Ask HN: Bootstrapping my app, tell me what you think? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Bootstrapping my app, tell me what you think?

5 pointsmalia13 comments

Hi guys,

I'm bootstraping a mobile app that enables long distant couples to virtually interact while timezones apart.

The heartbeat feature will let users hear each other's heart beating in real time and the shared clock will sync differing time zones or busy schedules and send a notification when you're mutually available.

Going to use the lean startup method and build one feature first. I have a site up, would love to know what you think. Does it clearly tell you what the app is about?

www.closerthanapp.com

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I'm hardly a model of success so take anything I say with appropriate weight.

The site is very clear about what it does and looks great. If you have the ability to map a finger in front of the camera to a heart beat that's kind of cool. Seems a bit trivial and useless thing to do to me. However like I said I'm not a model for success and I am 33 year old man / programmer, I still don't understand the success of Instagram, Twitter, cat pictures or almost anything on the internet.

You indicate this will be available for iOS/Android/Windows. Is that necessary? Why not just do one to see if you have any traction. Are you doing this to make money? If so, your pricing seems very low.

I would never use it but I'm not a teenager in love or in a long distance relationship. I'm married with two kids.

A unique idea and wish you success. Just take it easy and focus on one platform I say unless you have friends working with you on different platforms or funding, just don't want to see your burned out like I've been before. Have you got any indication anyone is interested in this?

EDIT: Just noticed the first thing you said is it's bootstrapped. So yes definitely think doing three platforms is a bad idea. Are you doing all that other stuff too? Video, messenger? I can't see how you could run a service like this bootstrapped for that price. Biggest thing: any indication anyone is interested before you develop, any beta users?

Hi thanks for your response.

I put all platforms to test how many people of each platform decide to click to subscribe for an email update for when the app is out. Though I get what you mean, it's probably misleading.

I was unsure of how to price, especially against my competitors and other apps out there. I plan to eventually have other revenue streams such as selling stickers. I sometimes wonder how some of the biggest apps that sell for such low prices are even surviving.

I've got 500 people signed up to receive an email notification when the app releases so that is promising.

I also wanted opinions on whether I should should state on the website that this app will release as a single feature beta version on iOS and I am building as MVP to begin with.

I was in bicoastal relationship for two years, but I don't think we would have used an app like this. It seems like just another place to have messages trapped (is there any way to export? why use this over text messaging or email?). IMHO, the benefit of this app versus the status quo has to be made clearer.

When you're starting out, go with free. I know your price points are very low, but the main friction is deciding what service to use to pay you through, deciding how much I trust that the billing will be honest, getting out my wallet, etc. When you want fast user growth, you need to be free.

The pricing is also confusing, because it isn't immediately clear that the annual pricing is for the same tier as the monthly. I'd swap the order of those two (keep the annual bigger) so that it's more logical for a left-to-right reader. First you introduce the tier (on the left) and then you introduce the annual upsell (in the middle). You could also try a variant of gotomeeting's pricing funnel, where they offer the discount in the second stage, after a user has selected a plan. This would simplify things further without really undermining your low-price message.

Thanks for your thoughts. Looking back my pricing order and strategy does seem a bit awkward. I've changed it so that FREE comes first with the most popular or value-for-money goes in the middle.

I forgot to mention that I have little coding experience and plan to either outsource or look for a technical cofounder for my startup. So that's about as far as I can stretch to when editing my site.

I do want to start out as a free app but have only kept pricing info to test the click through rate.

I've already used a messaging app for couples with my girlfriend. I do remember they had some nice features, like sending kisses and hugs, but we eventually stopped using it. Mainly because we had a lot of messages not being sent.

Currently I'm also bootstrapping my own product and I can see that you might have some problems (like I've):

1. It's always nice to have an app for each mobile platform... but it costs a lot of energy to keep them running! I'd start supporting only one. Use all the spare time for marketing (it's incredibly hard to sell things...).

2. We had access to nice features using the app I mentioned, but the chat experience wasn't fluid enough. Sometimes, when we try to do a lot of things, we forget the basics.

3. The heart beating feature sounds nice... but is it something important to your public? We've added tons of features we loved to our product. It's very disappointing to see that they aren't using them.

The use case is clear, it's not one of my use cases at the moment, but it's clear.

Less clear is how the app addresses the hard problems of long distance relationships, which for me were those times when communications were prickly. Cuddly kinda' took care of itself. Scheduling communications was more a matter of routine than checking calendars. Still seems to be the case that we just set aside a certain time of day.

Finally, I think the idea of generating revenue from services product is probably better than pursuing subscription. It's easier to have a high dollar transaction that would take 100 years of subscription revenue to generate. It also keeps the focus on delivering what each individual needs.

Good luck.

What do you mean when you say 'services product'? Is that where the person buys the app one off?

EDIT: Forgive my ignorance or how silly of a question that may sound.

Sorry, meant "services/product". For example, deriving revenue from jewelry sales or floral delivery rather than subscriptions to the app.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Yeah, you should submit it as a Show HN.

I was in a long-distance relationship and would definitely have bought this at that price. The landing page is clear and the photo on it speaks to me.

I wouldn't have actually used the heartbeat feature, but the mutual schedule one is valuable. I might even use that with my wife now occasionally. I would have when I was interviewing to move to the U.K.

Thanks so much for your thoughts :)

It can, but people read things differently. You might want to consider doing multi-variate or even just A/B testing on the landing page wording. A short animation or some cartoon pictures could help to reinforce the concept.

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