Ratio reaches 1M Users 🎉
Yesterday, 1 Million unique users in total have installed and tried to reduce their screen-time with our app, Ratio.
We’re quite proud of that milestone as we barely used any paid channels to acquire users, instead we often focused on making our product better.
If you’re one of these 1 million people who used Ratio, thank you sincerely for being a part of our journey.
We wanted to share some insights we learned along the way:
The obvious path was only clear in hindsight
Across all personas, Ratio users see a 24% total decrease in their screen-time within 5 weeks of using the app.
As usual with consumer apps, it took us 100s of public iterations with our active users to achieve. We are very grateful to our Beta community for having the patience and persistence in tackling this problem with us. Thanks to all of you who worked very hard with us to provide daily feedback and improve this product for everyone.
Impact matters
We’re proud to have helped people become the most productive version of themselves and protect their most valuable asset: their time.
Ratio wins back 368 hours per year for every active user: the equivalent amount of time needed to read 30 books or do a workout every single day.
Measured conservatively across our total cumulative usage over all users, we estimate we saved up to 3M+ human productive hours and counting.
Excessive screen-time has been correlated with an array of mental health issues. People-First and creating a positive impact in humanity is the uniting mission behind our team and users.
There’s still a lot to more to do.
We’ve talked a lot about the problem of smartphone over-use and the distraction economy. Back when we started Blloc in 2016; the average consumer spent around 2.5 hours daily on their phone with roughly 150 unlocks per day.
When we revisited these statistics in 2022 we were shocked to see how dramatically this has increased. Today the average consumer spends 3.9 hours daily on their phone with 350 unlocks per day.
Some studies tracked this continued rise in screen time. We believe the proliferation of even more addictive content feeds combined with more time spent alone in response to the COVID pandemic are one of many reasons.
Apple and Google have made a lot of positive steps recently to integrate digital well being and screen-time management tools into their OS’s.
Given the scale of the problem, we are looking forward and hoping for a continuation of this momentum.
Moving forward
Today 53% of American children aged 10–11 years already own a fully functional smartphone. It’s an alarming statistic, given what we’ve learned over the last 7 years, we can’t help but wonder what this will mean for future generations.
We hope to see more vertical solutions like ours focus on addressing how to best protect younger demographics growing up in this digital world.
For now we will first work on re-visiting our pricing strategy to see how we can unlock ways of making Ratio accessible to a wider audience.
Sincerely,
The Ratio Team.
