How long does it take to get 1,000 users?

About sixteen months.

Sometime on early June 2015, I decided to publish my app to the Google Play. To be quite honest, it was rather an underwhelming experience that as soon as I hit the “publish” button I was saying to myself, “Huh? That’s it? Well, I guess it’s live now.”

I have never talked about this app before. Not even a word. Perhaps once but that was only in passing within a context of a totally different conversation. Other than that? None. Social networks, IRL, or anywhere else. Mums. Not even my wife knew about the existence of it. This is by design because I really want to experiment with the app. Letting it grow organically. To see how many people out there that actually search for the problem which my app is trying to solve and giving it a shot without any external urging except of their own nerve system that led them to hit that “Install” button.

I did not put any extra effort for SEO-ing or what-have-you to boost the rank (fact is, I don’t even know if such method exists) and allow the rank algorithm to do its own work. Basically, it’s not unlike a simple, straightforward “Hello World” program, signed, published, and let it live (or die) out there.

This app catered to a very specific group of people in a relatively board category that had you search for it by its associated keyword, chance are that you won't see my app anywhere near the top results. On top of that, this app’s name is also a terrible one (not cute, not catchy, using a dictionary word that I'm pretty sure you won't heard very much in a daily conversation, and I imagine quite a few would not be able to spell it correctly) which makes it even harder to search for.

But, "Well, I guess it's live now."

I maintained the app fairly regularly. Updating the contents every other week (a schedule that I, more or less, was able to maintain), and bumped the app version once every two months or so for small bug fixes, or once or twice, adding a new feature. But mostly, this version update was meant as a tool for me to have a slightly more accurate user numbers by checking the number of installs/upgrade after the said update rolls out.

This app, is by no means finished. After all, you never finish a software. You just stopped working on it. I had probably spent about 40 hours for the initial version. Quite a significant part of that amount was used to cut “cool” features (in my mind) that simply serves no purpose. What I ended up is a simple GridView-based app with data populated from a dumb Node-based server. It was too simple but it works.

Initially, like many others, I had envisioned a “million-dollar” idea. An idea so good that I won’t tell you for fear that you are going to steal it away from me. An idea so awesome that VCs are going to practically begging to be a part of the first million dollars that I’m going to get even before I moved to the next slide of my beautifully crafted presentation.

Eh, who am I kidding? I’m already old enough to firmly believed that ideas mean shit. If you ever suggest to me that you had an awesome idea but you won’t tell me because you think I’m going to steal it away from you, I’ll shake your hands, bid you “good luck” (with a hint of sarcasm), and made a mental note to approach your next suggestion with an extra dose of skepticism.

The point is, the first version of this app, although coming from the same “million-dollar” idea that I initially had, are actually nothing but “just-get-it-out-there,” and on a hindsight, I should have done it long before instead of procrastinating, waiting for the great moment and releasing the app only after I have implemented all the “cool” stuffs that I had envisioned. Bull-shit. Had I insisted on that, I would have zero instead of one app which had lived through 12 versions for sixteen months, and had bothered around 1,000 people to hit that “Install” button.

To be quite honest, though, the app was practically dead for almost a year. As you can see from the graph below, a number of visitors to my app’s page was flat for the whole year. But I have never abandoned it. Persistence is the key here. Contents are updated almost every week, a new visual design, and a new feature was introduced during this "dead" year. Then something happened in June 2016 where the number of visitors had almost doubled, and then increased by 50% on July, and then almost tripled on August. The trend still continues today that the projected number for this running month (October) is going to put the numbers above the September’s numbers. I still don’t know what triggers the sudden surge but I think as the number of visitors to the Google Play’s page grow, the better its rank is going to be for that keyword. Self-propagating. Or at least, that is what I hope to happen in the coming months.

You may argue that the numbers provided by Google’s Developer Console is not reflective to the real world numbers. They’re not. But get this, I put Ads on the main content of this app. Not on the welcome screen, nor on other aesthetic screens. The content. That way, besides Developer Console, I also had a report from Google AdSense about how many times the content screens were loaded per day. Now for the last three months, where I had this sudden surge of visitors (and installers), I was finally able to consistently hit a revenue eligible impressions per day (they are pennies, really. Literally worthless). I got some happy click accidents here and there but I don’t and shouldn’t expect them.

The more important take here, is, that the contents are actually matters. I had users who are spending more than 5 minutes on this app (again, the numbers are from Google Analytics. Take it with a grain of salt) which is a luxury in this time of age where attention spans were measured in seconds. Below is the statistics from Google Analytics from July 1st, 2016 to October 5th, 2016. Eleven screens per session, two and a half minutes per session, and almost 70% returning users. I’m currently adding five screens per two weeks. On Monday. Almost guaranteed.

So where’s my Ferrari?

Haha, yeah, I cannot even buy a can of coffee with what I got from my daily Ad impression revenue. But that’s not really my main concern. Yet. There are quite a few things that I learned from this experience. And again, I reiterate, I would never have had this valuable experience had I stalled, waited, and “perfected” my idea first. After all, what is “perfect”? Nothing is ever perfect.

Anyway, what’s next?

1. Content wise, I have defined a clear, quantifiable scope on what the contents of this app would be. I’m not even halfway done yet. Probably not even a third. Updating contents are actually a very low effort on my end. Plus, I’m also benefiting from it as well so naturally, I’m going to continue the efforts. As long as I’ve still got means to do it.
2. Application wise, well, I still want to implement all those “cool” things I had in mind. But I’m currently keeping two jobs so the development of this app has practically ceased (except for contents addition) for the time being. I tried in-app purchase thingy, and I definitely want to publish this app on iOS but as of now, although this one is a delicious, my plate is already overflowing. Those bills are not going to get paid by puny Ad impressions that this app generates.

Everybody wants to do a startup now. But I feel like that many still approach this by overvaluing idea over implementation. I’m still not sure what is the correct approach, mind you, but I’m firmly on “idea is cheap” side of arguments. I had heard some (business) friends of mine pitch their ideas. They read books about startup success, coming with this great ideas (according to them), and finally said that “technical side won’t be an issue. There are many developers out there.” Yeah, again, good luck with that. Actually they had a point there. Creating an app is easy as I had already demonstrated with this app. But if success in a startup is winning a triathlon race, then releasing your idea’s implementation to the public is just like putting your shoes before you left your house on the race day. You still had to go to the start line (with a possibility of getting lost, or worse, get hit by a truck), waiting for that start whistle, wrestle your way to the water with other racers (with a risk of getting trampled over, slipped on a particularly slippery rock, or crossing the path of an angry crocodile on the way, etc.), then you had this risk of swimming into a shark, and so forth. You get the point.

Truth is, running a startup will take most (if not all) of your time. If you were still dreaming running a startup while still relying on a safety net provided by your day job, then first, you need to wake up, put on that shoes, watch your diet, and start training.

Because if winning a triathlon race is easy then everyone will do it. Right?