to wow visitors with animations.

        Don't forget that a website with a few paragraphs of text and some screenshots is infinitely better than a 'Coming soon...' one-liner, and it takes copy/pasting info already on the App store.

        I bet you you can achieve that in 30min flat - I say check that off today and then refocus on animations.

        1. 3

          Very good point, I will make sure to tick this off asap. πŸ™Œ

          1. 2

            Once your website is done, be sure to get in a good marketing routine to continuously acquire new users. The day you finish those great animations, you need more people to see them!

            1. Experiment a new audience to capture
            2. Validate it
            3. Create the content on your website
            4. Promote it
            5. Measure it

            https://getchipbot.com/blog/marketing-routines-new-founders-startups

            Congrats with the launch and godspeed to prosperity in the new year!

December 19, 2019 Launched our MVP

After we launched Avocation for Android earlier this week, also Apple approved our App for the App Store and we started launching Avocation for Android and iOS! After half a year of hard work on the App we finally released this project we are so passionate about.

Check it out!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.avocation.avocation
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/avocation/id1479581895?ls=1

We are very excited about the future!

14 Comments

  1. 4

    Here is my review about the app: (Android)

    Good:
    a. Animation/Graphics overall. The design language is playful but not dumbing down. It successfully puts forth a subtle playful aesthetic that isn't looking childish or too bubblegum-ish.
    The addition of sapling growing, the intent of adding few design easter eggs such as not enough water to run the tap below (I'm guessing you intend on filling it as I fill the habits consistently)

    b. The categories. You've pretty much covered most of them. Which can be a bad thing, but the way you've categorized the habits that's good.

    Bad:
    a. The knowledge center is misleading. When you put up a thumbnail and the time below it, it seemed like an animated video version, rather than text. I understand you wanted to put time similar to Medium, etc. but I was disappointed to read text, while I was expecting a video similar to Kurzgesagt videos.
    b. The units. You've added multiple categories of habits but no differentiation in units (to track). For example, I want to have a habit of drinking water, I might drink 100ml, 500ml, etc. Same applies for lets say meditation. I want to track how many minutes I've spent on it. I hope you are getting my point.
    c. Your tracking isn't letting me select routines, reminders that are recurring. Eg., meditation, drinking, food, etc that recur more than once in a single day, I wasn't able to do that, unless I create individual habits for them.

    Good to have:
    a. If you've a widget that'd be great, to tap on habits on home screen itself
    b. When i remove my tracking, or habit, the graphic in the reports tab isn't updated back to the broken jar image. I know this might not be the target for the MVP, but just suggesting it as a good to have.

    Overall, nice work! Looking forward to see more.

    P.S. Any reason you chose Avacado? and is the title meant to be Avacado + nation?

    1. 1

      Hey akrsna, thank you for your great feedback!

      First let me answer your question about the name πŸ˜„
      This is how Wikipedia describes an avocation:
      "An avocation is an activity that someone engages in as a hobby outside their main occupation"

      We thought that combined with a plant (Avocado) is perfect fit for our goal: Personal Growth

      You have some really great ideas, we will address them in our next updates! The Learning section could be indeed misleading. I think for now we will add something like "3-4min read" to address this.

      We though about units as well but currently decided to go the most simple and easy to use way of just allowing you to add a daily goal. This could be anything. Actually I have a "Drink water" habit myself and what I use it like "1 click = 1 glass of water". We are already thinking about adding a "Timer" habit that let's you track time over the day on it. This would be especially useful when you do your habit multiple times a day for some minutes. So stay tuned for the next updates!

      For your last suggestion we intended the "Anytime" routine for such cases. But you have a good point here. We will consider allowing you to add the same habit to multiple routines! Definitely makes sense for me πŸ™‚

      At some point we will look into widgets for sure, but that might still take a while since our development team is just me πŸ™ƒ

      Thanks again for your great feedback, I really love getting responses like this!

      1. 2

        @zwenza I loved the branding and thought it was a very clever derivative of an avocation as you described above.

        I have only delved into a few screens and am already really impressed with the quality of the UI.

        I had no problems with the learning centre being text - I loathe unnecessary video. I wanted to swipe through the cards like a carousel.

        Do you plan to give people a way to log instances of bad habits? It seems you are heading this way from the phrasing in the Recognize 3rd card.

        1. 1

          Thanks! Making the articles swipe-able is on our list already, as well as giving users a proper way to deal with "bad habits". We want to properly think about a good way to tackle this, because getting rid of bad habits is a lot more complicated than just "stop doing something". But this is definitely planned for the future as well! 🌟

  2. 2

    Can you talk a bit about your front-end stack? The app is really impressive. Using ionic, react native or true native iOS/Android app?

    1. 1

      Sure! Avocation is a React Native App which uses a ton of native Libraries to make it feel like it does right now. I chose RN because I am doing Frontend Development for multiple years professionally already, mostly with React. So with all that experience I could really focus on the product instead of the stack.

      I spend a lot of time on β€œsmall” things that people may think are irrelevant, but every little thing sums up to something bigger and in the end our goal is to provide a better user experience than other apps. So looking back I think everything was totally worth it.

      If you have any more questions you can also send me a mail, I am happy to elaborate more πŸ˜…

  3. 2

    This is definitely in the Minimal Lovable Product zone with the quality of implementation and the degree of polish of the consistent UI.

    1. 1

      We are glad you like it πŸ™‡β€β™‚οΈ
      This was a lot of hard work behind the scenes polishing the UI like this (a lot of reworks still during we did the MVP), so we are happy that people recognise this πŸ’«

  4. 2

    Sincere congrats - I know how hard it is to get over that first milestone of store submission.

    I really like your app store photos - made me realise I need to drastically revise the Touchgram ones https://apps.apple.com/us/app/touchgram-for-imessage/id1447336478?ls=1 as I was literally posting screenshots.

    As most of the action is within the iMessage app, those iPhone shots are very boring and probably discourage a lot of people! The iMessage ones aren't much better but at least show the app in action https://apps.apple.com/us/app/touchgram-for-imessage/id1447336478#?platform=messages

    1. 1

      Thanks @AndyDent!
      Yes, I think the App Store screenshots are a very important tool to catch the attention of your potential users. It already helps putting them into a phone frame, adding some color and a small headline. You can actually do a lot with screenshots!

  5. 2

    Love the design!

    1. 1

      Thank you! πŸ™‡β€β™‚οΈ

  6. 2

    Hey really cool user interface, colours and graphics. I had a play around and intend to use it all week before I give any in-depth feedback.
    A couple of quick questions

    • When creating a habit what does the daily goal number represent? Number of times in a day? How does the notifications work for 10 sets of pushups during the day? Is it one notification?
    • I set a couple of habits for weekdays and today is Saturday, although they are not set for today I was hoping to be able to see them still. I actually thought it would be cool to over achieve or simple have the option to complete a habit on a day I haven’t set.

    Thank you for sharing and congratulations on getting your idea out into the wild!

    1. 1

      Thanks a lot @AdamWilliamson!
      Looking forward getting your in-depth feedback, and have fun using Avocation your first week! πŸ₯‘

      The daily goal represents how many times per day you want to click this habit to complete it. The "unit" you can choose yourself. Your habit could be "Do 10 pushups" or "Do pushups" and repeat them 10 times. Avocation will send you a notification for you habit (if you set up a reminder), if you didn't (fully) complete the habit until the time you set the reminder, to make sure you do not forget about it!

      Previewing upcoming habits if you do not have anything scheduled today is a very good idea! We will definitely look into this suggestion.

      Thanks a lot already, and I am looking forward getting more feedback from you! πŸ™‡β€β™‚οΈ

About

We built Avocation because we struggled, like a lot of people, with building new habits. Not satisfied by the current apps out there we decided to built something which is motivating and educating people in a fun way.