Seems like you have the product figured out and just need to focus iterating on marketing. I'm actually in a similar position to you but having spent $400K instead of $1M.
I'd like to ask you, what were some factors that propelled you to self rationalize your method of going to market, that in hindsight turned out to be detrimental? Or in other words, what would you do if you were to go back in time and start over? Look, I know that's a painful question to answer since we can't turn back time, but I am asking it for the sake of educating others and for the potential benefits that stem from self reflection.
Appreciate your opening up on this. Thank you.
Part of how I have rationalized my journey so far is that I have been building an app that I myself use almost every day, I genuinely enjoy the building products and working with my team, progress has been steady along the way, and I have unwittingly over-indexed on my own judgments as an "efficient proxy to the market".
I know that might sound crazy, but it's a bit like, "We're making progress, but it's not quite ready, so let's just keep building. I know this is good! We got this!"
In terms of more specific reflections and lessons learned so far, here are a few initial thoughts if I could start over again, knowing what I know now:
- Co-Founder: I would not do this over again without a co-founder with passion and expertise in for B2C product marketing. (Even to this day, I've never really had good access to someone who has successfully bootstrapped and monetized a non-trivial digital product app from scratch.) In addition to the moral support and general collaboration, this skill set would be complementary to my own. It would had the potential to be a great counterbalance in the overall approach to GTM and product strategy.
- Financial Accountability: I'd create some semi-formal accountability structures with "gating functions" for how/when funds could be spent on the product along the way. Conceptually, before taking on another 3-6 months of committed product work, make more aggressive contact with reality through user interviews. Much of the product evolution has been pretty fluid, organic, and linear based on small inputs along the way.
- Proxy Users: I'd recruit a small group of users (compensating them a small stipend if needed) just to stay active on the app (e.g. you're going to be working out anyway, so do it with the app a couple of times a week) and provide regular feedback about what they see that they like and don't like, what's confusing, frustrating, etc. Probably too much of the UI/UX has been dialed in from my own experiences, and there are some interactions that can be reframed to be more obviously valuable based on the input of others
- Likelihood of Success: I'd question whether the scope/complexity of what I set out to do as a solo founder with limited funds can really be achieved. For example, how likely is it that I as a solo founder can bootstrap a B2C consumer-grade iPhone + Apple Watch to profitability? And in what is considered by many a "crowded space". (It wouldn't be wrong IMHO to characterize a certain district of the app store as a 'wasteland of fitness apps'.) Should I be trying to bootstrap something this complex in this space at all? Or decrease the scope? Or consider a different financing approach?
- Resist Perfectionism: It might not be obvious, but keep in mind that I've been thinking about GTM a LOT. I just haven't been doing GTM to the extent that it now seems obvious I should have been. I have somehow been rationalizing that I just need to "build more" to get the product "more ready" before I start leaning into a space and set of activities I don't particularly enjoy and am somewhat uncomfortable with. (And instead, I've been continuing to do the things I am good at and comfortable with.)
- Less Isolation: And even as I itemize all of these things, I can't look back and think of any specific moments were I ever thought I was making an egregious mistake on any given day. Every day, I made what seemed like reasonable/good decisions with the best information I had at the time. Being less isolated and more integrated into a community of practice to share progress might have made a difference
Probably lots of other things I could say (and let's not forget there are lots of other draws on my time in life with family, etc.), but those are some initial thoughts that I can share.
If anyone bothered to read all of this, I hope it's of some help!
It's too early to jump to conclusions without proper marketing for the app and any revenue-related metrics gathered.
The issue with delayed marketing can be that the product is too large to make changes fast and run experiments. Removing features considering committed resources would also be a challenge.
Regarding the Proxy Users, I think the idea is that customers should pay for a solution that solves a problem, not vice versa. You can install a session recording feature, watch app interactions occasionally, and do interviews with paying users (or invite active users to your podcast).
I am very much still an optimist on the future of the app and my ability to monetize it.
As I synthesize much of this post and these comments, it's increasingly clear to me that I've just been operating too much in isolation, leaning more into what I know well (development) -vs- what I don't know as well (marketing in all its forms)
Now it's time to do some overcorrection and then step back and find the balance.
I very much intend to have a success story to post here one day as a new comment on this post about "how my startup barely dodged death but now I'm writing this update from the beach watching the monies flow" :)
To round out the figures, let's ballpark another $300-$350k on server + platform engineering, $80k on media + data + content acquisition, and then the inescapable overhead of the business itself (accounting, legal, etc.)
Contract rates I'm used to paying for solid iOS engineers have been anywhere in the range of $80-$120 per hour (big discrepancy based on where they're based and whether or not I'm working direct or through an agency), so $50k would have bought me about 10 weeks of sustained effort on the high end of that range. That's probably about where I was at when we finished the first working proof of concept with a designer + iOS developer.
Since then, for better or for worse, I can confidently say that I've spent more than another $50k just on "iOS debugging time". Probably more.
Lots of things to build out just in iOS land itself that can be more time consuming than they first seem for anyone who is interested:
- HealthKit integration - Location Services integration - WorkoutKit integration - WatchKit integration and implementing your own bidirectional comms between iOS and watchOS - Multiple AWS integrations (namely, Cognito and S3 but there are various Lambdas gluing things together and many, many more bits and pieces like CloudFront, Route53, etc.) - Custom in-app camera (and large file off loading to the cloud) - APNs - async I/O to/from our own server APIs
And more, those are just the easy ones to remember :)
It's been one hell of an adventure in iOS engineering land to say the least, and we haven't even begun to talk about things on the server side like data modeling. There's some really interesting stuff there as well, but that's for another thread ;)