1–10k users in 10 weeks, on £1k
Week 2: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.
The Good.
We have more users than we did last week, when I published the first article in this series. Not as many as we wanted — but I said I’d be frank. 235 new signups whilst we’ve tested creatives, updated our ASO and waited for materials to arrive. Our instagram is finally heading toward 1000 followers — when it does we’ll be doing a like and share giveaway. That should happen this weekend, and as soon as it does we’ll be sharing content through influencers. We’ve already began A/B testing that content, with a noticeable discrepancy in popularity between the creatives.
We’re now live in Germany, and after some initial bug fixes will be ready to get the word out here next week.
My meet with Daniel Levelev, the growth hacker, threw out some really interesting insights. Chief amongst them was hyperlocal advertising — a decent sized budget but targeting one very specific area, when you know that place is going to be popular. 1km around a concert, football game, or the beach on a hot day. He also really helped us nail down the kind of content we need to be sharing to appeal to Gen Z — subtly branded, but fun and accessible. Only pushing Install ads on audiences that have already seen a significant amount of content — really following the traditional AIDA, or See, Think, Do format. Without a shadow of a doubt we’d jumped on Install ads too quickly, when we should have focused more on attention. So, some solid learnings.
Our Cost Per Install on Apple Search ads has also remained super low, averaging £0.23. Our Daily Active Users are up on average vs the previous week, by a factor of 2. This figure is slightly skewed by an anomalously high amount on one day, but we expect to maintain growth. Average user engagement time has risen 27%, so we hope to see referrals growing.
Reddit’s remained a positive space for us to promote on, with good engagement with our Kin user-base and a community feel developing. Reddit ads, that we hadn’t previously considered, were brought up by an ex-YC founder met by chance, and we’ll be looking into their worth.
Also this blog got over 1k claps, which was unexpected and hugely appreciated!
The Bad.
To stay exactly on track we should have hit 1259 users this week — as to get from 1–10k in 10 weeks we need 25.9% weekly growth. We just missed that, growing 25.3%. Our flyers arrived later than expected but are now with us, ready to deploy. Crucially, the stickers should arrive tomorrow — but they too were slower than expected. That means we haven’t been able to get out on the streets and sell, hyperlocal, at a list of target spots - or start hitting the 1000s of mobility devices on Berlin’s wide squares, thoroughfares, and cobbled streets.
We should have on-boarded more users in the past week — there’s no two ways about it. Equally, events in my own life prevented me from focusing as hard as I ought to have done — but there’s time to make that up as we push on. And I’ve got to return to the UK tomorrow for a doctor’s appointment, which knocks out another day — but I believe firmly that one’s own mental and physical health should always remain at the forefront of priorities.
Our strategy still isn’t fully mapped — my ethos always aligns too easily with a kind of easy flowing experimentation, but we need to be more solid. I’m going to nail down layers for each week on Trello in a more structured approach.
The Ugly
Our Facebook and Instagram CPI was atrocious — £12 per install. Whilst we did see a marked difference between creatives, and only spent a small amount, we clearly need to rethink if advertising on Fb and instagram is appropriate. These figures also discount a perhaps ill-advised promoted link to an acid techno track that I’ve played out a few times — I thought something left-field might get more notice, but clearly that wasn’t the case. (It is a bit of a slammer though). Outbound DMs, which I had another push at, again received next to no conversion on instagram, and I’m becoming worried about the effect it may have on the algorithm. For now, I’ll need to take a step back and focus on generating true, organic traffic.
For a Few Dollars More
Keeping up the (tenuous) thread of this post, what’s next?
Finally pushing the flyers and stickers out. I’d like to spend half of each day out and about, and the other half digital. Instagram creatives shared by influencers. The instagram like + share giveaway. Hyper local advertising we could well trial at football matches etc over the weekend, with custom creatives, if time allows. We’ll continue being active on reddit and telegram. We’re still waiting for TikTok ads to activate, but looking forward to seeing what they have to offer.
We need to onboard 322 new users over the next week — I’m confident we can do it.
Tris.
