How to Launch a New App: a Case Study About HitMeal

How was the HitMeal app launched? How was the target audience searched for and segmented? What did we do before starting the active development of this mobile application? Group Product Manager at AIBY Group Dima Khritankov shared his experience.

Hi! I’m Dima Khritankov, Group Product Manager at AIBY Group, a company developing mobile apps in the lifestyle category.

Dima Khritankov

One of my responsibilities is launching mobile apps that help solve user problems and assist them in their daily tasks. With that, I provide further support to the products and ensure reaching financial goals set by the company.

In this article, I’d like to share how the launch of our product HitMeal began and which steps we have taken before engaging in its active development. This insight will come in useful to project managers, junior сustomer development specialists, as well as any teams wondering where to start with a new project.

General Assumptions for Launching a Product

I should mention that we already have experience with Health & Fitness apps. So, we decided to put our knowledge and experience into expanding our portfolio. And we saw making an appearance in a promising category of Nutrition as a fitting opportunity. Knowing that our success would depend on certain factors, we’ve carefully considered them:

1. The market is lucrative, and its size is considerable.
2. There is a substantial segment of paying users highly driven to improve their nutrition habits.
3. We need to make a product that will effectively solve user problems.

To find out the market size, we’ve made a series of research efforts: we have studied current trends and recurring tendencies, our competitors’ dynamics and the sources of their growth. We could adequately estimate our chances of success because we had benchmarks measuring how saturated the niche was, which came from our previous experience launching Health & Fitness apps.

Identifying Target Audience

Still, the most fascinating aspects of our research in terms of developing a product have been the following two:

1. There was a substantial segment of paying users highly driven to improve their nutrition habits.
2. We needed to make a product that would effectively solve user problems.

We didn’t want to create a new business model. What we did want was for our app to resolve user problems more effectively than our competitors could.

We’ve drawn the following conclusions from the first aspect:

• Our consumers had already been using our competitors’ apps when we decided to develop ours.
• They had gained both positive and negative experiences in doing so.
• We needed to delve into all competitive strategies and carry out qualitative research that would tell us which issues weren’t being solved in apps at that moment and how users prioritized tasks.

It was critical to learn more about our future users. To do that, we came up with elaborate hypotheses on contextual customer segmentation. Here are the example hypotheses for various segments:

• The behavioral hypothesis shows user behavior in various circumstances and what motivates them (to act in a particular way). Let’s say an overweight person has weighed themselves, so they want to start eating mindfully to avoid serious health issues.
• The problem hypothesis covers the difficulties users face and the reasons they identify those as obstacles on the way to their goal. “When a person goes to the gym and attempts to keep a food diary, they find it daunting to count their macronutrient intake. And that makes it challenging for them to identify what to eat to gain muscle mass.”
• The motivation hypothesis is about users’ desires and why they can’t be effective in achieving their goals at the moment. “An overweight person wants an instant effective meal plan instead of wasting their time looking for and trying an overwhelming number of options to lose weight.”
• The blocker hypothesis reveals the cause for current (ineffective) behavior or difficulty. “An average person doesn’t cook healthy because finding a good recipe takes too much time and effort.”

Hypotheses-Based Target Audience Segmentation

Having taken the hypotheses into account, we drafted approximate segmentation:

This approach to segmentation helped outline the scope of users we could interview, for which we implemented usability testing tools like UserTesting. It also worked as a base for target audience screening questions.

Here’s an example of a screening questionnaire:

1. Which of the following do you find the most interesting and important? Choose up to 3 options:

• Self-education
• Nutrition (including dieting)
• Physical activity (fitness, sport, etc.)
• Games and entertainment (online/offline)
• Social networking
• Reading
• Arts and crafts
• Shopping
• Traveling

If they choose at least one option in italics, the next question is as follows:

2. Talking about health, which of these would you like to focus on? You can choose several options:

• Clinical screening (medical check-ups, tests, etc.)
• Fitness activities
• Sport
• Nutrition
• Mental health

Respondents who hadn’t picked “nutrition” weren’t our target audience. We held our search for the respondents on forums and among Instagram and Facebook followers of accounts and groups focused on nutrition.

Having analyzed the results, we held 23 problem interviews in Russian and English. Here, identifying the target audience is crucial, as some behavior and needs may vary depending on the culture. For instance, our interviews have shown that users from Russia and the ones from the USA have distinct nutritional habits and causes of being overweight. However, we have also established that there’s a segment struggling to stick to a diet while having to take care of a family. That segment is not limited to a specific location.

Each problem interview included

1. Classification questions:

• How would you describe your current physical shape?
• When do you think was the last time you were in perfect shape?

2. The main problem script:

• Do you believe it’s important for you to be mindful of your nutritional habits?
• What brings you the biggest discomfort in your attempts to improve nutrition habits?

At this point, patience is your best friend — managing such interviews is a lengthy and draining process. Don’t despair if you can’t carry them out on the first attempt. Start with five interviews and then analyze what was the most challenging in terms of respondent search and the interview itself. Try other means of locating potential candidates and review your questions.

After the interviews, I looked through the initial user hypotheses and outlined a few customer personas that reflected a paying segment.

Here’s one persona I made:

What matters most about the personas, though, are not their social or demographic attributes, but their goals, motivations, and frustrations. It was the similarity of the latter three aspects that led me to create generalized types of personas. But I created the names and other descriptors as well to develop team empathy toward the future app audience.

Next came another significant assumption: “We need to make a product that will effectively solve user problems.” The main goal here is to identify a number of features for the first version of the product and to come up with and prioritize the roadmap feature list.

The hypotheses, the research made, as well as the resulting personas led the team (we had formed at the time) to create User Stories. And we established features users may find useful based on them. We preferred User Story to Job Story, seeing that some assumptions had already been validated through qualitative research. More importantly, our product was meant to become a delighter rather than a painkiller right from the start.

Here’s a User Story example:

Along with the qualitative research, we were performing product analyses of the main competitors we had previously identified.

We’ve studied the features that were appearing on promotional screenshots such as calorie counting, recipes, and fitness plans.

Then we carried out qualitative analyses for each product in terms of the feature release. In that, we focused on the unique and sensible decisions of our competition.

On top of that, we studied competitor store reviews (from digital distribution platforms):

Identifying MVP functionalities

To identify MVP features, our user acquisition managers analyzed top competitor creatives. After that, we tested those creatives alongside ours and compared the metrics.

Another source for the MVP feature list and the prioritization of those features was the qualitative research into a few competitors via UserTesting. Users were installing a competitor’s app and carrying out the scripted tasks, all the while voicing their actions.

Here’s what one of the tasks looked like: “Using the app, try to record information about your latest meal. Move on to the next task when you’re done or when 5 minutes have passed”.

Having analyzed the collected data, we eventually identified the main MVP features and started to run user scenarios. The scenarios helped us to make a list of functional and UI requirements. After that, we came up with a preliminary half-year roadmap for other features. We called it preliminary because we had released the first MVP version and then carried out quantitative research on the main metrics of feature use. We also ran another usability test to find out what the users were doing and why. That knowledge would let us spot obvious flaws if any. The flaws were found, and fixing them became a part of our roadmap, which was only then finalized.

Conclusions

To sum it up, when launching a product, you need to choose a business model and base your market and competitor research, plus the potential target audience segmentation on that. Following this approach will help effectively distribute resources across the team while developing the product, as you will have a clear understanding of priorities. With that, your business will be yielding the best results.

When it comes to pre-development preparations, it took me two months to do research outside the team (while keeping up with my other duties), topped with three weeks of teamwork, which mostly boiled down to figuring out user flow for every feature.

I’m not saying that we did everything perfectly, and you’re welcome to argue some of my theses. Yet I do hope that our product launch experience will come in handy to those reading the article and embarking on their personal project.

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