Hello from Scotland

[Matt_J]

Hello,
Its been a while since I registered for the forum (4 years?!) so its about time I wrote an introduction and started participating in the forum.

Brief intro (TLDR: made some games and little money, then got a "career") :
I was always slightly against the idea of having a "career" when I was young. My first entrepreneurial venture was creating flash games (remember those?). During and after university I created a total of 17 games with a few exceeding 1 million plays and two exceeding 10 million! Sounds great right? While I was genuinely happy with their popularity I unfortunately had no idea how to monetise properly and peaked at $50 a day in adsense revenue from my website. This felt like a good amount when I was young but looking back I could have easily made 10x that with some minor improvements (such as putting ads in the damn games instead of just on my website!).
Eventually I got a job in software development and started my career as a software developer and didn't do any significant side projects or entrepreneurial stuff for 6 whole years!

Then I came across Mj's books:
They inspired me to develop my own games again. I spent 6 months building an game, released it on the app store and... nothing. The market had changed. Competition and quality was much higher now. I lost interest in improving the project any further.

Current business:
During the pandemic I had lots of time on my hands so I began work on an app in a different genre. I am a keen runner / cycling so I built in app in that area. I learned from the mistakes of the past (The biggest mistake from my previous app was that I tried to do it with my existing skill set. This time I had to learn a bunch of new skills to build what I wanted).
My app idea was to add gamification to exploring a city while running / cycling. It would connect to a customers existing GPS exercise tracking provider (strava, garmin etc) and calculate the percent of streets that they have explored in a city.

- It took 1.5 years to launch the first version and get my first user.
- Another 6 months to get my first paying customer (recurring subscription)
- Customers are now signing up through word of mouth (I've not done any marketing in the last few months and still customers are joining)
- I am now up to 1.7k users with a few percent paying

Theres still a long way to go but I hope to share the journey, and what I've learned here,
Matt

 

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[Isaac Odongo]

Thanks for becoming active

What is stopping you from getting 10k users, 100k users, 1million users and so on?

What is it that you need to do to get more people paying?

 

[Andy Black]

Hello,
Its been a while since I registered for the forum (4 years?!) so its about time I wrote an introduction and started participating in the forum.

Brief intro (TLDR: made some games and little money, then got a "career") :
I was always slightly against the idea of having a "career" when I was young. My first entrepreneurial venture was creating flash games (remember those?). During and after university I created a total of 17 games with a few exceeding 1 million plays and two exceeding 10 million! Sounds great right? While I was genuinely happy with their popularity I unfortunately had no idea how to monetise properly and peaked at $50 a day in adsense revenue from my website. This felt like a good amount when I was young but looking back I could have easily made 10x that with some minor improvements (such as putting ads in the damn games instead of just on my website!).
Eventually I got a job in software development and started my career as a software developer and didn't do any significant side projects or entrepreneurial stuff for 6 whole years!

Then I came across Mj's books:
They inspired me to develop my own games again. I spent 6 months building an game, released it on the app store and... nothing. The market had changed. Competition and quality was much higher now. I lost interest in improving the project any further.

Current business:
During the pandemic I had lots of time on my hands so I began work on an app in a different genre. I am a keen runner / cycling so I built in app in that area. I learned from the mistakes of the past (The biggest mistake from my previous app was that I tried to do it with my existing skill set. This time I had to learn a bunch of new skills to build what I wanted).
My app idea was to add gamification to exploring a city while running / cycling. It would connect to a customers existing GPS exercise tracking provider (strava, garmin etc) and calculate the percent of streets that they have explored in a city.

- It took 1.5 years to launch the first version and get my first user.
- Another 6 months to get my first paying customer (recurring subscription)
- Customers are now signing up through word of mouth (I've not done any marketing in the last few months and still customers are joining)
- I am now up to 1.7k users with a few percent paying

Theres still a long way to go but I hope to share the journey, and what I've learned here,
Matt

Nice.

What's the difference between paid and non-paid?

Are there other paid apps that do a similar thing? How are they getting paid signups?

 

[Matt_J]

Thanks for becoming active

What is stopping you from getting 10k users, 100k users, 1million users and so on?

What is it that you need to do to get more people paying?

Thanks for the reply!
There's not much stopping me from achieving 10k now. I think a little more marketing would be enough

For 100k I think I will need to expand the social / competitive elements of the app. Currently I have leaderboards for each city. A few people have asked for a private leaderboard for their running club. I think there is big potential in getting running/cycling clubs interested in the app.

The app only supports cities in the UK at the moment so expansion to other countries would also be needed

For getting more people paying I think my first step is to reduce friction for in app payments. I've done this on iOS but on Android I am still using a third party payment provide and not google pay. Beyond that there are a few commonly requested features that I should add to the app

What's the difference between paid and non-paid?

Thanks for the reply!

Users on the non-paid version are limited viewing the 3 cities that they are most active in. They are also limited to their top 6 neighbourhoods within each city.

Paid gives people access to all cities, all neighbourhoods, premium areas such as national parks and the ability to create their own custom areas (useful if they live outside of an area that is currently supported in the app). There are also leaderboards to add a competitive edge to it (free users can see an "all-time" leaderboard while paid users get monthly leaderboards as well)

I've found 2 other websites that do something similar. They are both relatively small (run by 1 or 2 people as far as I can tell). One method they are using is restricting the number of historic activities that are imported from strava / garmin when a user first registers. I need to investigate further into what they offer.

Thanks for questions! They definitely helped me consider my next steps

 

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[Andy Black]

Cool.


Maybe the most important question:

How are they getting paid signups?

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Welcome Matt and congrats on getting your first paying customer!

 

[Matt_J]

Thanks MJ!

How are they getting paid signups?

Good question. This needs further investigation. I've got a non-paid accounts with both websites.
I should probably check out what their paid features have to offer as well

 

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