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Ask HN: How important is install #s vs. usage/retention in funding right now?

11 points by amtrekker ↗ HN
I know it's a buyer's market at the moment but I have a project I've been working on for awhile that is starting to show some pretty impressive stats on the usage/retention front, although our actual growth has been slow and steady. It's self-funded right now, so to stop treating it like a side project and take things to the next level I'll need to raise $150,000-$200,000.

My question is, is anyone finding that good usage/retention stats and a detailed plan to get to the next milestone is enough to raise that amount from angels right now or is it a fool's errand to start reaching out to people without crazy install numbers? Feeling a little stuck without being able to hire some help.

Average user/device/day is higher than Twitter right now and closing in on Instagram and SC, clocking in at about 15.2 min/day.

Retention is a little noisy with only a few thousand users but stays between 50-75% day 1 and 15-33% day 30. Fall off is nearly non-existant after day 30.

It's a B2C "social photography game" on iOS only right now with a small but friendly and totally engaged community with active users in over 50 countries.

9 comments

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brianwawok
So you have an app with users. How much money does it make? What would 200k let you do?
amtrekker
It makes $0. It's a social app just getting its legs so we're focused on growth right now. We do have some outside the box ideas for monetization down the road though.

We've reached a manpower ceiling with just two of us working on it daily so the 200k is about double what we need for a few hires that would allow us to build out the desktop experience, some general design/UI updates, get off of Parse and onto our own backend and complete two large features that will make the overall experience a more shareable and viral experience. It should also be enough to take us to our first 1mil users.

The other half is a buffer against the 1000s of things that can go wrong and to give us a little runway while we raise a real round if things go right.

brianwawok
Gotcha.

I don't know anything about the value of customers that dont pay yet. Obviously they have a value but no idea what that is. Twitter good good valuations without making money because of very fast growth. Slow growth and people not paying money? Not sure.

amtrekker
Right. And obviously the plan is that we would be ramping up growth with these iterations. Of course, that means someone with more money than us also has to believe those plans will work.
brudgers
Curious if there are 'inside the box' monetization ideas, because those might be more easily understood and evaluated by an investor. And if there are reasons that they would not work with the product, that would be a good starting point for explaining why the 'out of the box' ideas might.
amtrekker
That's an interesting take. Thank you. Yeah, there are definitely plenty of "inside the box" routes that often seem like a known quantity but that doesn't mean they aren't worth discussing and exploring.
brudgers
Being profitable, or having growing revenue, or both, is not something that investors tend to discount. Something like a high user growth ad supported website might even imply that the value users get from the site is so high that they put up with an advertising model...not that I'm suggesting the ad model, the ability to monetize something is a good way to filter for viability as a business.
arikr
> We've reached a manpower ceiling with just two of us working on it daily so the 200k is about double what we need for a few hires that would allow us to build out the desktop experience, some general design/UI updates, get off of Parse and onto our own backend and complete two large features that will make the overall experience a more shareable and viral experience. It should also be enough to take us to our first 1mil users.

An investor would certainly prefer investing if it was the case that you were growing so fast that you couldn't handle the growth. The skeptical investor in me would ask: why can't you two get it growing faster without other people? How much longer would it take you to build these two large features with just you two? Which other things are you spending time on right now that you could stop using time for?

I feel these are valid questions given you are building a social application that makes money from advertisements, where to make large amounts of revenue requires extreme scale -- therefore why would an investor want to invest unless they believed you were excellent at growth?

amtrekker
Good questions. We could certainly build the features ourselves, one of the time constraints we're trying to battle is a self-imposed deadline to relaunch before the end of the year. We saw a large bump at the end of last year, before we had started working on telling anyone we exist, from users looking for interesting ways to do 365 Projects for New Year's resolutions. This year, knowing that's coming and a proven use case, we'd like to amplify that effect as much as possible.

The other piece of the puzzle is that we know we're pretty good at what we do but I'm a former theme park designer and that doesn't necessarily translate to UI and graphics 1:1 so it would be nice to bring someone in to up our design game there, likely on a short-term contract.

And finally, we'd be learning a completely new skill to rebuild the backend and get us off Parse by the end of January when they fold. There are bandaids available for that situation but if we're going to go through the time and expense, we'd prefer to do it right.

So ultimately, my original question plays into your last question, "Why would an investor want to invest unless they believed you were at excellent growth?" I'm hoping the answer is something like, "because these other metrics and circumstances point to a high enough likelihood of excellent growth being right around the corner." But I don't know if that's how the funding market thinks right now even if I can convince someone to believe that to be the truth as much as I believe it to be, so I'm hoping to gain a little insight there.