RunLoop

I build RunLoop, a running app for iPhone and Apple Watch, on my own in the evenings. Six months in I have 171 users and 3 paying. Those are small numbers, but they are finally readable numbers, and what they told me was not what I expected.

Posting the whole thing because funnel breakdowns from this community changed how I work.

The first mistake: I launched into a category I could not win

RunLoop started life as a run/walk interval timer under a different name. I built it because I wanted one, which is a fine reason to build something and a terrible reason to assume anyone will find it.

Interval timers are a solved category. I ranked somewhere between #17 and #21 for my own category terms. The apps above me have 18,000 to 170,000 ratings. Nobody scrolls to #19. I was not competing, I was invisible, and no amount of polish was going to fix that.

The niche was already inside the app

There was a small feature buried in there: you pick a distance, and it generates a running loop that starts and ends at your own front door. I had built it for myself, because for two years I ran the same loop and on the days I wanted something different I would just stay home. Deciding where to run was one decision too many before work.

Then I actually looked at the competition for that feature instead of the timer. Every app that generates running loops from your location is tiny. The leader in that search had 19 ratings. Nineteen.

So I rebranded around the route generator, rebuilt the store listing around it, and pushed the interval timer down to a supporting feature. Same app, same code, different front door. That single decision taught me more about picking a niche than anything I have read on the subject: you do not have to find a new market, you have to find the part of your product that is standing in an empty room.

The numbers

Six months, 171 users, 3 paying. Free to start, no account required. Pro is a subscription with a lifetime option.

The funnel, distinct users, from event data:

- 73 saw the welcome screen
- 58 tapped start (79 percent)
- 15 ever reached the paywall (21 percent)
- 4 started a purchase

The lesson I did not want

I spent months on monetization. Paywall copy, pricing, trial length, adding a lifetime tier, the order of the bullet points. Genuine months of evenings.

The funnel says the paywall converts fine and almost nobody ever sees it. 15 people out of 73 reached it. The other 58 left before the app ever got to show what it does, which is generating your first route and handing you somewhere to run.

Monetization was the work I could control and measure, so it felt productive. Activation was the actual leak the entire time. I was optimizing the last 20 percent of a funnel that 80 percent of people never entered.

What I changed

Everything I am building now points at one thing: getting a generated route in front of a new user inside their first session, before any signup, before any explanation, before anything I think is important. If someone opens the app and does not end up with a route they could actually run, nothing downstream matters.

The thing I am working on right now is the same idea pointed at retention: when you finish a run, it should land in the training log you already keep, automatically, with the route and the intervals intact. Asking people to abandon their existing history to use my app is a reason not to use my app. I want to decide where you run and guide the run. I have no interest in owning where it gets recorded.

The question

For those of you further along: what actually moved first session activation for you? Forced interactive onboarding that makes people do the core action, or stripping steps until the core action is simply the first screen?

I have read convincing arguments for both, and my own sample size is small enough to be comedy. Real experiences beat my A/B test of 30 people.

App for context, if it helps to see what I am describing: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6758607743