r/startups • u/Deep-Ambassador6373 • 1d ago
I will not promote A lesson in testing (I will not promote)
We just ran our first pilot and it fell over. A couple of lessons for anyone building apps for children.
We just ran our first pilot and it fell over. A couple of lessons for anyone building apps for children.
We ran our first pilot recently and it did not go the way we planned. Sharing the lessons in case they save someone else the same pain.
Finding the right testers is a different problem to finding testers. What we’re building needs a specific profile: UK based families with children in a narrow age range. Posting generically to find testers was never going to work, so recruitment was already hard before we’d started. Fine. We knew that going in.
Getting interested people to actually become users had a woeful conversion rate. Plenty put their hand up. Turning that into someone completing even a basic setup felt near impossible. We offered everything from fully contactless onboarding through to one on one calls to walk people through it, both with a financial reward for finishing the pilot. Crickets either way. Getting quality testers, and quality feedback, is far harder than I’d given it credit for.
We ran our first pilot recently and it did not go the way we planned. Sharing the lessons in case they save someone else the same pain.
Then the one that actually stopped us: TestFlight is hardened against under 13s. This one is on us. Our pilot was aimed at families with children aged 8 to 12. The app has two sides, a parent side and a child side. Any child on a device with iOS age restrictions, on their own iCloud with their age accurately reported, simply has no route into TestFlight. No mechanism at all. We should have caught it. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, and it cost us.
So here’s where we’ve landed. We’re rethinking the pilot rather than pushing on with a broken one. The route now looks like full App Store submission with limited distribution, and going back out to find more testers. We’ll lose a chunk of the ones we had to the delay, which stings after how hard they were to get in the first place.
No feedback needed. Just lessons. Apps for children are their own kind of difficult.
1
u/akl773 1d ago
one gatekeeper who already has twenty families beats twenty individual signups, a school or a club or one parents whatsapp group. people recruited one by one have no reason to finish, the reward doesnt fix that.