Transcription
If your app has no downloads or no revenue, then you're probably a victim of a common misconception about the mobile app business. In this video, I want to break some of those misconceptions for you.
So first off, why am I even talking about this topic? Well, I've launched a lot of apps, both for myself and also for clients. I'll give you two examples: one is my app called Delicious, and the other is my app called Mind. The Delicious app got around 51,000 users and then generated a total of $12. Okay, it's not a big potato, but it's not something to be proud of either, right?
On the other hand, we have this big boy that generated six figures. Looking good! This is gross, by the way. The store takes a 15% cut, but still, you know, six figures and doing awesome. It's still live, by the way; there are users using the app as we speak. So what's the difference? A few things.
First, let's talk about tech. Tech founders usually believe that tech is the only thing there is in the app business. As soon as they build it and launch it, that's it, right? They'll get 2 million users, and their bank account will grow, and everything's amazing. Turns out, it's not like that. It took me, I don't know, years—years, unfortunately—to understand this, but now I do.
So, tech is just the tool to build your app and help people solve problems. If you are just building an app for fun or just because you want to, and you haven't researched your users, market, and so on, chances of turning that into a profitable business is close to zero. So that's the first misconception: that tech is the most important.
If you are a tech founder, you might think you can probably build anything that you dream of. Tech will never be your risk. What will be your risk then? Well, does anyone want your thing? Like, who's your audience? What problem are you solving? Before getting into tech and spending months getting things perfect, you should just think about who you are building for and what problem you are solving. Is it a burning problem, or is it a nice-to-have thing?
Let's look at the two examples here. Delicious was an app to share recipes with people around the globe. It seemed cool; the tech seemed cool, right? You create your recipe, you're all excited, you share it with everyone, then others can use your recipe and rate it, and so on. But it turns out that's not really a desire people have. Like, why would I share my recipe with strangers? It's not a burning desire. And also, why would I even pay for it? The revenue we got was from ads, if I'm not mistaken. It's not connected here, but as you can see, there's no purchase revenue; it was all through ads.
If you need to rely on ads to monetize, then that's not a good thing. That means the app doesn't really solve a burning desire, and again, the chances of building a successful business out of it are really small.
On the other hand, there's Mind. Mind teaches you about spirituality. There are bite-sized lessons to help you get started on various topics in the spirituality space. They are made so that you can read them, understand them, and implement them. It's very action-driven and solves a burning desire. People want to know who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how things work in this universe. It is definitely a bigger desire than sharing recipes with strangers.
Then the other thing I already mentioned is monetization. If you need to rely on ads, it's not going to be good. You need high volume and high usage, and that usually happens in social apps. The chances of building a social app that will have millions of users active every month are so hard to do in today's world. You are basically competing with TikTok and others, right?
So good luck! Ads are out of the question—maybe only games can make it, but yeah, I'm not an expert on games. On the other hand, if you are solving a burning desire, people are willing to pay and will happily pay if you know what you give them for that money is valuable. Monetization is easy there. You just lock certain content behind a paywall, and they pay. Ideally, that is through a monthly subscription. Then you use the profit to make the app even better and look better.
So, that's monetization. Common misconception number two: I need to monetize with ads? No, you don't! A burning desire means people will gladly pay for your product.
Then number three: where do I find users? Right? You built a perfect app, you spend nine months and who knows how much money, and no one is coming. That's also one of the burning problems: who are you building for, and where are those people?
For me, with the Delicious app, I had no idea honestly. I just built the app and prayed and hoped for the best. Spoiler alert: it's not a good strategy. On the other hand, with Mind, I researched Facebook groups, subreddits—I joined them, participated in like 20 or 30 of those, and I asked people what their problems were, what they would love this app to have, what topics to cover. Then I built the thing that people were most excited for and shared it across those communities. That's how I got my first thousand users.
So, you know, start with the end users. Don't start with a product, with the app, with building. Building is the easy part, but finding people that will love your product and finding the painful problem that they will gladly pay for—that's the hard part. So focus on that.
That was number three. Number four is a common misconception: your app needs to be perfect. This is such a common misconception! Okay, so this is like my big vision. I want to have all of these 170 features I've designed—this Figma with 200 pages, dark mode, light mode, everything's perfect. Now, I just need to spend nine months to build it. And that's it? Big misconception again.
What you really need is just a good enough app that you can launch in like a month or so. That's called an MVP—Minimum Viable Product. You basically need to spend as little time as possible to build an app, launch it, and then use that to validate your idea. The point of the MVP is not a full finished product, right? It's just the starting point.
The point of it is to figure out, are people excited about it? Are people using it? Are people paying for it? If you can cut that initial development and launch phase from nine months to one month and then answer those risky questions, like does anyone want my thing? Is anyone willing to pay for my thing? If you can answer that in one month versus nine months, that's amazing.
You know, you get feedback from people, you talk to them, and then you figure out, okay, this is working, this isn't working, I need to fix this, I need to add that, and you iterate. Eventually, you build a six-figure app. It's not a straight line, but the faster you can launch and gather feedback, the better chances you have of survival.
Then misconception number five: I don't want to monetize my first version; it's not moral to do so. If you give people free stuff, right? If you let—just say you are giving a $10 worth of value for $0. Who wouldn't want that? If you give me $10 and ask and don't ask anything in return, I mean, thank you! Why would I not take that?
By launching your free app and thinking that you are validating your business idea, you aren't. You're just giving away free value. People will probably like it, but would they pay for it? Do you have a business, or is it just a fun project for you? You cannot answer that question unless you put a paywall.
Let's go again to the examples. For Delicious, you already saw there was never a paywall—zero. So I never really validated the business idea, and people weren't even really using it and sticking. The payment was never the issue; it's just that the product idea just wasn't exciting.
On the other hand, for Mind, I monetized it from day one. I built the app in four weeks, and it had a paywall from day one. Within the first two weeks or so, there were already two people paying a monthly subscription of $5. That's what you aim for with the MVP—validate your idea quickly.
Just to give you some context and stretch your mind a bit: the initial version of Mind had five lessons, and two of them were completely free. For the remaining free lessons, you needed to pay. The lessons take on average about five minutes to go over. That means people were paying for 15 minutes worth of content—$5 per month. Okay? And two people gladly paid within the first two weeks, and that number grew like crazy for the first nine or ten months. It just kept growing and growing.
Now, the point wasn't to scam people, right? Giving 15 minutes worth of content for a monthly subscription? No. The point was to validate the idea. As soon as I saw people pay, I immediately rushed to write and publish more lessons, and then it had more than 100 lessons in the app and some additional tools and so on.
But that's the easy part again. Writing lessons and building the app is the easy part. The hard part is validating, and that's the common theme here. The faster you can get to validation, the better.
What does that include? It includes a fast launch, adding monetization from day one, knowing who your users are, and where to find them—just finding them for free. One more thing that I did wrong with Delicious: I was focusing on ads early on, and that's just burning money. Versus for Mind, I was just being part of the communities, posting there, and yeah, people were excited and downloading and using the app and paying.
So yeah, that's it for this video. I hope it helped you shift your perspective a bit and your mindset on how you should be thinking about app businesses. To sum it up: tech is the easy part. Figure out who your users are, what's their burning problem, and then try to solve that problem within four weeks and launch. Just see what happens and monetize from day one. If they are paying, then that's amazing; continue building. But if not, then figure out where people drop off, what they don't like, and try to fix that. Talk to your users and see how you can make the product better.
So that's it for this video. If you enjoyed it, just give it a like. Also, comment below if you have any questions or thoughts, or if you want me to cover any topic in more detail in future videos. And also subscribe, because I will be releasing every video like this once every week. Thanks!