BTW, I'm the OP and am happy to answer questions here. My expertise is obviously in consumer internet products but I spend a lot of time thinking about growth. It's my superpower!
Our app is free, so we aren't eager to pay for installs at any price, and paid aq is not a major channel for us. The lion's share of our new users come from organic search, social sharing, and word of mouth.
Also- thanks for taking questions and congrats on your success :)
Our growth has been remarkably steady, with minor seasonal factors. If the majority of your acquisition channels scale with the number of users (SEO, social, viral) then you should see a steady accumulation of momentum over time, even from a very small number — perhaps the low thousands.
We've had a strong word of mouth factor from the very beginning, but I attribute that mostly to the brand and the fact that this is an underserved market. Parents have traditionally been invisible to tech companies and they are delighted someone is finally building for them.
This also sounds like a good link that can go on indiehackers.com
We solve an huge number of extremely important problems for our users. Some things just off the top of my head:
- Find local daycares that have spaces available, which is pretty important when you need to work
- Find a nearby restroom or changing table when you need one RIGHT NOW (and when you need one, it's usually RIGHT NOW)
- Get parenting advice in real time on just about any topic
- If you're someone who doesn't fit in with traditional parenting groups (mostly moms, mostly married, etc), connect with a community of parents like you (single parents, stay home dads, etc)
- Find places where you can nurse or pump safely
- Get suggestions for things to do with your kids, because they are bored and you need to get out of the house
- Locate family-friendly restaurants and businesses when traveling
Etc. In some ways this is actually a challenge as there's no single, dead-simple value prop that we can use. But I love Winnie. We're genuinely helping people be less stressed and more successful as parents.
I see that Winnie have great topics discussion with questions asked and answered by users.
For a new forum, there are bound to be empty-room syndromes.
How did you guys manage to kickstart discussions in the beginning? Is it all organic or is there some growth hack involved?
This qns have been bothering me a while and I can't seem to get any good readings anywhere else.
Initially it did feel like an empty room, but this was before the ability to start discussions with other users and ask questions. Initially you could only add reviews of places. I remember adding a couple of reviews and since I didn't get any immediate engagement from other users it felt like I was adding valuable content but it wouldn't really be useful until they got a large number of users.
When discussions became available the biggest thing was that Anne and her co-founder Sara were really active users and shared their knowledge of being parents. Every single post that I added was liked and/or commented on by them. If you asked a parenting question or posted something in the early days it would be answered/commented/liked by Anne and Sara and often within minutes. They also would add valuable and engaging content on a daily basis whether it was an interesting article, something funny, or just asking a question that could be answered by users and start a discussion. When you see how active both of them were it makes you feel like posting something or commenting is okay and at least going to be acknowledged and appreciated by them even if there weren't a whole lot of other users that were active. I always knew that in the early days the biggest thing was just continuing to add valuable content and eventually the engagement would follow. After a few weeks I started to see other users become more active and start liking my posts and adding their own which just continued to grow until they got to some of their big growth events like being featured in the app store or launching their daycare directory.
Not all products need to invest in amazing apps or apps at all, but if you don't have a decent app than ASO and featuring are not going to be available to you. This may or may not be important to your business.
There are many benefits to native apps from the experience polish to the community and resources surrounding them. There are 2 major negatives to native: dev time and cost.
The Native vs Cordova/SomethingElse discussion is going to have different answers depending on your use case. Let me restate that for importance. Your use case will dictate which is "correct" early on.
For us, the rapid product tests we were looking to run, in both web and mobile platforms with a very small engineering team all but required a cordova app. As our product has grown more mature, and major client features change less frequent, the appeal of native has grown. But despite that appeal, we remain firmly in cordova and will for at least another 6 months.