Hi!
RELIVIT allows anyone to easily capture, curate and merge together short videos (up to 3 seconds each) and photos of life's best moments.
You can check-out RELIVIT here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rel...deo-diary-of-your-life/id1245132334?ls=1&mt=8
About RELIVIT?
We tried to make RELIVIT very simple to use, to get started with it:
Our aim is simple - we wanted to create an app that let everyone to be able to easily capture, curate, compile and share videos of life's best moments.
We envisage that people will use RELIVIT for nearly anything, including:
•A year of your life, by capturing one second everyday
•Sharing your favourite moments from holidays
•Progress from your fitness regime = show off your gains
•Enjoy great videos of your child or pet as they grow up
•Weddings, birthdays or other special events
•Progress of your house renovation, landscaping or car restoration
How did you build it?
At the start of February, I teamed up with a mate, and also brought on a designer (for equity) and hired a Chinese based developer on Upwork for a fixed fee to complete the app. The Developer was good to work with initially, but the project quickly became a rollercoaster him threatening to kill the code and not complete the project. It ended with him giving us what he called 70%-80% completed code, but turned out to be ~30% - 40% and us parting ways. We later found out that he was prioritising higher paid Upwork contracts, and didn't have motivation to work on ours. Lesson 1: Don't be a tight ass on dev costs!
From this we partnered with an India-based dev company to finish off the app. The budget blew out a bit, but it was definitely our fault for not making the scope/wireframes incredibly detailed and not taking the time upfront to explain the functionality in a super high level of detail.
For example, the developers coded a screen in such a way that the app would run out of memory after users loaded more than 15 videos to it. We had not communicated that users might have 100s of videos uploaded to it, because we thought it was such an obvious thing to point out. Lesson 2: Don't assume anything is obvious with developers!
Why would anyone want RELIVIT: You might use RELIVIT for taking a 1 second video each day during a holiday, or your day to day life, or you might like to record gym progress or weight-loss progress throughout a year, or recording your kids or pets as they grow. Whatever it is, our app is meant to make it easy to create stunning compilation videos and share them to social media etc.
Competitors Before you start yelling and screaming, yes there are apps like this on the market. The first one was/is extremely successful but is now charging $7.99 for a pretty clunky user experience and subpar final product (IMO).
Our app is free with In-App Purchases, but the core feature-set is already more than what the competitors are offering.
How's it going so far? We have not spent much on marketing yet (pushing some more important changes to the app through this week) but we are currently exceeding 100+ new users a day since launching 1 week ago. Our Day to Day retention is at a level we were hoping for, and our Product Page Views / Downloads ratio is usually around 78%-85% per day. We are currently planning out our growth hacking campaigns for the next month. We are hoping the RELIVIT watermark of the app (that is present when a user shares a video, unless they have purchased our 'remove watermark' IAP, will lead to exponential growth as users start sharing videos they have made with our app.
What did we expect would happen? It's probably too soon to tell what will really happen, but we had been hoping for more viral growth early, i think our expectations were a bit naive, as it was the first app we have released. Lesson 3: Be realistic with your expectations.
What's next? We've got a number of social media influencer lined up to post videos made with the app during the next fortnight. We are excited to see what ROI & downloads we can generate from these. We are also submitting to a tonne of app reviews sites, although starting to question the value as they appear free but then try to sting you $10 - $50 to 'skip the line' and not wait 2-3 weeks to be processed. Without knowing what sorts of downloads we could expect from these sites, we are not willing to spend this yet .
What we would like to know?
Thanks for reading,
Rich
#RELIVIT
RELIVIT allows anyone to easily capture, curate and merge together short videos (up to 3 seconds each) and photos of life's best moments.
You can check-out RELIVIT here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rel...deo-diary-of-your-life/id1245132334?ls=1&mt=8
We tried to make RELIVIT very simple to use, to get started with it:
- Import videos and pictures from your camera roll, or take them via the app
- Crop your videos to your favourite snippet (up to 3 seconds)
- Allocate tags to your moments, to allow for easy sorting and compiling
- Merge your videos and photos together to create compilations that showcase special moments and events such as weddings, birthdays, holidays or anything else you can imagine
- Share your compilations via Facebook, Instagram or other social platforms, or send directly to friends using WhatsApp, WeChat or iMessage
Our aim is simple - we wanted to create an app that let everyone to be able to easily capture, curate, compile and share videos of life's best moments.
We envisage that people will use RELIVIT for nearly anything, including:
•A year of your life, by capturing one second everyday
•Sharing your favourite moments from holidays
•Progress from your fitness regime = show off your gains
•Enjoy great videos of your child or pet as they grow up
•Weddings, birthdays or other special events
•Progress of your house renovation, landscaping or car restoration
How did you build it?
At the start of February, I teamed up with a mate, and also brought on a designer (for equity) and hired a Chinese based developer on Upwork for a fixed fee to complete the app. The Developer was good to work with initially, but the project quickly became a rollercoaster him threatening to kill the code and not complete the project. It ended with him giving us what he called 70%-80% completed code, but turned out to be ~30% - 40% and us parting ways. We later found out that he was prioritising higher paid Upwork contracts, and didn't have motivation to work on ours. Lesson 1: Don't be a tight ass on dev costs!
From this we partnered with an India-based dev company to finish off the app. The budget blew out a bit, but it was definitely our fault for not making the scope/wireframes incredibly detailed and not taking the time upfront to explain the functionality in a super high level of detail.
For example, the developers coded a screen in such a way that the app would run out of memory after users loaded more than 15 videos to it. We had not communicated that users might have 100s of videos uploaded to it, because we thought it was such an obvious thing to point out. Lesson 2: Don't assume anything is obvious with developers!
Why would anyone want RELIVIT: You might use RELIVIT for taking a 1 second video each day during a holiday, or your day to day life, or you might like to record gym progress or weight-loss progress throughout a year, or recording your kids or pets as they grow. Whatever it is, our app is meant to make it easy to create stunning compilation videos and share them to social media etc.
Competitors Before you start yelling and screaming, yes there are apps like this on the market. The first one was/is extremely successful but is now charging $7.99 for a pretty clunky user experience and subpar final product (IMO).
Our app is free with In-App Purchases, but the core feature-set is already more than what the competitors are offering.
How's it going so far? We have not spent much on marketing yet (pushing some more important changes to the app through this week) but we are currently exceeding 100+ new users a day since launching 1 week ago. Our Day to Day retention is at a level we were hoping for, and our Product Page Views / Downloads ratio is usually around 78%-85% per day. We are currently planning out our growth hacking campaigns for the next month. We are hoping the RELIVIT watermark of the app (that is present when a user shares a video, unless they have purchased our 'remove watermark' IAP, will lead to exponential growth as users start sharing videos they have made with our app.
What did we expect would happen? It's probably too soon to tell what will really happen, but we had been hoping for more viral growth early, i think our expectations were a bit naive, as it was the first app we have released. Lesson 3: Be realistic with your expectations.
What's next? We've got a number of social media influencer lined up to post videos made with the app during the next fortnight. We are excited to see what ROI & downloads we can generate from these. We are also submitting to a tonne of app reviews sites, although starting to question the value as they appear free but then try to sting you $10 - $50 to 'skip the line' and not wait 2-3 weeks to be processed. Without knowing what sorts of downloads we could expect from these sites, we are not willing to spend this yet .
What we would like to know?
- We would love any feedback on the app, our product page, whether the app's purpose is made clear enough to you, and also how intuitive the app is.
- What sort of product page views / download ratio % would be considered 'average' or 'above average' for a free app with many competitors? What sort of other key metrics do you use when assessing your app's launch.
- Any experience people have had from switching their free app to a paid app, and when they decided to make this plunge?
- Any growth hacking techniques people have found work well during the first month of launching a new free app. This is our first app, so we are pretty new to this.
Thanks for reading,
Rich
#RELIVIT
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