Your app has no users mainly because of the following reasons...

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Recently, I have been in contact with some App teams. They all have their own Apps and want a lot of users. However, most of them have not been online for long and have relatively few users. So they sent me their Apps and asked me to see how to promote them. Then I installed them and tried them. Due to the problem of my phone, I can't install many Apps. Every time I install a new App, I have to uninstall an old App. The main reason is that Huawei's G7 phone also has many problems, so it is very painful to install it. Then after installation, I experienced many 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 you who are preparing to start a business to make 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 artificial experience problem. The first App I tried was a gif app. After installing it, the top was blank. Not only was the content blank, but the background was gray. In particular, the color of the search button at the top was almost the same as the background color. You couldn't see it at all. It was like looking for a white hat in the snow. I was so drunk just thinking about it. Anyway, I don't know how new users feel after installing 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. I almost uninstalled Alipay and WeChat before I could install it. The problem was that it was too big. I saw that it was 50M. I thought, “Brother, does a simple social app need to be so big?” The problem was that it was slow to start after it was installed. I thought, “How much do users have to love 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.

***I experienced a sports App, which is also relatively 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 moving on to the next one. The key point was that there was no skip function, so I had to watch the whole picture.

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 poor in innovation, basically copied from the PC, there are jokes on the PC, I also make a joke App, there are group Apps on the PC, I also make a group App, there is Facebook on the PC, I also make a social App, to be honest, there is no innovation at all, the key technology is not as good as that on the PC.

***, it is these apps that are very difficult to promote. Without innovation and resources, it will be very difficult to promote. 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, if you look at apps like Zuji and Facemeng that became popular for a short time and then faded away, they are at least somewhat innovative. Apps without any innovation don’t even have a chance to become popular. It’s really worrying to think about them, for these entrepreneurs. Therefore, when starting an app business, you need to transplant and bring in 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.

Traditional thinking is to make money while spending money. The general idea is to hire a person, and the value created by this person should be 10 times more than the salary he gets, or to spend one dollar and earn 10 dollars. I remember meeting a boss of a traditional enterprise who came to the Internet industry to recruit people. He said he was very rich, but when asked about the salary, he said he planned to spend 8K-10K to recruit people, and also required the director level, saying that this salary was relatively high in their industry, and there was also commission. To be honest, this salary can't recruit many high-level people in the Internet industry.

So we can see the difference between traditional thinking and Internet thinking. Internet thinking is to spend a lot of money to recruit people, do marketing, and either succeed or fail, and fight hard. Traditional thinking is still a planned economy idea, which is still relatively backward.

Most traditional enterprises that transform into the Internet fail unless they truly change their way of thinking. This is because most traditional enterprises that transform have more or less some speculative mentality. Therefore, you must think clearly before making a mobile Internet App. It is not 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 an app, and the human cost is also very 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.

***, 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.