Earlier this year, I launched my first ever app on the App store. It was a weather app (yes, one of hundreds, if not thousands) with a twist — a weather app that tells you how bad climate change is in your area.
Fast forward 6 months. How’s it doing?
Nobody on Earth is using the app.
Gone are the days I thought the app would magically take off and everybody would love it.
But one thing is crystal clear. There are so many things I could try to improve it!
So in the heat of climate change, I decided to give my app a makeover and release the first major update in mid-September.
Here is a quick summary of the three biggest mistakes I made, and what I could’ve done differently.
1. Narrow down the audience and get to know them more
Having worked as a product manager for almost 2 years, this should’ve come as second nature. I made my initial target a broad spectrum. “Anyone interested in climate change”. I didn’t even specify to what extend my target audience is interested or knowledgeable in climate change.
The key for a successful indie-project is to make a very small niche market fall deeply in love with your product. I shouldn’t make my audience a whole “spectrum”, but a single snapshot/point on that spectrum.
Once I identify that small group, I will conduct a handful of user interviews. Unlike larger projects, small ones can adapt fast based on user feedbacks. I should reap the benefit and focusing on satisfying my small target audience.
2. Educate myself more on the solution
Identifying the problem and becoming an expert on that problem is the bare minimum. But it shouldn’t be the only thing that matters. I was too busy focusing on the “problems”, that I totally overlooked the actual “solutions”.
I knew that people are feeling anxious about climate change, but I wasn’t giving them any solutions to feel better about it.
To fix this, I will go out to the real world and identify what people do to actually alleviate their climate change anxiety. If I can emulate the experience in my app, it will lead to a much more desirable product.
3. Make it lean, but also perfect.
Yes, building a lean product is like THE unbreakable law in product development.
But I took that too seriously and literally—while focusing on being “lean” too much, I ended up making a low-quality product.
Being lean does not mean make a cheap/bad product. It’s about having 1 really good feature instead of 5 mediocre ones.
The product should be attractive enough with just that 1 feature. I was too obsessed with shipping fast, the core feature ended up feeling quiet lost and incomplete. Even if it means having fewer features, the product itself should feel complete and joyful to use even from the little things it offers.
The full-send
As I said in #3, Jikimi feels incomplete, I know it better than anyone. That is why I didn’t promote it as much as I could’ve, and didn’t even tell a lot of my friends about it.
Still, these three big problems wouldn’t have been clear to me without this failed launch. Having a firsthand experience of the app’s struggle taught me just how much effort must go in to actually get people to use your app
I’m happy to have taken my first step in the journey, and even more excited to hustle to get to the finishing line.