Hello fellow bootstrapper!
Here is today’s Kiwi News DAU chart:
It’s hard to see on the horizontal axis, but ever since March 2023, we’ve been trying to make a dent in improving our daily active user chart. As you can see, not very successfully until recently.
So what caused the two recent spikes?
The earlier and higher spike is when Farcaster promoted Kiwi News as a mini app on their app store. Luckily we had in-app notifications already enabled, and so as you can see, while very small, we managed to retain a small amount of users.
But what’s significant about the DAU chart from above? This:
Farcaster mini app notifications have changed how I think about building consumer apps. And following is how I have updated my beliefs.
The consumer contact is the business value
It’s really as simple as that.
For any product that you launch anywhere, if you are not somehow recording the contact information of your customer as quickly and as efficiently as you can, then you literally have no actual product.
A product is entirely useless if you cannot inform your user base about what happened on it. That is, in particular, very true for a consumer app about news. Consumers will not remember your product. You will have to frequently remind them that you exist.
I used to have a more charitable view of people, in that I believed that they’d surely be smart enough to remember my product and hence would type in my product’s URL when they wanted to see high quality news.
But it is not like that.
In fact, for us builder we should assume the opposite. We should rather beg others to pay attention to what we’re doing. We should rather constantly remind them that we’re still here instead of silently shipping and waiting that they come.
Record as many consumer contacts as you can. Remind your customers often about your product. To the point where a percentage of them unsubscribes because you’re getting on their nerves.
You are not Sam Altman and your product isn’t a billion dollar LLM. These main characters already have the attention, so Sam isn’t seen hustling for clicks. But you’re most probably not him.
Not all audiences are the same
This will come as no surprise to the email-loving crowd. But you’ll have a real hard time explaining a Twitter-addict that posting hot takes all day may not be a good strategy to re-engage a product’s audience.
Twitter is undoubtably great for generating immense reach. I did this half a year ago when I wrote a rant about Ethereum that reached a quarter million views. That said, you don’t really own your audience on Twitter, and neither do you on Farcaster.
Both of these apps are heavily geared towards algorithmic recommendations, and so unless you have the magic formula to frequently send out a viral banger, these platforms aren’t as useful as you might think for growing an audience that retains and reengages with your product.
The quality and craft of your reengagement matters greatly. Are you sending out automated tweets with links that nobody sees? Or are you notifying users via iOS Push notifications when they’ve received a comment directed at them?
The quality of reengagement obviously matters. Pay attention to how direct your reminders are. You own your audience when you can engage with them at your will. Meaning they’ll see your content when you want it. Not when they want it or an algorithm wants it.
A strategic pivot
The strategic pivot for Kiwi News has hence been to attract as many subscribers to ways in which we can notify our user base and pull them right into our app. We have done this by making Kiwi News a fully-featured Farcaster mini app. This allows us to send notifications directly to the Farcaster user base.
We’ve also continued to improve our iOS private beta by adding Push notifications. And in this week’s push, we’re reactivating our email subscribers, among them you!.
Reengagement, for us, but probably also for your app, is probably a key to success (if you’ve mastered all other parts of product building). I say this having banged my head at a not growing DAU chart. So I might have some brain damage xD
I should have known better considering that I had ran a freelance consulting business off the few hundred subscribers I had on my blog in 2021.
So what now?
First of all: Thank you for being subscribed here. I appreciate it. I hope that this email and other posts have brought you value and better insight into your own journey bootstrapping a company.
It would help me immensely if you’d voluntarily subscribe to a reengagement method of your choice to become a Kiwi News user. The value proposition here is that you’ll get the best crypto links right in your inbox of choice at zero cost.
Here are your options:
If you want to receive one email every Friday with the best three links, subscribe to our Kiwi Weekly newsletter.
If you’re an iPhone user, check out our iOS Testflight private beta. Make sure to allow notifications!
If you’re a Telegram addict, DM me at “timdaub” to get access to an exclusive group of 500 members discussing the crypto news cycle.
If you’re a Farcaster maxi, check out our mini app and subscribe to our notifications
Finally, if you haven’t already, subscribe to this Substack.