Site Insight
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My most recent post highlighted the struggles of one start-up to persuade customers to download and use its iPhone app. Based on the comments we received, this is a common challenge — and one that is not easily resolved.
Marcela Miyazawa, a founder of the start-up, Wanderable, said the honeymoon gift registry has exceeded her expectations in attracting users, but she is disappointed in the response to the app. She was thankful for all of the reader suggestions, which she discussed in a conversation that has been edited and condensed.
A number of comments questioned why you decided to focus on honeymooners. They expressed concern that the market is too small and that people enter it only once — they hope — in their lives.
Our biggest challenge is our limited audience. We are only relevant to couples getting married in the near future and are currently irrelevant to our users post-wedding and -honeymoon. Still, there are many apps that appear to be marketing themselves successfully to these same couples: Gift Registry 360 allows couples to scan the bar codes of registry items on their iPhones, and Appy Couple is a start-up that allows couples to create seamless wedding Web sites and app integration for planning around their big day. Our challenge is to get in front of this niche audience in a cost-effective manner.
We see a huge opportunity in the emerging honeymoon registry market as couples are getting married later in life and have already accumulated many of the household goods that are common in traditional registries, but we also see an opportunity to broaden our scope beyond honeymoons and already have the functionality for this in place. Wanderable.com and our app already allow for couples to register for anything — from a snorkeling expedition in Fiji, to a new set of china, to pots and pans — and couples can utilize the app to ask for gifts and to send thank-you postcards for items that are not travel-related.
One commenter provided a seven-step guide on how to plan and build your app to increase the chances of its being seen and downloaded. His list includes creating a video and a Spanish version, working with ad networks, and improving the screen shots to include faces. Do you agree with his suggestions?
There are some great points here. A video teaser would be a great announcement of the app, as would paying to have the app featured on relevant wedding sites. However, as a very small start-up we did not have a budget to commit to creating a video for the app — we haven’t had the budget to create a video for our site yet, which would be our first priority. Advertising to the niche market of engaged couples is extremely expensive. Paying for a sponsored post about the app on a major wedding blog like Style Me Pretty costs $3,500 for a weekday run date. It costs $5,000 to be included in a single newsletter sent to Martha Stewart Weddings couples, and you share the newsletter real estate with additional advertisers. With our small budget and tight margins, neither were possible for the app release.
In response to translating the app to Spanish, the vast majority of our current Wanderable honeymoon registry users are in the United States, and so while we would love to expand the app to multiple languages it is not a priority right now. Utilizing an ad network with a revenue-sharing model instead of a pay-per-install model is a great angle for us to explore, and we are doing so because of the feedback from the article. However, it will likely be a challenge given our tight margins and the low amount of revenue to share.
The feedback on the screen shot quality and content has also been useful to our team, and we are using it to take action to create more clear and attractive visuals to promote the app.
One commenter was adamant — judging by his use of exclamation marks — that you were misled about the price for reviews in wedding blogs.
Smaller blogs will run guest posts for free or at a small fraction of this cost, but larger blogs like Style Me Pretty, 100 Layer Cake and Wedding Chicks charge upwards of $1,000, moving into the $3,000 range. While the blog audience is extremely relevant for us, the cost becomes prohibitive. Since we only take a very small fee from transactions from our Wanderable honeymoon registries, we are not able to come close to our target cost per acquisition though these channels. The smaller blogs that are free or low-cost provide very limited traffic to our site (under 20 clicks) and have yet to prove worth the time and resources that go into them.
I know how hard it is to find the perfect name for a business. A few readers were vocal in their belief that the name Wanderable does not describe what you do, limits your potential and is not memorable.
We think the name fits the solution because Wanderable is about making a gift meaningful by being able to give a couple a variety of experiences on their first travels together. The name Wanderable evokes those experiences and the desire to choose the gift of a memorable experience.
How do you feel about the recommendation to work with the various vendors — caterers, photographers, etc. — that are involved in weddings? And what do you think of trying bridal expositions?
This is a great point. We are already in the midst of networking with wedding planners and photographers to capitalize on vendor relationships. For example, we offer wedding planners discounts to provide to their clients who use Wanderable. We have tried bridal expositions in the past but did not see a strong return on investment. It costs upwards of $1,000 to participate, but we only got around 70 leads as a result, and only a small percentage of these leads converted into actual registries.
Richard Demb is co-founder of Abe’s Market, an online marketplace for natural products that is based in Chicago.