Solving the chicken and egg problem

Cianos

Hi all,
We recently released our app for iOS/Android - it's like WhatsApp but allows users to assign tasks and share Notes with each other. Think something like Slack or Trello but rather than aimed at designers or tech companies, it's for construction crews, restaurant staff, cleaners etc etc - folks who won't be sitting at a desk all day and getting to grips with a tricky/complex piece of software.

If you want a better idea of the concept you can check out the landing page here; www.joinworkapp.com

Anyway, since release we've been running a few ads in the app stores to get downloads.

We got a small set of users who are actively using it every day and essentially seem to be running their business through the app which is amazing.

However the majority of downloads we get result in little to no activity.

We believe that the reason for this is the classic chicken and egg problem - when someone downloads, they're the only person they know using it so there's nobody else there to starting using it with, as such they can't start using the app without inviting someone, but they're not going to invite someone without being confident that it's worth doing so, which they need someone else they know using it to determine, and so on and so forth.

For the next phase of development we want to try and get around this problem, but right now are not entirely sure what the best way to do is, hence this post.

One idea is to create a setup wizard or onboarding process such as;

Step 1: What are you working on at the moment? (user enters the project name)
Step 2: What's a task you need to get done? (user creates their first task)
Step 3: Any info you need to remember for this project? (user creates their first note).
Step 4: Who else is working on this with you? Let's invite them now! (user sends out invitations to their colleagues)

Beyond this we're not too sure, and I hoped you might have some suggestions. Our priority right now is to hit 100 daily active users, so while the app is pretty rough around the edges still, our current goal is to just push the activity and get a better medium to long term response from any ads we're running.

Thanks for reading!

Atomic Pineapple

On your website remove the "Just" from "Just 3 simple features" and change it to "Three simple features", A/B test it if you can but when I first read it, it turned me off reading further.

The accessibility tags on the images don't inspire confidence either.

On the chicken and the egg....it sounds like you're a business to business seller but it looks like you are trying to sell as a business to consumer? The app sounds like it's perfect for an SME that needs a simplified communication process with todo lists. Are you targeting ads on Google etc. to businesses or consumers?

If you could get a few small businesses to start using it and then use these as references to highlight the usefulness and success of the app then you can start selling to more and more of these types of businesses.

If I'm wrong and the app is for consumers then you need to look for some sort of viral growth, you need to find out what it is the people downloading it are really looking for and what would make them share it with people within their company.

Have you got analytics installed in the app? If not that is the next step rather than a setup wizard, if people aren't sharing the app now, they are still unlikely to do so when a wizard asks them if the app does not address the lack of value for them.

With analytics, set up some A/B experiments to test what people are actually doing with the app and test some of your assumptions about what people actually find value in, be wary of vanity metrics - https://tim.blog/2009/05/19/vanity-metrics-vs-actionable-metrics/ - make sure you are testing something valuable and not something that just leads you to believe your assumptions are correct, challenge them.

Graham

You need to:

1) give the downloader immediate value
2) find a hook that will entice the initial downloaders colleagues to download the app.

Personally I'd de-emphasise the 'invitation' aspect of the app. Instead just send tasks/notes etc to app-less assignees by email.

You don't need to offer the app-less assignees full functionality by email, maybe just a 'bob has assigned the following task to you' / 'mary has added the following note for you' type email. At the bottom of the email a single sentence suggesting what the recipient could do with the task/note if they had the full app.

Original downloader gets immediate value as he can assign tasks/notes straight away.
App-less users get an incentive to download the app.

Cianos

Thanks very much for the great feedback.

@Atomic Pineapple, at the moment we're assuming it'll be more B2B than B2C or C2C. In saying that, it could be useful for service providers to communicate with their clients, so hopefully there'd be some B2C usage in there too.

In terms of analysing the numbers, unfortunately we don't have enough usage yet to pull valuable data from. While we did see the downloads coming in when we ran ads on the app stores, there was no worthwhile engagement with the app beyond an installation really, but we feel that if we can solve this problem the activity around the app and its viral reach potential in turn will improve a lot.

@Graham, we really liked the idea of allowing non-app users to receive content from the app via email.

I would be worried that it might make the usage (and in turn user growth) a bit divided and possibly overly complicated. i.e, if we're successful in getting people to add their friends as email recipients, then we should be able to get them to invite their friends to download and be a 'proper' user. Or if the flow presented is complicated by the inclusion of the email option, then there's the potential of losing them as users altogether.

Another concern would be that a big value that the user gets is the extra engagement received from notifications letting them know that Tasks have been completed or Notes have been updated.

The flow at the moment is;

User A assigns Task X to User B
User B receives a notification to let them know Task X is assigned to them
(User B completes task X)
User B marks the task as complete
User A receives a notification that Task X is complete

So as above, the engagement is heavily based on the notifications pertaining to the status of the task, and if communication was taken outside the app that wouldn't be there.

It still is a really nice idea and one that could be worth experimenting with. Unfortunately our developer is not as available to experiment as we'd like (he's cofounder but on the basis of reduced fee, and in fairness he's put a mammoth amount of work in to get us this far) so we've to be very careful with how we progress from here.

And on that point, if anyone reading this is interested in getting involved by all means get in touch.

G-Man

Ries in Lean Startup has lots of examples where startups dont spend money on the IT, but concentrate on getting feedback, even collating it manually.

When you have small numbers try mimicing full functionality in an email from the appless user. i.e they email back DONE.

At the back end, just have manual process updating the status. When you see email users starting to use, encourage them to move to the APP.