Ask HN: How many signups should an app realistically expect in the first month?
I got a thousand users the first month on an app that went well. And about 200&#x2F;month on something that doesn&#x27;t go so well. This is also a small market, about 1&#x2F;10 the size of the US.<p>I&#x27;ll be frank here. It&#x27;s like a date. If you don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s going well, it probably isn&#x27;t. It <i>might</i> be doing okay, but it&#x27;s probably better to move on.<p>If people aren&#x27;t lining up to give you their money, it&#x27;s likely not working. If it is working, your focus would be scaling, dealing with complaints, getting frustrated yet excited that there&#x27;s too much to do.<p>That doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean the <i>product</i> is wrong. It could mean you have the wrong market, wrong marketing channel, wrong pricing model (imagine if Facebook tried to charge membership or Netflix tried to monetize from microtransactions), wrong pitch.<p>One thing that always works for me is asking, who is the best competitor? And trying to build a product that is 10x better.<p>How do people do split proceeds now? They write out the math on a piece of paper, transfer to friends. Cash or click click bank account details. Is your product 10x better? Probably not. It&#x27;s not too hard to do as it is, and it&#x27;s more effort to sign up.<p>What about someone who does this a lot? Course seller, or freelance teachers for a studio. Well, they probably have done it in a contract, where they collect a sum and then pay it out. It&#x27;s a burden, but is it a burden worth paying 6% + the cost of figuring out a new system?<p>Your fee system could be off too - I strongly dislike pushing fees to customers, because it feels like a dodgy &#x27;hidden cost&#x27; thing. The reason people offer &quot;free&quot; shipping (i.e. write costs into the price) is because this puts off customers.<p>Alright, so who would actually have this issue so badly that they would be <i>happy</i> to pay 6% to get it off their hands?<p>A large scale company probably has integrated it into payroll, and at some point it&#x27;s cheaper to just hire someone to split the bill. So you&#x27;ll want something medium sized, maybe hectic and complex. Event management perhaps? Or training. If so, you&#x27;ll actually want to be approaching those target clients directly and asking them. Asking your friends and family, or posting on HN will likely just give you fake data - your effective customer base could be 0, but is being floated up by supportive people.