I'll tell you at 3 o'clock! Why does your app have no users?

Recently, I have come into contact with some App teams, all of which have their own Apps and want a lot of users. However, most of them have only been online for a short time and have relatively few users. So they sent them to me and asked me to see how to promote them. Then I installed them and tried. Due to problems with my phone, I couldn’t install many Apps. Every time I installed a new App, I had to uninstall an old App. Mainly, Huawei’s g7 phone also had a lot of problems, so the installation was also very painful. Then after the installation, I experienced a lot of problems, so I quickly uninstalled them all because they were too bad. But I also found many problems, so I wrote them down and gave some advice to everyone who is preparing to start a business making apps.

1. The product experience is too poor

Poor product experience can generally be divided into two aspects: technical and human. The technical one is mainly bugs. Bugs appear before you even click a few times, such as duplicate numbers in the address book, jump errors when sharing... Anyway, there are all kinds of problems. It seems that the main reason is too little testing and lack of professionalism. Most people think it's ok if they test it with their own mobile phones and there are no problems. At least find a tester who specializes in testing, Testbird, to test it.

Next, let's talk about the human experience issues. The first App I tried was an animated graphic app. After I installed it, the top of the app was blank. Not only was the content blank, but the background was also gray. In particular, the search button at the top was almost the same color as the background. You couldn't see it at all. It was like looking for a white hat in the snow. I was blind. I was drunk just thinking about it. Anyway, I don’t know what it feels like for new users to install it.

Of course, this App is for female users . I wonder how women can possibly like this kind of color experience. It makes me feel drunk just thinking about it.

Next, I tried the second App. In order to install the second App, I almost uninstalled Alipay and WeChat. The key point was that they were too big. After installing it, I saw that it was 50M. I thought to myself, does a simple social App need to be so big? After the key was installed, it still started slowly. I thought to myself, how much this user must love you and be loyal to you.

The next thing I experienced was the group app. Someone said that a group was created for me and I just had to go in and join it. However, after I installed it, it started very slowly. I won’t go into details about that. I was willing to wait for the sake of helping out. The key point was that after I entered and knew the group name, there was no search function. I had to look for it one by one in the categories and lists. There were dozens of pages and there were too many to find.

The last thing I experienced was a sports app, which is also quite well-known. However, every time I opened it, a guide page was displayed. Each guide page had four or five pictures. I had to look at each picture for several seconds before I could move on to the next one. The key point was that there was no skip function, so I had to watch them all.

Of course, the weirder things are yet to come. When you are using this App, every time you switch functions, a pop-up window will pop up, asking you to go to the App Store to write a review. You can either go or cancel. It is very annoying. It is ridiculous to play with your users like this just to get reviews on the App Store.

…

These are the four apps I tried. After trying them, I uninstalled them all and felt much better.

2. Insufficient product innovation

There are too many startups making apps now. According to statistics from KuChuan, the number of apps that are currently updated has exceeded 1 million, and the total number of apps in the app store is more than 3 million. That is to say, among so many apps, 2/3 are zombie apps, and 1/3 are half-dead apps, with some people occasionally updating them.

Of course there are many more, just like the App I experienced, there is a small team updating them, but these Apps are very uninnovative, they are basically copied from the PC, and there are jokes on the computer. I also made a joke app. There are group apps on computers, so I also made a group app. There is Facebook on computers, so I also made a social app. To be honest, there is no innovation at all, and the key technology is not as good as that on computers.

Finally, these apps will be very difficult to promote. Without innovation and resources, promotion will be very difficult. Some apps are ported from PC to mobile phones. At least they still have a big Weibo or WeChat account. If they are ported, they can still attract some users. However, these apps with nothing in them will be even more difficult to promote if you are unwilling to spend money. Sometimes you think that an app made by a team spending hundreds of thousands of dollars is not as good as a Weibo or WeChat account made by a junior high school student.

At the same time, let ’s take a look at apps like Zuji and Faceu that became popular for a short time and then faded away. After all, they are somewhat innovative. Apps without any innovation wouldn’t even have a chance to become popular. It’s quite worrying to think about this, for these entrepreneurs. Therefore, when starting a business and developing apps, which is just transplanting, it is better to have some innovations, otherwise it will be too difficult.

3. The speculative mentality of starting an app business

The mobile Internet bubble is getting bigger and bigger, spreading to the mentality of bosses in many traditional industries. The high premium effect of the Internet has also made many traditional business owners have some speculative mentality, that is, making an App may be able to obtain more capital income, but they don’t know that Internet thinking and traditional thinking are fundamentally different.

The Internet thinking is to spend money to develop the market first, and then generate revenue or conduct capital operations after the market is bigger. This span is generally about five years.

The traditional thinking is that you make money while spending money. The general idea is that when you hire someone, the value he creates must be 10 times more than the compensation he receives, or in other words, you earn 10 dollars for every dollar you spend. I remember meeting a boss of a traditional enterprise who was recruiting people in the Internet industry. He said he was very rich, but when asked about the salary, he said he planned to spend 8K to 10K to recruit people at the director level. He said this salary was relatively high in their industry and there was also commission. To be honest, it is difficult to recruit talented people in the Internet industry with this kind of salary.

So we can see the difference between traditional thinking and Internet thinking. Internet thinking is to spend a lot of money to recruit manpower, develop marketing, and either succeed or fail, and give it a try. Traditional thinking still belongs to the idea of ​​planned economy and is relatively backward.

Most traditional companies that transform into the Internet fail unless they truly change their way of thinking. Because most traditional companies that are undergoing transformation have a more or less speculative mentality. Therefore, you must think carefully before developing a mobile Internet app. It does not mean that you can get rich by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. You may even end up with nothing.

In addition, most of the mobile Internet companies that have received financing have hundreds of people working on one app. The human cost is also huge.

Therefore, when traditional enterprises transform themselves into mobile Internet apps, they must have long-term planning and capital investment. Otherwise, they will not be able to truly gain users or get better premium opportunities by relying on a speculative mentality.

Finally, the three conditions also show that it is not easy to attract mobile Internet users. Without a good product and experience, without good talent investment, without good capital investment, and without innovation, it is impossible to have tens of millions of users by relying on a few people to make an App.

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