How a tiny little bird got a puff of success, and how we’re struggling to figure out what to do with it

A friend and I built twindr as a (derpy) joke project, and it somehow blew up. The “Tinder for unfollowing Twitter profiles” hit number 1 on ProductHunt, was featured on Gizmodo, The Daily Dot, LifeHacker, and a bunch of other websites. Despite all of that, the one thing I learned from Twindr’s success is how broken the App Store is. More specifically, I learned how broken the app rating system is.

Lots of people have talked about the app store before. Discovery is impossible, monetization is ugly, and trying to build around the 7+ day review time is rough. But as a small time developer, I now know how difficult it is to make an impact on the app store, even if you have a popular product.

Twindr is doing really well

(for what it is and what we expected)

First, I want to show you a few stats about Twindr (courtesy of Parse Analytics and Fabric.io).

New users (weekly)

This is the number of new users we’ve gotten since launch. Somehow, our new user count is still climbing a week after publicity has died down. We absolutely expected our app to plummet into oblivion by now, especially since we’ve spent a total of $0.00 on marketing Twindr. Despite that, over 120 thousand people have been unfollowed on our app in two weeks.

Based on these numbers, we’ve estimated that almost 1 million cards have been swiped on Twindr.

Our App Ratings

Even with those absurd numbers, we have about 19 app reviews. I would guess that about 50% of these are from our friends, and the other 50% are from the good people over at ProductHunt.

Other than that, I don’t think a single regular user has gone back to rate the app. How do I know? Aside from providing hours of swiping joy, Twindr has 1 other button that provides a menu of extra options:

Clicks (over 2 weeks)

Tweet Your Ratio: 22 clicks

Follow The Devs: 71 clicks

Rate Us: 0 clicks

Contact Us: 28 clicks

Donate: 52 clicks

Logout: 17 clicks

Wait, did we do this right? More people wanted to give us money than rate us on the app store. Then again, when you click “donate”, this is what happens, so people were probably just messing around.

Still, not a single regular user wanted to rate our app.

The Solution

Inspired by this article by Aaron Wojnowski

We didn’t expect success with Twindr, but once we got some, we immediately kicked into learning mode. Why not test a few things while we had the opportunity? So we built a very basic system for trying to improve the number of ratings.

Enjoying Twindr?

The mechanism is very simple. Users have a slim chance of encountering the “enjoying twindr?” card, and then never encounter it again. The initial results were really optimistic.

Here are the numbers. We intentionally kept the chance of encountering the card low so that only our heavy users would come across it. About 60% of the people who encountered the card said they enjoyed the app. If only 10% of those actually did rate the app, we’d have 40 additional ratings. So let’s take a look at what happened.