A mental health app company · guest's current employer
Run three apps at once with one team
Biggest fail of the year: attention spread too thin
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- recent
In their words
Make Ugly Ads to Grow Your App – Yuliya Lennox (Solid Starts)
David BarnardWhat is the worst experiment, the biggest fail of the past year that you learned from?
Yuliya LennoxBut I would say that starting too many products, starting too many pots, boiling water pots, whatever, doing too many projects is too hard. So I recently joined a team where they had three apps in the same time and they were trying to do it all in the same time. And that's something that no matter how many people you have, no matter how many ideas you have, good ideas, bad it is how similar even the projects are, you cannot put enough attention to them. And I've seen a lot of teams that are like, "Oh, we had another great idea. We had another great idea. We'll start it right now because it costs nothing to develop it because we already have the developer on salary." No, no, don't do that. In order to not make mistakes, you need to prioritize one thing and you need to literally treat it like a war room where every day you come in, you are like, "What are we doing today?" If you want to scale, if you want to not fail.
Yuliya LennoxThat the biggest lesson that I learned that don't let anything go like, "Oh, it's the same. You scaled one app, you can do another app." No, no, it's not like that. So that's it.
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New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Keep testing new ads until one sharply cuts costs, even if current ads work
- Run ugly ads that show the product and the pain in the first secondOne ran for years; called 'the best ad ever'; no numbers
- Run a trendy AI 'fruit babies' ad for a doctor-backed baby feeding brandBacklash: parents questioned whether to trust the brand
- Have the founder join every marketing meeting and write the ads himselfApp reached #2 after Duolingo; link to this is loose
- Win your home market first, then add languages one by oneLiked locally, then expanded; later #2 after Duolingo
- Test new ads at $10/day in Indonesia, not $1,000/day in the USSame test signal at ~1% of the cost
- Fully translate and adapt an app for Japan with a Japanese speakerDidn't work at all; harder than expected
- Run paid ads from the start alongside organic growthOrganic-only apps plateau; paid added late often ate into organic
- Share test results across apps and with a weekly peer group
- Make the paywall's continue button blinkRaised conversion, secondhand; no numbers
- Sign a celebrity like Hilary Duff for brand adsBig influx almost at once, secondhand; ROI hard to measure
- Hire people obsessed with the problemCredited for product quality; no numbers
- Have the core team work ~17-hour days, six days a weekSaid to lead the field now; no numbers
- Translate the app into many languages with AI and test nearby marketsHer biggest win of the year; Turkey converts well; no numbers
- Sell a $1 plan after a 60-question quiz, then stack add-ons to ~$350Buyer got half back after demanding a refund; invites regulation
Tags: focus, too-many-apps