Getting Users Is Hard

Cool initiative. Is it maybe that given the pandemic, many people are more wary of meeting in the first place? Your struggle might partially be explained by that?

Probably not super easy getting folks in your niche in a global pandemic, yeah?

It’s tricky I imagine as you have to sell people on the idea then they have to sell their friends on using it. WhatsApp is “good enough” for this task and there are simple workarounds such as say “we meet at 7 at xyz” and whoever can’t make it just doesn’t they come next time or join later.

I suggest finding the type of people or situation where this sort of thing is a real headache for people by asking. The cool thing is you can just ask random people at bars, coffee houses and parties and get some feedback. Read “the mom test” to get an idea of how to approach this. Or in a nutshell don’t tell them about your app at all, find out about their habits and issues around arranging social events.

There is a good chance that this might lead to a pivot or just work on something entirely different. So be prepared to jettison a sunk cost even though it feels painful!

You are right, getting users is hard. With a product like this, I think the best way is to just ask people face to face if they would use it. And if they say “no”, find out why not. You may not have the right product. Also, Can you use it yourself, and invite friends to stuff using your app? If they get a few invites from you and all the events are successful, then maybe your friends will want to initiate their own events. Even if you had money, this “hit the pavement” approach is pretty crucial to making sure you are selling the right product.

Everyone has some kind of social event app as one of their first ideas. It never works.

Who are your competitors?

Does everyone that is going to benefit from the system (receive notices, click attend, etc) have to download an app? That will be an powerful hindrance. People inherently don't want to download more apps, there is a lot of friction in that process. Remove as much friction as you can there.

Narrow your action / marketing focus to get started. Perhaps see if you can promote your app at destinations (to the co-benefit of the destination / place if at all possible; tell the owner you'll market their business on your app in exchange), rather than focusing on trying to get users outside of active context. Go to where the activity is occurring, where people are doing the thing you want them to use your app for (eg at a bar). If you're willing to grind, that approach is probably your best bet (short of a huge, expensive ad blitz). Where people are doing the thing in question, they will be most receptive; outside of that, their receptivity plunges toward zero (unless referred by a friend in the moment of / before / during an activity).

You better be a very social type, because you need to be out in the thick of it. You need to be of the people, in it, pushing this thing to every human that will listen at every location that will tolerate you. You need to be the social manifestation of the result you want out of the app (since it's a very social app by its nature), network user after user after user. This is an example of doing something that doesn't scale, you're going to go out and sell every initial new user on the app, where the app is going to live most of its life (at destinations, events). After a while, the snowball momentum will take over, if you're lucky, and you won't have to grind for every new user.

Messaging people is a dead-end in most cases. It's like a spam email or cold call in how it lands in the brains of the people receiving it. Go to where the action is, sell (promote) your thing in its proper environment.

If you solve (most apps don't do a good enough job) a real (most problems are imaginery or tiny) problem, getting users is not hard.

my friend got into biking recently (bicycle) and wanted me to create an app so they can organize bike rides (cause they go in groups), extra functionalities would be share gps routes and status (heartbeat, speed...).

I answered him to take a look at the app store, and if there's less then thousand apps just like that, I worked create one for him.

not to be a dick or anything, but these kind of things I don't believe would fly. you have your WhatsApp groups, your Facebook groups, your telegram groups... how the hell am I supposed to compete with that?

why people would left a app they already use to for a while to use mine?

I think the same questions apply to your project.

Again, not to be a dick, just my opinion

I built a similar app for a client. It's called "Festi." It's on IOS and Android with web app as well... Getting traction has definitely been difficult, but is slowly growing.

I've thought and read a bit about getting initial users but never done it successfully so I can't offer much from experience. That said, reading your experience with your list of 82 prospects, I don't see where you demonstrated value to them. Demoing value is different from merely "explaining" value.

One of the classic missteps is expecting people to inherently "see the value" of what you're building. Nobody just sees the value like you do. You have to demonstrate it. Show them how their life will be meaningfully improved with your app.

Couple that with event organization being a two-sided problem. Any successful product needs to offer value for both organizers and attendees. You've mentioned time-saving for the organizer - great - but what does an attendee get out of it? For both parties, how are they coordinating currently? Is your app clearly 10x better for both sides?

Assuming you've got all the above checked off, then I would start with a simple strategy: Organize some events with your app. Be your first user, and make the friends you invite your second, third, and fourth users. Did your app make organizing easier? Or did nobody actually RSVP when you know they would face-to-face?

Remember, introducing an app into any experience inherently adds friction. So your default starting point is that you're actually making it harder for organizers to get RSVPs on the books. Your app needs to offer enough value to make up for that friction.

I would expect there'll be a grind until you hit a point where people are more likely to attend events you organize through the app, and those attendees decide to use your app for their next event. At that point you're viral. But until that point, you've got an app that makes things worse for the user compared to their current alternative.

My friend is currently developing a todo app and interestingly enough is getting some users even though things like Trello exist and it boils down to two things:

-Dogfooding. He even organised his wedding using the damn thing.

-Talking face to face with people who are as dissatisfied with incumbent products as he was.

You've got to have a problem that really bothers someone in order to get them to use your solution.

You're targeting an extremely saturated market. Unfortunately the need for your app is already solved by something like Facebook or even just a group text e.g. "2 dollar margaritas at 123bar, meeting there at 8, come on out". Ultimately the level of coordination and opt-in required by the friend group isn't really worthwhile for the mass market, you'll need to be a little more innovative to find some success, but the fact that you're disciplined enough to actually bring your ideas to fruition means its just a matter of iterating on your ideas till you build something more compelling.

How is this better than any social network/messaging app? Why shouls I install it?

Also, the timing for social apps isnt great given the ongoing pandemic. You might simply be suffering from bad timing

You are in a crowded space.

Check out this book called "Lean Customer Development" by Cindy Alveraz (so¿). Also, there's a talk called AARRR (metrics for pirates) that could be helpful.

Customer development is WAY MORE important than product development (as you've just discovered)

I don't want to just spread negativity, but I see this so often on HN I feel like it's mean not to comment.

I would strongly recommend anyone considering developing an app to have a list of potential customers before they write a single line of code. This is not a revolutionary idea, but I still see it regularly ignored.

When you launch, you want to be able to send the announcement out to your 1,000/5,000/25,000 email subscribers/insta followers/podcast listeners. Simply writing an app and submitting it to the app store is going to be painful.

> This page is blank lolz

A friend build something that was pretty much this in 2016/7 (https://appadvice.com/app/down-for-whatever/1060924679) and failed harder and learned the lessons you are learning more slowly.

There are excellent points in all of these responses, and customer development is critical before you dive into product. I would suggest you go through the process of:

• truly identifying your goals (what do you want to get out of this? is this a 10 year business or just a side project)

• target spaces where users already exist (FB groups, LinkedIn groups, Shopify marketplace, etc) where you can access them

• Based on your goals, decide on whether you want a small % of a large user base or a larger % of a very niche user base. As you are discovering, only a small % of folks are going to be interested if there's not a massive frustration or fear you are tapping in to.

Invite friends to something using the app. If they don’t have the app, send an email with the event invite and saying how they can install. Ideally you would have web functionality as well, in case installing won’t happen.

As many people have said this is a very crowded space littered with dead apps. One of the biggest issues is that you ultimately will want some kind of “comments” section because communication is central to planning, which at that point you end up reinventing texting but as a worse interface as comments, and then people will just resort to texting. It’s not clear why this is so much better than a) texting, and b) posting this to a social network in the first place. Covid certainly makes the timing poor, and even if you don’t have restrictions now, that’s probably not a good thing and not something to encourage.

Getting people to download a new app or a new anything at this point needs to be really a fundamentally new product experience that is 10-100x better than anything else you’re using. It’s easy to think about... if someone told you to download an app to notify when you’re going to the bar, and everyone has to download it, would you really change the social inertia from your existing communication solutions just to post a bar notification? That’s a pretty tough proposition.

As mentioned a group text goes a long way to resolving your problem. I'm going to a bbq this arvo organised on whatsapp. But also your solution sounds like it's trying to disrupt/recreate Apple/Google/MS calendar, not Facebook events. I'd probably be looking into CalDAV or similar to ensure interopability with whatever system your mates/users are already working with in their day-to-day .. And then sprinkling some sugar to kickstart a slow-shuffle to your side of the dance floor. Good luck!

This micro version of clique-only Facebook events is not bad. If someone builds a usable version of this that will eat into a significant portion of WhatsApp groups.

I believe if your app can just record my video, then transcribe my audio to figure out details of my plan (location, time, etc.) and then post an Instagram story with my video plus metadata in an elegant way with a poll widget, that is something I would use today.

Maybe later in product lifecycle you can add more useful features within your app. But I'd definitely start out by latching on to an existing social network.