Welltory · B2C · heart-rate-variability wellness app
Build smarter, personalized Apple Watch-style move rings and daily goals
Didn't drive retention: missed goals made users feel shamed; worked only for a small group
Failedretentionfeature-development
What they did
Built 'more scientific' rings than Apple's: personalized cardio zones and smarter move goals per user.
What happened
Worked well for a small segment but was not a retention driver, because seeing unmet goals has a shaming effect.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Why Duolingo’s Engagement Strategy Won’t Work For Every App — Asya Paloni, Welltory“We'll make more scientific rings and set smarter move goals for people." Works really well for like a small segment of the population, but as like a retention-driving cool feature, you know, not that great, because it has this shaming effect.”
Related topics
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New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
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- End onboarding with 'Stress is building right now' instead of promising more energyBeat an ending that promised more energy with a progress chart
- Ask to turn on notifications right away, before showing much valueWorked best in that spot, against best-practice advice; no numbers
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- Ask 'How do you usually feel?' with both 'drained' and 'stressed' answers50-70% of women pick low energy; men pick stressed or fine
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- Welltory: Make your wellness app something people open when bored, instead of TikTokBecame the company's final big pivot to reach the mass market; no numbers
- Welltory: Show new text and visuals, based on the user's own data, every time they openGave the initial retention boost; built by hand before gen AI, which was very painful
- Welltory: Show heart data as a color-changing liquid that updates with no user effortBecame the core feature; guest says people really love it; no numbers
- Welltory: Tell users how their habits affect things they care about, like next-day work output
- Welltory: Replace raw stats with a home screen that explains what each step and heartbeat meansJust launched; guest says users seem to really love it
- Welltory: Give users a personal daily plan to follow and check offDropped: health tasks happen outside the app, so users fall off and feel shamed
- Welltory: Make users' results pretty and easy to post, so they can show offGuest's example: a friend posts his results and keeps coming back; no numbers
- Build one standout interactive widget before adding the basics every rival hasDrove a lot of installs and retention; some bad reviews for missing basics
- Welltory: Check each big feature idea against the mission, main persona, trigger and user jobGuest says the team has used it successfully; scoring features with points didn't work