To New Beginnings 🌱
I’m not sure why I haven’t done this sooner but I thought it might be helpful to document my journey in building a new mental health app from scratch. I plan to write about the challenges, the experiments, the wins, the losses, and everything in between.
For context, I’m a non-technical founder so although I do all the product design, I do have to source a developer for the actual development.
The app that I’m currently working on is called Sunday.
The goal is to help improve the overall well-being of users by providing unique tools that help you stay present and mindful. Some of these tools include guided journaling, mood tracking, and meditation sessions.
This is the 2nd app I’ve built. Prior to this, I built a bill-tracking app called Chromabill - which is currently in the process of being acquired.
I made a lot of mistakes with my 1st app — not investing in marketing early on, thinking users would magically appear once my product was built, constantly iterating without understanding user needs, and other common pitfalls that many first-time founders make.
A Seasoned Approach 🧠
This time around, I plan to do things differently — by taking a slower, more methodical approach.
I’ve decided to make the app free for users. In my previous app, I did a subscription-only service with a 7-day free trial. This worked well but I lost a lot of potential users who chose not to subscribe.
For Sunday, the app will be free to use in order to retain users with the opportunity of convincing them to upgrade later on, if they find the app valuable. It’s a lot easier to sell to existing users vs. find new ones.
~ Did you know that it costs 5x as much to attract a new customer, than to keep an existing one? ~
In order to start marketing early on, I’ve already set up a Twitter and TikTok account for the application. I plan to post content and build hype early on. I’m also marketing the app on my personal TikTok as well (which has around ~27k followers).
To further build hype prior to launching pre-orders on the app store, I’ll be hiring a seasoned marketing specialist to help with tailoring the perfect pre-launch, launch, and post-launch strategies.
I’m still building out the designs for the app but here are a couple of screenshots. As always, I’ve kept everything dark mode and added in some purple accents. My product design skills have gotten a bit better over time.
Current Focus 🎯
My primary focus now is to create a solid onboarding experience. In my last app, the onboarding was terrible and no one understood how to use the app at first. When you confuse users, you lose users.
So this time around, I’m keeping the onboarding nice and simple to help educate new users. My developer already started working on the onboarding flow this week to get the ball rolling.
On my side, I’ve started to fill out some App Store Connect metadata such as app name, description, screenshots, etc. A great resource to help you tailor your keywords and get better at App Store Optimization is using App Figures. The founder Ariel Michaeli posts incredible guides in his App Teardowns.
I’ve also hired a fantastic illustrator named Sofia to help me with setting up the brand guidelines for the application. I provided her with a mood board and tasked her with creating 5 moods that users can select prior to journaling. This was the outcome: