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Kai

What would you focus on? 🎯

👋 Hello fellow makers,

I've been posting my tasks here but realized I could also try the discussions.

I am currently working on https://meetfriends.app/ - an app that reminds you to stay in touch with the people who matter most. I made this app for myself and I use it every day so my first goal is accomplished. Now I want to see if it's useful for others and if I can monetize it to cover the running costs or even make a small profit. I know it's hard to do B2C and competition on the App Store is super strong.

Background Story

Let me start with the short story of how I started on MeetFriends. Last year I realized that, while I enjoy an active social life, it's mostly others who are proactive and invite me for activities or just call me. I'm also an app and reminders person. I love maintaining my streak on Duolingo and Zero Fasting or tracking my runs and cycling. I then came up with the idea of reminders for contacting people. So I searched and tried many apps, but they were not working for me as it was

  • not working with reminders
  • taking too much time to manage reminders
  • no option to go through contact book in a reasonable time
  • bad privacy where contacts are sold / used for ads
  • sometimes unusable UX, UI

So I did many calls with friends, prototyped a few UIs and eventually implemented an MVP in Swift as a side project. I am very happy with my app for my own needs. It was also interesting to see what influence our personal networks have on health, happiness, longevity etc according to TED talks.

Challenges

So far from talking to people, I have identified the following challenges, besides a lot of positive feedback:

  • People can benefit from the app, but it's not immediately clear to them as the problem and negative consequences of not staying in touch are not obvious. People might even benefit, but don't want to admit it as it's somehow perceived negatively that one needs an app for this. (Person: "And I hate to admit it, but I need it too")
  • To make the most out of the app users need to use some features that they don't immediately discover (I think a tips & tricks section in my 3rd tab can help here a lot)
  • There's adoption pain of adding contacts. I already reduced it to a minimum with the show me contacts feature and making it much simpler than other apps, but it's hard to avoid completely. Perhaps I can highlight the show me contacts feature more and encourage users with some mechanisms.

Product-wise I have many more ideas from bigger new features to quality of life things to reduce friction. But I also am quite excited to work on other completely different project ideas, some seem to have better financial potential. As I work full time and only do side projects my time is limited.

Business challenges

The problems I see to make this a tiny financially sustainable business compared to an app for myself:

  • As said before most people, who could benefit don't know it so they also won't search for it, people don't want to admit they need it, so probably hard to grow
  • Consumer willingness to pay on the App Store is very low generally
  • Margins on the App Store are bad so it takes quite a lot of subscriptions
  • I guess churn will be high because while it reduces the time needed compared to not having a tool, it still needs time and effort to form a habit and people tend to do short-term things over things that are more long-term beneficial. Many will give up and cancel the subscription.

So the question is what would you focus on?

  1. Continue talking to people to get feedback. A few are also considering becoming customers.
  2. Work on the product
  3. Do a mix of 1. and 2.
  4. Use the app for my own needs and slowly shift focus to a new project while maintaining the app and adding features when I want them.
  5. Something else I didn't list?

I'm curious to hear your opinion about what you would do. Of course, also any feedback on the app itself is welcome.

Thanks, Kai

0 Likes 2 Comments
Seamus Pioneer

My vote is #3. Keep making progress on the update, but get feedback while doing so. You don't want to blindly plow ahead and build something no one likes. But you also don't want to stay stagnant and spend all of your time talking to people and not making any tangible progress. In terms of the app, from my personal experience my biggest challenge is that I have 10+ communication channels for different people (Text, Slack, Discord, Reddit, Email, Telegram, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Messager, Whatsapp, etc.) and it's hard to remember to check them all. The result is that I can sometimes miss responding to a message for days or weeks. If the app had the ability to give me an update on my last conversation and whether I had anything pending ACROSS platforms, I'd find it very useful

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Kai Author

Thank you a lot for the feedback! Currently, I do 3) as I think the same. However, I might switch from 1. April to another project as my goal is also to do three things this year. Since I use my app everyday I will still improve it from then just more slowly.

I know people have many channels today and it's annoying. One little thing my app does is that it silently counts what contact method you used, when you open a conversation via MeetFriends, and then it sorts them. So for a person where I normally use WhatsApp it will appear as first and for a person with Telegram it will be that. This helps sticking to one channel. But I also actively try to have the habit of communicating with one person in one channel only. I like to declutter so while I cannot force all my people into e.g. Telegram I can try to minimize channels this way. Unfortunately most channels (WhatsApp etc) are closed systems where it's very hard to impossible to see anything as third party app. But I will brainstorm if there's any workaround for this problem.

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sona

Hey Kai,

My vote is #3 and #5, where #5 is for you to consider a non-aggressive fund raising strategy over years while you work on #1 and #2.

My action #1 is that I will get an iphone for myself today although I had a policy of not purchasing apple products coming (due to some historic and maybe not so much relevant reasons anymore) - this is how much I would love to use your app! My action #2 is to share about this app with my coworkers/friends who have iPhones, who are more likely to be interested.

My concern is that I see a scarce audience who now appreciates the structured virtual social life, so I predict the app will not be so popular among the wider public during the first 5 years. At the same time, I believe that there are already a few thousand progressive human beings on our Earth who will quickly see the benefits from using your app in order to improve their life quality so much that they will be willing to pay a subscription fee for it, like myself!

All the best, Sona

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