6 lessons learned from an early app launch.

A true story.

by @KevinLinser

If there is one rule in startup life we keep hearing, it’s “launch your app early”. You hear it from your mentor (@AlekRossi), accelerator coach (@topij), investor (@AnttiKosunen), and the other lean startup guys. The ones who succeeded as well as those who’ve failed preach it:

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”.

Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman)

So we launched early! — We took our app (back then called “whostr app — connecting strangers for shared activities”), knowing everything was still far from perfect, and even though we were missing key features, we pushed it to the app store. These are the lessons we learned, the hard way.

No 1. — Nothing happens when you push to the App store.

Congratulations you’ve made it to the app store! Now you’re just getting started. One of the biggest myths, is that once you upload your app (no mather if on Google Play or iTunes) it will simply go viral. I don’t want to crush your dreams, but that’s definitely not going to happen. The first 10,000 app downloads take the most work, and if you’ve launched your product early, the flaws are obvious so this work can be really painful ;) So, how to launch an app and where to start? — Trust me, you will depend on feedback! And the most valuable feedback will come from your core users, those who should love your product in future. Try to reach out to these users early. And remember, it’s better to have a handful of honest, but real users helping you develop your product, than 50,000 bots across the globe.

No 2. — Pick a closed test market with a narrow user base.

Adopting some constraints will help to focus your research at launch. We chose a place on the landscape where no one knew us, and there was no reason to be ashamed of our not ready product — that would allow us to easily reach out to our core target group at a single location. So we packed our luggage and went to Linnea University (@LinneUni) in Växjö. A small campus in the heart of Sweden, with thousands of students locked into one single campus. A dream spot for an app launch. During a two day testing we put together all of our online marketing know-how and advertising power (not very much as a small start up) and introduced Växjö to whostr.

Small hint: Try out as many marketing channels — offline and online marketing — as possible during a short time at a single location, as you will quickly learn how every channel converts, and which will work best for you. We had 1,000 doorhangers, which were distributed to every single dorm door, and 5,000 Flyers, one on every seat in the lecture halls; in addition, we used free and paid social media advertising.

No 3 — Our assumptions sucked, until we tested them.

Collecting the first hundreds of downloads, and then talking to the first 50 users was eye opening. Forget all previous forms of validation! This is where you get the full truth, after you’ve put your assumptions to the test and seen how your app is used in real life. As our app connects people close by each other for shared activities, an assumption was that would be using our app to make new friends and meet strangers on a regular basis. The no 1 Feedback we got was: “Cool app, how do I invite my friends to my activities.” — BOOOM. — A stranger network, including your friends — Not exactly what we had in mind. Beyond that, we learned that while people want to actively connect with new people, the weekly usage was too low to build a significant community. This was definitely a game changer and called for a pivot.

No 4 — Launch early, but don’t forget a handful of CORE functions.

Our app is built on instant messaging and connecting people based on location. Thus, there are two key things that should definitely work:

• 1st: The location based service retrieving a user’s position. This worked pretty well and didn’t cause us any trouble.
• 2nd. The integrated chat service. This function on the other hand caused a bit more of a headache, being limited by poor performance, connection problems and no cross platform ability. Launching early also meant leaving out push notifications — imagine a messaging service where you have to open the app each time to check for new messages, this explains already enough.

At least we learned we weren’t the only ones who’ve made these mistakes. We should have read THIS earlier — (Thanks to @popcorn_ryan). Our situation could have been worse, but my co-founder Patrik (@patrikschaer) insisted on including analytics from the beginning. It would have been even worse to leave out the two lines of code, so valuable in developing the future of our application.

So launch early but define your CORE features and make sure those are running perfectly (I’m not talking about design). Doing this will ease your life and help you sleep more smoothly. And beyond that, analytics belong to the CORE.

Some nice little feedback we got aside:

• “What does this button mean in here?” — An explanation of our basic features would have been an asset
• “Nice app, but the chat doesn’t work” — Thanks we are aware of that and we are still ashamed of it ;)
• Use a name that users can pronounce, and particularly, one they can type when searching — But this is its own story

No 5 — Virality does not just come out of the blue.

Where is this viral growth everybody is talking about? And how do you build a social network of people who don’t know each other? There is a simple answer to that: “Not at all. Or only with luck”. At least we got a bit lucky and our users told us the right way to build in organic growth by asking for a specific invite function to their most loved activities.

This caused us to make another pivot with our concept, but that’s what testing and validation is done for. At least this is what Eric Ries (@ericries) is always preaching. So, our job now was to step back and revise the concept, still keeping in mind the overall vision we had from the beginning: Changing the way that people are meeting up and breaking down barriers between strangers.

No 6 — Don’t even consider building features.

What to do if your retention rate sucks and your organic growth is zero?! You are DEFINITELY NOT going to build new features. So we got the first users, a pretty unstable chat server, no push notifications, and some problems with UX. What’s next? Definitely NOT building any new feature, unless it actively supports platform use and user growth. This has always been a golden rule of our team, one that everybody is a ware of.

Next. We stepped back, narrowed our concept, and even killed some featured. We then focused on fixing what was not working AND providing users with a more comfortable way of inviting new users to their most loved activities. This ultimately resulted in creating the App that we call NAU (@nauapp).

There is still a lot of work ahead and much to learn, but we are excited about making it to the next level. I will keep you posted as our journey continues.

If you enjoyed the read, or your think this might be of help, it would mean the world to me if you hit the recommend button or shared it.

Something to add or don’t agree? I would be happy to hear from you.

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter: @kevinlinser @nauapp

Or check out how we are doing with our project: here.