Apr 4, 2021
2 min read
Day 126 — Sprint 17 Retrospective
Reflecting on the week of our app launch
🎥 Highlights of the Week
💡What I Learned
- Submitting an app to the app store. It’s not hard, but it’s definitely tedious. The app store is our storefront, and we want users to have a great experience from the very beginning. This means investing in creating assets that will hook users from the beginning and get them excited to use our product.
- Building launch hype. In a perfect world, we would have a huge waitlist of people eager to download our app. While we didn’t do this, treating each day like launch helps drive excitement from new people and helps us stay motivated to finding new users.
- Analytics matter. We nearly just launched the app without any analytics built in. What a mistake that would have been. With a day’s work of integrating Amplitude, we now have data behind our decisions and can use it to improve for the next release.
👍 What Went Well
- Our app went live! It was really exciting to experience the process of idea to app launch. Though it really isn’t that different from the app we’ve been testing on Test Flight, there’s something about being on the public app store that makes everything more real.
- We got our first real users! Refreshing our analytics for the first users definitely bit into productivity, but it’s so fun to see the first users experience the app.
👎 Opportunities to Improve
- Driving users to the app. One of the big opportunities we have is to find ways to market to teens and families to use our app. We still have a long road to go to drive awareness. We’re still missing a viral component to our app, which will be essential to make this happen sustainably.
- Increasing app engagement. When you put something out into the world, every flaw and things you wish you did become clear. To make our app useful, we still have work to do so that our features align with our goals of helping teens build independence. We’re on the right track but not there yet.
🎬 Action Items
- Outreach to potential industry partners.
- Design our next features.
- Drive app downloads.
What’s Next?
This week I’ll switch focus to laying out our business case and test out our thinking with a couple accelerator applications.
