Australian hypnosis app Mindset has reached a milestone 12,000 users in just over two months, attributing its growth to a strong social presence and a commitment to getting to know its users.

Founded by Chris Naoumidis and his brother Alex Naoumidis, the self-improvement app provides hypnosis recordings designed to induce a state of “hyper-focused attention”, helping users change negative thoughts and behaviour.

As well as passing the 12,000-user benchmark, Chris Naoumidis says Mindset has been featured as ‘app of the day’ in the UK app store and listed in the top 10 free health and fitness apps.

He says such fast growth was achieved by the team getting to know the app’s target market through social media, particularly Reddit threads.

“The majority of our growth has come through interacting on forums and getting to know our target market,” Naoumidis tells StartupSmart.

The app was also launched on product sharing platform Product Hunt, which allowed for easy discussion and feedback.

Mindset was targeted towards the UK first, because of a strong existing hypnosis market in the country. The US is the app’s second-largest market, but interest has also been growing rapidly in Australia over the past few weeks, Naoumidis says, which he puts down to “increasing self-awareness”.

Mindset’s focus on knowing and understanding its users led the team away from seeking any external funding. Naoumidis says they did consider fundraising to pay for outsourced development, but decided against it.

“We felt it was better to learn to develop the app ourselves. The benefits of this are that you can respond to user feedback very fast, which leads to very agile development,” he says.

However, that fundraising could be on the cards in the near future. So far, the app has grown via product development and word-of-mouth, particularly through social channels. Soon, Naoumidis says, the startup will be ready to spend on marketing.

Even so, he maintains getting to know the user-base of a product is the key to growth.

“If you don’t understand your users you won’t be able to build something they love,” he says.

“If they don’t love it they won’t share it with their friends. And if they don’t share it, you won’t get that growth.”

Naoumidis also urges entrepreneurs to share their ideas and start selling them immediately, in order to understand whether or not the target market will pay for the service on offer; Mindset users pay $10 per month.

Products should be designed to solve big problems, he says.

“If people won’t pay to solve a problem, then it’s not big enough,” he says.

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