Quick Guide if you are building a consumer tech co
I am Aarihant Aaryan! Welcome to the Iron Sharpen Iron newsletter,
I share my weekly homework from my startup journey, learning about human behaviour, and sometimes decoding industries and business models for fun.
I can’t control my curiosity :) )
I have been helping a few of my friends in their -0 to 1 journey of building consumer tech products, I am sharing this quick guide, hoping it’ll accelerate your -0 to 1 journey while building a world-class consumer-tech product.
The only aspect you have to focus on in the early days is monetization, “ what % of users are going to pay for the use case”
Don’t wander too much around retention as it is a subset of the frequency of the problem if you don’t figure out monetisation on day 1 - then your retention won’t make sense most likely
Don’t complicate the development process, have 4 or 5 UI screens for your app ( Something in this order, Login/signup, Home screen, core activity screen if any, payment screen) it’ll help you to ship fast and iterate faster.
Flutter is a better language to code on, UI building becomes much easier and you can publish Android and IOS at a similar time.
How will you collect payments? you can create a Razorpay individual account if you want to collect payments in India, if it is the USA or any other country it is either Play Store payments or Apple payments
You must have your app description, pictures,and ready as early as possible to upload your app on the Play Store / App Store. You can create most of the content via ChatGPT
You can create a privacy policy via ChatGPT, host it on the notion and share the link in the Play Store and App Store
An ideal time for your Android time to be accepted on the Play Store is 5 days, IOS Store is 3 days ( Creating a developer account on IOS is a pain in the wrong places, if you’re an Indian developer, please use the UPI option)
Please integrate amplitude to understand user behaviour on your product,
“ firebase will not solve it”- You’ll have a perfect funnel that will give you a decent idea of what’s happening. The ideal time to integrate is 30 minutes.
It is mandatory to have a delete account option on your Android and IOS app, otherwise, your build will be rejected
If you’re building for an Indian user, use True Caller for login/ signup and if you’re creating for consumers outside India, who don’t prefer sharing numbers, you can use Google Sign-in and Apple sign-in. Hence getting feedback from abroad users is tough that’s why most companies give gift cards or $50 in cash to take an interview
For customer support use your WhatsApp number, keeping in touch with your early believers always helps
You’ll ideally do an app install campaign to get users to your product, don’t run ads on Meta initially, do it on Google ads - your Cost per install is much less and also tracking becomes easier
Your ad budget depends on your financial status, but a good ad budget to experiment in India is around 5k to 7k per experiment but for the USA it is 15k to 20k.
In India, the typical cost per install for an app is 3rs to 30 rs for big markets but in the USA it is $1.5 to $3.5 and beyond
Have 5 graphic designs of 1080x1080 size and 4 videos ready for your app install campaign
Your core metrics should be, Cost per Install, Cost per conversion, Conversion Percentage
“Remember if all your ideas and hypothesis fail, the next thing you should do is not execute your hypothesis but run an ad on meta asking your target group about the problem statements - you will most likely land on an insight that you can double down on”
If you have any thoughts share them in the comments :)
If you found this insightful, do drop a like :)
A ❤️and share on LinkedIn / Twitter would mean a lot.