How developers could help your app survive?
Here is a quote from Entrepreneur about YouTube
…when it started, it was meant as a kind of video-based dating service, where users could upload short videos describing their ideal partner, and browse for potential matches. The site even had a slogan: “Tune in, hook up.” After seeing the potential in becoming a wider and more efficient host of online videos, YouTube pivoted and slowly turned itself into the empire that Google acquired for $65 billion.
There are 3 important things in the statement above.
- YouTube founders didn’t give up when they saw the app was not so popular as they expected.
- They found out that people like to upload videos and share them with friends.
- Founders had enough resources to change things they already developed and make a pivot.
The app launch is only beginning
When someone orders software development services, they look for getting the end product that will be used, not just the development process itself.
When you order borsch in the restaurant, you want to eat it and expect it tastes really good. Not just to pay money for somebody to cook it. Usually, clients pay money to create the app (order borsch) and do not think about what will happen after they launch the project (make sure, it tastes good for others).
It does not matter how much time you have spent on developing an initial version. Most of the people will use it in a different way you expect. But this is not the worst case. Because very often users do not go through your registration process at all.
The app may work perfectly, be fast & reliable. You can say — developers did their job. And now it is the problem of product-market fit, marketing or lack of budget on promotion. I may partly agree with you.
How can developers help?
Thoughtful developers can offer to help to understand what’s wrong and how users interact with your marketing materials and the app. Step-by-step, screen-by-screen. When users are stuck and close the app.
It may be shown in accurate real-time dashboards. With the ability to filter data to deeply understand the reasoning behind it.
There are a lot of free analytic tools for this. And nothing hard in adding analytics across all your marketing materials, app store pages, and the app itself.
We know there are too many projects that spend most of the budget on adding more and more features to the scope because founders are afraid that current features are not enough. They postpone the launch and expect great success on day 2 after it.
That’s why we decided to take a step further and not just build fast and reliable apps. Now we always add analytics and set it up for the most critical KPIs after the launch. Depending on the marketing needs, we tight up users’ behavior with traffic sources.
Example
Testing Facebook ads. At this stage, it’s most important to prove that the marketing message is correct, so users not just install the app but complete comprehensive registration and start using it. We suggested the client track the registration process and connected it with the FB ads manager. Now we can compare not only Mobile App Installs (1), but also see completed registrations (2). It helped us to discover the best performing ads and save the advertising budget.
In addition, we can see how people go through the signup process and improve it.
Based on this we discovered that most of the users are declining the registration process on the last step. It helped to analyze the reason of it and found out how to improve the signup flow.
After marketing is started it’s crucial to know how does it work, to analyze users reaction to it, and learn about user experience with the app. this is why it can be a great advantage if developers can set up analytics that will show you all weak points that could be fixed.
Things that we use:
Facebook Analytics (documentation)
Firebase Analytics (documentation)
