Wunti.app

The answer is a big YES.

Issues / Motivation:

• PWA notifications didn’t work reliably on Android and at all on iOS (until recently)
• Facebook mobile ads open in the Facebook built-in browser and that sucks if you want the user to install your PWA

How is a mobile app a solution:

• Notifications just work on both platforms.
• When the user clicks on an App store / Play store link, the store app automatically opens, breaking out of the Facebook browser. Also, every user knows how to install an app.

Results:

1000+ installs across iOS and Android in the last 20 days (when I started the ads campaign)
2500 ad clicks for ~100E which is worth it for me. ~40% conversion rate.
~200 daily users (more on the weekends), which is more than expected since the app is mostly “one time use”.
~100 of those daily users are subscribed to notifications, which is less than expected, but still a good number

Compared with last year, I had 3000 clicks to the site but most of the users weren’t returning and I didn’t know why, until someone sent me an email telling me that it’s really hard to get back to the site because of the Facebook browser.

Conclusion:

If your main marketing channel is Facebook/Instagram and you want daily recurring users, a mobile app is better than a PWA.

The app requires crowd-sourced status reports. In the first season, there wasn't much of a crowd using the app so there weren't many reports, which made the app pretty useless. The app had a "chicken or the egg" problem.

In the 2nd season of the app being live, after a more serious marketing push, the app has a lot more people using it to get up-to-date lift and slope reports. And some users have started consistently contributing reports. Which solves the "chicken or the egg" problem.

How I've managed to solve the problem:

1. Fake it till you make it / Dog-fooding: at the start of the season I was the main contributor. I'd report problems at the start of the day, mostly closed lifts and slopes. These are the most important types of reports and I could just echo the official reports from the official channels.

2. Marketing push: more facebook/instagram ads with a wider demographic. Since the app had at least some daily reports (added by myself), I could start getting more users, which would not instantly leave because the app was empty.

3. Nudging users to contribute: if there weren't any recent reports, the app would show on the home screen a message informing them that they can contribute to the benefit of all other users. There was also a call to action next to the message.

And that seems to have been enough.
Have some useful content. Show it to people. Encourage people to add content.

13k impressions, 250 link clicks, 15 accounts created. $15 spent so far across 7 days. Targeting local users in/around Brasov, Romania.

My plan was to get some eyeballs on the app and this seems like a good and cheap way to do it.

I've also interacted with 2 users of the app after they've sent me an email. It seems that the feature I put most of my time in, the 3D slope map is pretty useless to locals who already know the mountains. Bummer :(

But on a happier note, users are actually using the app and they are adding info about lifts (queue size, heavy winds, etc). So, thank you users :)

The original idea was "Waze for snow sports"

The "minimum" features I've aimed for:

A map of the mountain (slopes + lifts)
A way for users to add info about the slopes (ice, rocks etc) and lifts (out of service, long queues etc)
Local resources: cameras, communities, shops, instructors, events.
Work offline.

Since this is 2020 and COVID has mostly ruined the snow season in my country I'm treating this winter as a way to gather feedback.

The app can be found at https://wunti.app/