🚀 Add to Chrome – It’s Free - YouTube Summarizer
Category: App Development
00:00
Most indie apps don't fail because of code. They fail before the first line is ever written.
And no amounts of just do marketing, bro advice will fix it. In this video, I'll show you the three simple, budget friendly strategies I'm using to find product market fit and
00:16
save myself months of wasted time before building the wrong thing. I use this decision to find out in under a week whether an app idea lives or dies.
So, you've decided to become an indie app developer. Or maybe you've already got
00:32
some apps on the app store already, and you had high hopes for this indie app thing that if you put the work in the late nights, and all that energy, things would work out. Downloads would come, revenue would follow, and eventually financial freedom.
Then reality hits.
00:50
This is harder than it looks. your app just isn't generating revenue.
Or worse, when you look under the hood, when you look at App Store Connect, nobody's even downloading it. This doesn't feel like success.
This feels like failure. And
01:06
then the thoughts hit. Maybe I don't have what it takes.
Maybe I'm not good enough. How does everyone else seem to make this look so easy?
So now what? It's not you.
Well, it kind of is, but not in the way that you think. Every
01:22
successful indie developer I've ever met has stood exactly where you are right now. And I did, too.
Before my app portfolio generated over 1 million downloads in App Store sales, I was barely getting by. Low downloads, little revenue, and a whole lot of doubt.
It
01:39
wasn't until I understood product market fit, like really understood it. I thought, "Yeah, if people are downloading my app, that's product market fit.
If I build something good, that's product market fit. Wrong.
Product market fit is when people are actively looking for a solution for a
01:56
problem that they have and your app solves it. That's it.
There's no need to over complicate it. And it's so simple that beginners always seem to miss it.
They start with an idea, they build the app, and then they try to find users.
02:12
But by this point, it's already too late. To find product market fit, you need to flip the script.
Instead of jumping straight into development, you need to ask yourself why. Why would anyone want to download this app anyway?
These days, I never leave this to
02:29
chance. There are three things I do when I come up with an idea to work out whether I'm on to something.
Do I have product market fit or does my idea need to be tweaked or even abandoned altogether? First, it always starts with keyword research.
I start by typing in
02:47
keywords into a tool like Astro, and this can be done on a budget. Astro costs around about $9 a month, and there's other tools like app figures, which have a 7-day free trial.
I start searching for keywords people might use to find my app. And I look for keywords
03:04
with a popularity over 40 and competition under 60. That's a general rule.
If I really love the idea or it's something that I really want to build, I might be a bit more flexible on those numbers. But 40 for popularity and 60
03:19
for competition is a good framework to start with. This shows me how many people actually search for the app that I'm building and how much competition there actually is.
I'll never go far down the app idea path until I've actually found keywords people use to
03:35
find the app. And many of my app ideas have died here, right here.
Every single one I thought would have been successful, would have been the most amazing, greatest app to ever be created. But when I do some basic keyword research, the reality sets in.
03:52
And that's okay. Personally, I would rather work out now than spending months building the wrong thing and find out later on down the path.
And you can take it one step further and you can use a tool like Sensor Tower to find out how much the top ranking apps actually earn.
04:10
Sometimes a keyword looks too good to be true. And you'll never know the true story until you start looking at the cold hard figures because revenue never lies unless it's a monthly recurring revenue screenshot posted by a 15-year-old OnX.
I find this step so
04:28
important that I have a shortcut on my phone that lets me spy on the total number of downloads and the revenue of any app. I'll put a link in the description below.
This covers the question, will people actually search for my app? But I've run into this weird
04:43
problem too many times where all of the metrics lined up. They look perfect, the perfect idea, the perfect keyword, and I get it ranking well, but still nothing.
People might use the app, but they're just not coming back and they're not sharing it with friends. So, now I ask
05:00
myself the next question. Well, people want to use my app.
In the past, I would just build the thing. I'd put it out there.
I'll find out, does it sink or does it swim? But now, I do something a little bit different and a little bit more calculated.
I'll make a short video
05:17
to share the basic premise or idea or feature. I'll post it to Tik Tok reals and YouTube shorts and then assess whether it gets any positive signals.
And no, I'm not talking about the video going viral or anything here. That's not the objective.
I'm looking to see how
05:34
many people bookmark the post, like the post, or comment. What's the app?
The best part is the moment I build a new feature, I can test it. Before I've even released it, before I've even shipped it, I can finally find out, is this something people actually want to use?
05:50
But it doesn't stop there. When you're building your app based on feedback from social media, you start to think of your app less as a bunch of features and more as short form content.
you hook into this weird feedback loop where you create features that people will
06:07
actually want to engage with. And this in itself is a form of product market fit, especially if your target market is on those sites, especially if you're going to be promoting your app on those sites once it's released.
Now, I want to
06:22
talk about the final strategy I use to find product market fit. And this is probably not taught in any business school or any course online.
Just stop overthinking it and stop secondguessing yourself. But Adam, you've just told me to deep dive into keyword research to
06:38
find out if people actually search for my app and then you covered this whole social media feedback loop thing to work out if people actually want to use my app. And now you're telling me to stop overthinking it.
Okay, hear me out. Some
06:53
of my best projects, my best performing apps came as the result of creating a completely different app. building an app, getting it into the app store, and going through the motions gives you insights into the problem from a completely different perspective.
Check
07:08
out my app, Piano Run. It's an arcade game for learning the piano.
A simple falling block game where you match the notes on a physical piano. You plug it in, you play, it's fun.
But it wasn't until I released the game that I found out something interesting. Only 10% of
07:24
people were actually using it on an iPad and a smaller fraction of those would actually be connecting it to a piano. As a standalone iPhone app, it sucks.
And for 90% of people using the app, it was bad. I didn't have the insight on my
07:40
own. And it wasn't until I released the app that I realized this.
Then over the holiday break, I started thinking, how can you learn piano on an iPhone? And the answer was simple.
a memory game where you learn the notes on the piano
07:55
by name and you learn sheet music. You don't need to be connected to piano and you can play it anywhere, anytime.
Sometimes the thing you're building will fail and that's okay. What you do get is insights and information that you never
08:11
would have if you never set out to build it in the first place. Finding product market fit isn't some shorefire strategy.
It's a series of steps that help you make better, more informed decisions to reduce your chances of failure. So, next time you have a
08:26
brilliant idea, first do some keyword research to validate the demand. Then, share it on social media to assess engagement and make more informed decisions.
Then, simply just start. When you get the ball rolling, it gains
08:42
momentum.