My app's first week (what actually happened)

So, I launched my app last week and decided to track everything. Revenue,

trial starts, conversion rates, all of it. And in this video, I'm going to show

it. And in this video, I'm going to show you every single number, and more importantly, everything I'm doing next to improve those numbers. If you're new here, welcome to the channel. My name is Chris and I build productivity apps. I

usually focus on one productivity app for video. And today, we're focusing on

for video. And today, we're focusing on my newest app, Amy. Quick context. Amy

is a calorie tracking app in the style of Apple Notes. You just type the food you ate and then on the right, the calories will magically appear. So,

let's start with a number that everyone is probably interested in. How many

people ended up subscribing? What is the MRR or monthly recurring revenue? One

week into launch, we are at around $400 monthly recurring revenue, which is an insane number for the first week. I've

launched a ton of apps so far, and to be honest, it took my first app almost 2 years to get its first $400 in monthly recurring revenue. I made so many

recurring revenue. I made so many mistakes back then. Honestly, could make for a good video for me to talk about those mistakes. So, let me know in the

those mistakes. So, let me know in the comments if you want me to do that. But

so many mistakes and it took me 2 years to do that with the first app and it took me one week to do it with this one.

I think this is a testament to all the work that was put in before we even launched the app. I spent 2 months basically building up this weight list, posting all over social media, showing my progress behind the scenes of building the app. Over 2,000 people

ended up joining the weight list, and we got hundreds of thousands of views across social media. So, I knew we would get some subscribers on launch week, but I did not expect it to be this many.

I've been getting DMs from people saying, "This is actually an app that I would use. I'm going to cancel my

would use. I'm going to cancel my current My Fitness Pal subscription and switch to this." All of this has been really validating, especially because the app is priced at $10 a month, which is pretty high for a calorie tracking app. So, on the surface, revenue looked

app. So, on the surface, revenue looked really, really good. But then I started looking at other metrics, and now I'm thinking maybe it's not so good. Yes,

the $400 MR is a really, really good number. I am super happy with this

number. I am super happy with this number. But when I started looking at

number. But when I started looking at other metrics, I noticed that it probably could have been much higher. If

you've been following along, you know I've been tracking everything in Post Hog, and when I looked at the data, some of the numbers were kind of shocking.

Let's start with the big one, which is how many people after they downloaded the app continued and actually signed up for the app. Basically, how many people inputed their email and got to the onboarding steps? And that number is

onboarding steps? And that number is 40%. Which is absolutely mind-blowing to

40%. Which is absolutely mind-blowing to me because I thought it was going to be around 80 90% because who would just download an app not to sign up? But it

turns out like 60% of people would do exactly that. I have had multiple people

exactly that. I have had multiple people reach out and give feedback saying you need to support Google and Apple login, but I kind of just dismissed it. To be

honest, I thought everyone would be fine with email login because that's what I use personally when I sign up for other apps. But after hearing it enough, and

apps. But after hearing it enough, and shout out to the people who gave me this feedback, I decided to implement Google and Apple login. And to be honest, it actually wasn't that hard to implement.

It took me like an hour to do it. And I

also built it in a way where if someone signs in with Google and they've already signed up through email, it will combine the two accounts. Since making the change, around 400 people have downloaded the app. And of those 400 people, all of them have actually signed

up and gotten to the onboarding stage. I

triple checked these numbers, and it is actually correct. In hindsight, this

actually correct. In hindsight, this makes so much sense. Turns out people prefer to use these methods because of the decrease friction. Huge lesson. I'm

never going to ship a consumer app anymore without these login methods.

Now, so that was the first big drop off and the first big change that I made.

Second number I was looking at is what is the conversion to trial rate. So, how

many people who signed up actually went through and started a trial? And that

number is 5%. Which is actually not great. I think the number we're looking

great. I think the number we're looking for is around 20 to 30% if not higher.

So, I started brainstorming, trying to figure out how am I going to get this number up. There's a bunch of things

number up. There's a bunch of things that I can do to try to tweak the onboarding and try to lift the number.

But another thing I could do was to try to actually just make the app more valuable and show people that it was worth paying for. We have this feedback board where people can submit feedback, they can upvote the features that they want to see. And I was specifically

looking for features that if I added them to the app would make people go, "Oh, yeah. This is a premium app. I

"Oh, yeah. This is a premium app. I

would pay for this app." And one feature that was climbing the feedback board and really got my attention was an Apple Health integration. So, I thought, okay,

Health integration. So, I thought, okay, let's see how hard this is. Let me take a stab at it. And I was very surprised that it was pretty easy. And after an hour, I actually got the full integration built. So, now there's a

integration built. So, now there's a whole new section in the settings page, and you can enable the Apple Health integration. And it's going to do a few

integration. And it's going to do a few things. First, it's going to pull in

things. First, it's going to pull in your workout data, your steps data, how many calories you've burned each day.

So, this is all information that's in Apple Health. And now, we can display

Apple Health. And now, we can display all of this inside of the app. And the

other thing we can do is we can actually send the calories consumed data to Apple Health. So now other apps can use this

Health. So now other apps can use this Amy data in their own apps. And I added this new stats page which was a page I was going to add anyway is a page that's going to show you how many calories you've consumed on a weekly basis. You

can also see stuff like how much protein you've consumed for the entire week as well. But I thought this is the perfect

well. But I thought this is the perfect place for other Apple Health information to live. So if you scroll a little bit

to live. So if you scroll a little bit down, you can see how many calories you've burned for the week. You can see your steps. You can see your workout

your steps. You can see your workout data. And we have this goals bar at the

data. And we have this goals bar at the bottom which shows you how many calories you've consumed, how much protein you've consumed. And I decided to tweak this so

consumed. And I decided to tweak this so you can now see how many calories you've burned in the goals bar as well. But

here's the important part. After

building all of this Apple Health stuff, I added it to the onboarding flow. So

now when users are filling out their information, one of the things that they're going to be prompted for is to enable Apple Health. And again, the reason I did this was not just to show that the feature exists, but it's to really signal to them that, oh yeah,

this is a very highquality app. Apple

Health integration itself might not make a big difference, but if I keep adding features like this, like an Apple Watch integration, for example, and I make it clear that this stuff exists on the onboarding, all of that stuff will eventually add up. There are thousands

of calorie tracking apps out there.

People are always switching. So, I

really need to fight and convince them that this app has everything they need and it's going to fit their workflow better than anything else out there. By

the way, stuff like the Apple Health integration usually would have taken me like weeks, if not months, to actually ship. But, I literally built this thing

ship. But, I literally built this thing in less than an hour. And it's because I'm using tools like claw code and cursor to build a hundred times faster than I used to. If you look at my prompts, they're pretty detailed. And

the way that I achieve that is by dictating everything. I get a lot of

dictating everything. I get a lot of questions asking what tool I use for dictation and the answer is Whisperflow.

And a huge shout out to them for being a channel sponsor. Whisper is smart voice

channel sponsor. Whisper is smart voice to text that works in any application.

The reason Whisperflow is perfect for developers is it understands technical terminology. So when I say something

terminology. So when I say something like use state convex schema web hook handler it gets it right every time. And if

you're using it with cursor windsurf whisperflow actually has integrations with these IDEs and it can actually understand what's going on in the code you're looking at and tag files. So

check this out. If I'm inside cursor and I tell it please enhance the styles from subscription overview.tsx, tsx

subscription overview.tsx, tsx it will actually tag the file without me having to type anything on the keyboard.

It's available on desktop so you can use it inside of cursor claude chatgpt like I do. So I'm constantly using it to

I do. So I'm constantly using it to dictate things into claude or chatgpt like I write very detailed YouTube scripts and I'm just kind of dictating everything. Typing all this out would

everything. Typing all this out would have taken me like 30 minutes. But with

whisper flow I'm able to do it in seconds. You can use it on iOS as well.

seconds. You can use it on iOS as well.

I use it all the time when I'm responding to messages. I'll leave a link in the description and I have a code that gets you one month free and that's on top of the existing trial of Flow Pro you get when signing up. They

did not do that. I'm the one that asked for that. So, thank you to them for

for that. So, thank you to them for providing that. The Apple Health

providing that. The Apple Health integration was one of the last changes I made on the feature side. But, I also got a lot of good feedback on improvements I could make to the onboarding so we can bump up that 5% conversion number. Here were the key

conversion number. Here were the key changes and I'm going to be doing this with all my apps moving forward. Maybe

you want to do it with yours too. But

the first was completely flipping the onboarding flow. So, right now I have it

onboarding flow. So, right now I have it where the user has to sign up with their email or now Apple or Google login and then they're hit with the onboarding flow. I got this advice from people and

flow. I got this advice from people and I double checked it. I looked at a bunch of very successful payw walls and onboarding flows and I decided to completely reverse it where now when the user clicks create account, they're

going to be taken immediately to the onboarding flow. After they're done with

onboarding flow. After they're done with the onboarding flow, I'm going to ask them to go ahead and make an account.

And the reason I'm asking them to make an account is so that they can save their data and so that they can use it across multiple devices. And then after they make an account, they'll be hit with the 3-day trial and the pay wall screen. Reversing this does seem like a

screen. Reversing this does seem like a very small change, but again, the number we're working with is 5%. If we can boost that 5% to even something like 10%, that could be the difference

between 400 MR and 800 MR. So any change that could potentially bump this number up, I think is worth a try. Second major

change I made was to the payw wall experience. If you look at the current

experience. If you look at the current payw wall, there is actually an X at the top right you can click to dismiss it.

One of the numbers I was looking at was how many people click that X. So how

many people when they see the payw wall, they just dismiss it completely. And

that number was around 60%. So 60% of people who see the payw wall completely dismiss it and then I'm assuming most likely churn from the app. What I

decided to do was actually make it where when a user clicks that X, I actually immediately give them a 24-hour free trial. No credit card or anything. I got

trial. No credit card or anything. I got

a lot of feedback from people saying that they wish there was a way for them to try the app before even starting the trial. And the reason I initially did

trial. And the reason I initially did not do anything like this was because I was scared of the cost. If you remember, this app is costing me about $300 a week just from the beta testing. So, I was a little bit worried about that. But after

analyzing the current cost and the revenue coming in from the subscriptions, I think I now can afford to offer this 1day free trial. So, I

thought to myself, if I'm going to lose those 60% of people anyway, if they click that button, there's a very low chance of them starting the trial. I

might as well just let them use the app and hopefully I can win a few of them that way. So, these were the launch

that way. So, these were the launch numbers. We're at about $400 monthly

numbers. We're at about $400 monthly recurring revenue, which is a huge deal.

We had a 60% download to sign up rate, which we then bumped to 100%. I think

it's going to be 90% realistically by the end of this. And a 5% trial conversion rate, which I really believe will bump up with all of the changes that we've made. And all these changes are important because I do want to experiment with UGC marketing. And

obviously, if you're putting money into something like that, you want the highest chance of conversion because it's such a waste if you invest money, get people to download an app, and they can't even get past the onboarding screen. So any little improvement we can

screen. So any little improvement we can make to these percentages does actually matter. So that's where we're at after

matter. So that's where we're at after one week. There were a ton of lessons

one week. There were a ton of lessons learned on my end. Hopefully there was something interesting that came out of this video for you guys. If you enjoyed this content, check out my Instagram and Tik Tok. I post almost every other day

Tik Tok. I post almost every other day about building productivity apps. And

obviously if you like this content, don't forget to subscribe. But thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you guys in the next video.