A lesson from a failed startup

I spent almost a year working on a habit tracking app called habitly, and it failed. There are many reasons why it failed, but in this post I want to talk about just one. Since it has become a valuable lesson for me I think it could help you too.

My app had a horrible retention rate. I thought one way I could improve the retention rate, was to add features that the users want. The most requested feature at the time was the ability to add one off tasks. So thats what we added.

2 weeks of designing and 2 weeks of development later the new update is out. Habitly is now a habit tracker combined with a to-do list.

The result

1. Less than 1% of users used the new feature
2. The retention rate went down

What just happened... The users literally requested this and none of them use it...

Habitly's value proposition is to help people track their habits. And adding a to-do list provides no value to the people who download the app to track their habits. In fact it actually made the app worse...

One of the consequences of allowing people to create one off tasks was that it increased the number of steps needed to create a habit. It made the app more complicated.

Every single aspect of your business should be built ON TOP OF your value proposition. For example, we should've only added features that helped people track there habits. When marketing we should communicate our app as "The best way to track your habits".

Every single aspect of your business and every decision you make should be built on top of your value proposition.

The value of having all your habits and tasks in one app isn't enough to convince a person to use the app when both the habit tracking features and the task features suck. There are popular apps/software where every single feature is based around creating the best to-do list. We only had one feature. Clearly people are going to use alternatives.

Sidenote
This may sound obvious to many of you but it wasn't for me when I started.
One other lesson I learned was don't spend 4 weeks on a feature that nobody wants.

If your interested in reading more stuff like this check out my new project https://twitter.com/FreshmanStartup