App Survival Guide

Hint: Let Early Adopters Steer Your Product

Our startup began with a vision. A vision of what we wanted to create, something we wanted to use, and what we wanted people to use it for. Our idea was unique, and by George people were going to love us for it.

Spoiler alert: that didn’t happen.

As we worked on our idea and started getting beta users into our app, our idea changed a little bit. And a little bit more. But with every change (read improvement, obviously), we were careful to make sure we remained loyal to our vision and the aspects that made us different from everybody else. We were social, but we had utility. We had purpose.

The specifics of our situation aren’t particularly important to my point here, but the context gives a little clarity, so bear with me. We created an app that lets people ask a question at a particular location they are interested in, be it a restaurant, a beach, a parade, a deli…whatever. In real time, other members of the community who are near the location in question are notified, and they can answer said question with a picture and text. Real-time question and answer.

The idea of requesting information from another friendly user was very important to us. In our minds, it was new and made us feel like our app was more purposeful than somebody sharing a picture of a hamburger with their friends.

Well, an interesting thing started to happen. We got some traffic (we have been blessed with a fantastic group of early adopters in our home city of San Francisco), and a smallish group of users discovered that by asking a question and immediately answering it themselves, they could share all kinds of cool stuff they were seeing around town with people nearby.

At first we were slightly troubled by these hooligans misusing our masterpiece. The misguided souls accounted for less than 10% of users, but still, the audacity! However, we quickly realized that this was resulting in some really awesome content. Content we loved, content that was useful, and content of value. Some of these “self posts” actually accounted for our most highly upvoted content.

We realized by talking to our most active users and by digging through the data that these self posts were our future. People want to share what’s happening around them and want to discover cool things in their neighborhood — who are we to stop them?!

So far, we haven’t regretted it for a minute and we couldn’t be more excited about the next steps at Spectafy.

We hope the moral of our story can help you: listen to your users. They just might find a way to tell you what they want.