The month of May 2022 in Review
Wow, hard to believe it's only been a month since officially announcing the iPhone release of Lazztech Hub!
Since releasing the iPhone app I've put on a number of new hats, transitioning from more isolative development work, in my free time, to dividing that free time after my day job to communicating with users for feedback, marketing, & development.
I also got right on the effort of getting the Android app released and managed to get it on the Play Store in an Open Beta release!
I've gotten to just about 40 user signups, of which 5 are people I'm unfamiliar with that I'll assume found, installed, & signed up as a result of my marketing efforts. This may not sound like much but I've nearly doubled the user count since getting the app released so I'm certainly counting this as a win. I started with about 20 who were early adopters that helped during the beta testing.
I tried various different marketing methods from Facebook & Instagram posts, reaching out to friends directly, a Google Adwords campaign, an Instagram Ad campaign, a promotional ad campaign via the Apple Appstore, & sharing content about the app on Reddit, & IndieHackers. Other than this I found and used a service called previewed.app to generate the marketing images on the Apple App Store & Google Play store.
Out of all of those the Apple Appstore paid promotion seemed to perform the best of any of the Ad campaigns. Then the Reddit post to r/startup & r/sideproject subreddits got about 4k views and some feedback from interested prospective users. Then after Reddit, I also received some very supportive engagement from IndieHackers. I definitely intend to continue posting there and would recommend it to anyone bootstrapping a startup or side project like this.
Through gaining ~20 users I made sure to communicate with them through their initial setup process to get feedback & recommendations. Some of the feedback was low-hanging bugs or adjustments, others were more significant feature requests that I took note of to get an idea of which were the highest-ranking requests.
I've pushed out a number of updates already based on user feedback. Which included:
- Android hardware back button support
- Less persistent sign-in prompts - the app now stays signed in vs prompting for sign in when re-opening the app which is more in line with how other social apps handle sign-in
- Streamlined signup form by only asking for a birth year for age restriction validation
Of the more significant feature requests, I've compiled this list in rough order of most to least times requested:
- Calendar events
- Public Hubs - For the discovery of community group gatherings at landmarks like public parks
- Ability to mute arrival and departure push notifications on a Hub by Hub basis
- Some form of chat integration
- Sharable content or links to Hubs/Events that can be shared on other platforms
- One-click signup with 3rd party social accounts
Going forward I'll be sticking with my initial intention to build based on user feedback and have already made good progress on the Calendar events feature. Below of some screenshots of the work in progress feature.
I've eased off of marketing due to the quantity of feedback and am taking some time to shift back to applying my free time available for the app towards development, & bug fixes. I think that it will work best to try to grow organically as feedback is implemented.