How My App Grew by Over 1 Million Users in One Month

Every app developer dreams of launching their product to instant success and massive growth. But the reality is, sustainable growth that lasts is extremely difficult and requires immense effort, strategy and some luck.

My team and I were fortunate to see our app take off to the tune of over 1 million new users in the span of a month. It may seem like overnight success from the outside, but it was the result of many months of disciplined execution, continual product improvement, and a major focus on user retention and engagement.

In this post, I‘ll share the approach we took and some of the key lessons we learned along the way. Hopefully our experience can provide a helpful roadmap for other entrepreneurs and developers looking to build highly engaging apps that users love.

Retention Matters More Than User Growth

One of the biggest mistakes I see apps make is focusing solely on user acquisition and growth metrics like app installs. The problem is, if you can‘t retain those users and keep them engaged with your app long-term, those growth metrics are meaningless. You‘ll just end up with a "leaky bucket" where you‘re spending time and money acquiring users who churn out the bottom.

Studies have shown that the average app loses 77% of its users within the first 3 days after install. Within 30 days, that number jumps to 90%. Within 90 days, it‘s over 95%. [1] Think about that – for every 1 million app installs, only about 50,000 of those users are still around 3 months later!

Imagine pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom – that‘s what it‘s like trying to grow an app without solid retention. No matter how much water you pour in the top, it will keep leaking out the bottom.

The key metric you need to focus on is retention, often measured by the percentage of users who are still active in your app after a certain number of days (Day 1, Day 7, and Day 30 retention are common benchmarks). If you can build an app experience that hooks users early and gets them coming back consistently, growth will take care of itself. You won‘t have a leaky bucket.

Taking a Lean Startup Approach

When we first started developing our app, we resisted the temptation to overbuild or chase user growth prematurely. Instead, we took a lean startup approach of moving quickly to build a minimum viable product (MVP), putting it in front of users, and rapidly iterating based on their feedback and behaviors.

The core principles of the lean startup methodology are: [2]

Entrepreneurs are everywhere
Entrepreneurship is management
Validated learning
Innovation accounting
Build-Measure-Learn

We embraced the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. Rather than spending months perfecting our product in isolation, we focused on shipping quickly, measuring how users interacted with the app, and continuously improving the experience.

Identifying Our Value Proposition and Target Users

Before even writing a line of code, we needed to clearly articulate the unique value our app would provide and who we were building it for. What problem were we solving and why would users care? How were we differentiated from existing solutions? Who was our target user and what behaviors and preferences did they have?

We believed there was an opportunity to build a better mobile-first calendar and scheduling app. Our research showed that many people, especially busy professionals and working parents, struggled to balance their work and personal calendars across devices. Existing calendar apps were often difficult to set up and use on mobile.

We envisioned an app that was fast, intuitive and intelligent – almost like a personal scheduling assistant in your pocket. It would use artificial intelligence to learn your scheduling patterns and preferences over time. It would automate tasks like creating events from your emails. And most importantly, it would be a joy to use, with a clean, gesture-based mobile interface.

We developed user personas of busy working professionals who were always on the go and primarily used their mobile phone to manage their life and work. We believed if we could build an app experience tailored to their needs and behaviors, we could earn their loyalty.

Building an MVP to Test Our Riskiest Assumptions

With a target user in mind and value proposition defined, it was time to translate that into an actual product. But rather than trying to build our complete vision right away, we focused on testing our riskiest assumptions first.

The riskiest assumption we needed to test was whether we could actually make scheduling easier and faster on mobile, to the point where users would adopt our app for daily use. If we couldn‘t nail the core user experience, nothing else would matter.

So we started by building a simple MVP that did one thing really well: create a calendar event with just a few taps. We intentionally left out all but the most essential fields and stripped away any unnecessary steps. Our hypothesis was that by making event creation lightning-fast and easy, users would be more likely to use the app regularly.

We recruited a beta group of a few hundred users who fit our target persona and had them test our scheduling experience. We closely watched their engagement with the app and listened to their feedback. To our encouragement, many of them raved about how quick and painless it was to create events compared to what they were used to.

Iterating Based on User Feedback and Behavior

Of course, as with any MVP, our app was far from perfect. As we continued to put it in front of more beta users, we began to notice some consistent points of friction where users would drop off in the experience.

One of the most common frustrations was around setting the location for an event. Our original design required users to type in an address, which was cumbersome on mobile. So we quickly iterated and added a "Use Current Location" option that would automatically populate the location field using the phone‘s GPS. This small tweak had an outsized impact on improving the scheduling flow.

We continued to collect user feedback and behavior data as we iterated. We would define a specific metric we wanted to improve (e.g. increasing the percentage of users who successfully created an event), ship a change, and then carefully measure the results to see if we moved the needle positively or negatively. Gradually, we started to hone in on an app experience that was resonating with users.

Optimizing Onboarding and Activation

Another key learning from our beta was the critical importance of user onboarding. If we couldn‘t get users to experience the core value of our app shortly after installing it, they were unlikely to give us a second chance.

So we invested heavily in optimizing our onboarding flow and what we called "time to value" – how long it took a user from install to successfully scheduling their first event. We applied the same Build-Measure-Learn process of continually iterating and measuring results.

Some of the most impactful changes:

Adding progress indicators so users had a clear sense of how many steps were left
Placing tips in context so users were guided on what to do next
Prefilling certain fields based on data we had (e.g. defaulting to their current timezone)
Offering one-tap signup/login with Google/Facebook to reduce friction
Trimming our onboarding flow from 5 steps down to 3

By the time we launched, we had our average time to value down to less than 30 seconds. We knew if we could just get users in the door, they would quickly see how easy it was to manage their schedule from their phone.

Launching at the Right Time

As our core app experience started to stabilize, we shifted our focus to preparing for launch. Timing was critical – we wanted to maximize buzz and awareness right out of the gate.

After some debate, we decided to target a mid-January launch to coincide with when many people are focused on getting organized for the New Year. It also happened to align with a major tech conference where we knew the press would be looking for the next hot app.

In the months leading up to launch, we worked on building relationships with journalists, bloggers and influencers in the productivity space. We gave them early access to the app and incorporated their feedback. When it came time to announce our public launch, we had a list of friendlies who were primed and ready to talk about us.

Riding the Viral Wave

When we finally launched, the response blew us away. We were fortunate to catch a viral wave right away – featured by Apple as App of the Day, covered by major press outlets, and raved about by users on social media.

We poured fuel on the fire by being highly responsive to user feedback on social media and app review sites. Anytime someone posted about us, we engaged with them one-on-one. We ran some paid social media ads, but the viral word-of-mouth growth drove the majority of our new user acquisition.

Within a month of launch, we had rocketed past 1 million users, adding tens of thousands of new users every day. It was a thrilling, and also terrifying, time. We worked around the clock to keep the servers running and stay on top of all the activity.

Doubling Down on Data-Driven Development

But we resisted the temptation to rest on our laurels. With so many new users flowing in, we became maniacally focused on measuring and improving our retention and engagement metrics.

We instrumented the app to track everything – what features people were using most, what actions correlated most with long-term retention, where the remaining points of friction were. We held daily stand-ups to review the latest data and determine what to build or improve next.

We A/B tested everything, from copy and design tweaks to whole new features. If we had an idea for an improvement, we would ship it to a small percentage of users and carefully compare the results against a control group.

Over time, this data-driven approach enabled us to scale our learnings and compound our growth. The more we understood user behaviors at a granular level, the more accurately we could optimize the experience. As our retention improved, our acquisition efforts became even more impactful. It was a virtuous growth cycle.

Key Takeaways and Lessons Learned

Looking back, there were a few key principles that I believe contributed to our successful launch:

Retention is the foundation of growth. It doesn‘t matter how many users you acquire if you can‘t keep them engaged.
Launch is a process, not a singular event. The work you do in the months leading up to launch, in building relationships and refining the product, makes all the difference.
Instrument everything and let the data guide your decisions. Intuition is important, but it should be validated by real user behaviors.
Focus maniacally on the core user experience. Don‘t get distracted by bells and whistles or what competitors are doing. Just make your core product experience exceptional.
Recognize that you‘re never "done". The product that launched was just the beginning for us. We‘re continuing to measure, iterate and improve every day.

Closing Thoughts

Reflecting on our journey from MVP to over 1 million users, I‘m incredibly grateful to the entire team who made it possible. It‘s a rare and special thing to build a product that resonates with so many people.

But I also know that this is really just the beginning. In many ways, it feels like we‘re just getting started. As proud as I am of our initial traction, I‘m even more excited about the opportunity ahead to continue building an app and a company that makes a positive impact on people‘s lives.

For anyone else who is in the trenches of building something new, I hope our story offers some valuable lessons and inspiration for what‘s possible. It won‘t be easy, but if you stay relentlessly focused on your users and work hard to build something they love, good things tend to happen. Keep pushing.

You can check out our app here: [link]

If you enjoyed this post, you can read more from our team at [link to company blog]. You can also connect with me on Twitter [@yourhandle]. Thanks for reading!

References:
[1] https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/app-retention-benchmarks/
[2] http://theleanstartup.com/principles