This is a productivity app, and productivity apps are a real hard sell on mobile. Think about it, you're asking someone to embed a particular piece of software directly into their life. It has to provide so much value over not having any app that they have to remember to use to make using it a no-brainer.

Your app isn't really competing against other productivity apps, it's competing against the fact that an app is not going to be most people's best approach for improving their lives. The process of integrating a tool with life is not fun, it takes work and there's only so much that things like reminders can do for you.

I use two productivity apps on my phone. Reminders and the one I'm building. It's an ongoing experiment in how one can use software to improve life. Right now the only thing I've managed to integrate is spending tracking, and even that took months of back and forth consideration. Do I want to tag individual expenditures? How do I want to categorize them? How do I want to add an expenditure to a category? What should I call the act of spending something and what should I call the category? How do I want my reports to look like? Do I want reports in the database, or should they be generated dynamically? How should I represent common transactions that I do every day in a way that doesn't clutter up the main interface?

The whole exercise has left me unenthused about productivity software as a viable product category. Adding an expenditure now is easy as pie, for me, and only me. All of the work I had to do to figure out how I spend money and how I should build an app to manage it essentially has to be redone for every single person who wants to use software to help them manage their life. The domain seems simple, but it's actually incredibly complicated, because it's different for everyone.

It's always obvious when you are dealing with founders who likely won't make it. Specifically, when they're so so close to their own product that they start to blame anything else for failures rather than take an objective look at their own missteps.

In this case, buried among some semi-coherent arguments, we reach the point where one should ask "Was this product compelling compared to other solutions that tackle this pain point?"

Obviously not, but don't expect the company to smell the coffee. In their opinion, their "few competitor apps" didn't matter, but they lasted longer, so they probably did. Oh, but of course "they weren’t doing it as well."

Take a look at the comments rolling in here, some of which note that the product didn't seem like compelling standalone option but that would have done well as part of a larger solution. Others inquire why certain features were left out that would have adequately addressed the entire pain point, but left the product feeling incomplete otherwise.

Of course, these potential customers were all wrong, because "other apps felt heavy and complicated."

Founders considering mobile, don't make the same mistake(s) this company is making. Rather than write some clickbait Mediun post after the fact, remember that a great UIX, onboarding and maybe even a mascot might be necessary for mobile success, but they definitely aren't sufficient. Nothing beats product market fit, and if a mobile app is necessary for said fit, you better not only bother with mobile, you should embrace it...objectively.

This looks like someone trying to take the blame of failure out of their shoulders.

The questions are right, the answers are wrong. The app did not (judging by the text, I never heard of it before) add the value they thought. Maybe it did not even work as well as they thought. Actually, I doubt that.

I won't argue too much into it, instead I will give you counterexamples:

1. I should be on the target audience, and I have never heard of the app before. 2. Concur seems to be doing really fine, working on the same problem - so they have either a better marketing or a better solution.

Bottomline: don't shy people away of doing anything because you failed.

This tells me a lot more about the founders not understanding the market than about mobile apps in general.

> The mobile app was doing something really cool: you only had to take a snap of a receipt, and tap a button to export all the data into a beautiful Excel expense report.

That's a feature not a business. That feature already exists in all of the major expense tracking SAAS products that I'm familiar with.

So who is the target market? The sliver of people that have enough of a problem to want to buy a solution but not enough of a problem to buy the major existing solution is just not that big.

I can't find the app to see exactly how it worked, but did it have any integrations with expense reporting systems? As someone who files expense reports monthly for work, that would be the biggest issue for me - if it doesn't have a hook into QuickBooks or whatever system the company is using, then it's not going to get an enterprise following since users still have to manually enter info, which decreases value a lot.

The other issue is that if, like me, you travel a lot then a large number of your receipts will be in emails or PDFs (I book airfare and hotels online, and take Uber instead of cabs), so taking pictures of paper receipts and tracking driving miles would only get me half-way to completion.

Sorry, but this article is pointless. There are no numbers whatsoever, everything can be squeezed down to "if it's not a messenger or a game¹, people won't use it", and there's not even meaningful comparison to any alternative approaches. Like the users that forgot the app magically won't forget to talk to that Slack bot once in a month.

Literally, this article is nothing but an advertising for a refreshed product, with some wanna-be-viral-marketing attempt at sparking discussion by somewhat controversial statement of "not on app store". (Uh, sorry for being cynical here, but seriously...)

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[1] Not a full list.

Looks like they replaced the app with a Slack bot. That is more interesting than the article.

There are some services which would be more convenient as a bot on a chat platform than a "portal" site or a mobile app. Some issues with service-specific site / apps:

- password that's perpetually forgotten (unless the site plays well with the password manager)

- proprietary, doesn't explicitely support integrations unless the authors implement them

- yet another set of notifications to deal with.

It is obvious what people want. A single app that does it all. Seriously.

We need a general purpose application that can be used for 80% of all use cases. When you think about it, all apps pretty much re-introduce the exact same features. Preferences, contacts, notifications, authentication, sharing, etc.

I want to use the exact same interface and language to order a package from China to my house, or to hail a cab to move me from work to home. I want the estimated ETA and cost prediction to be displayed the same. Tracking a package or the real-time location of a cab should be done through the same interface. I want to be notified the same way, whether it's my package or my cab that's late and/or has arrived. I want to pay for the package and cab ride the exact same way. Reviewing the received product and reviewing the cab driver, should be identical processes. I think the same should apply to pretty much any interaction, be it to ask my coffee machine to brew a cup, to be notified that my colleague will be late to a meeting, to pay for a meal, to review a movie, to schedule an appointment, to locate a friend.

My thesis is that all communication problems (which are what apps solve) are difference instances of the same one.

An app is not any tool. It's a language. We need to implement a general purpose language, and then all use it to interact with different agents/services.

If you think "build it and they will come" applies in the mobile space, you're completely wrong and about to light a bunch money on fire. I'd be very interested to know if this team talked to 25+ people smack in the middle of their target audience about their expense-tracking pains before starting to think about building the app. It really seems like they thought of a problem (or what they perceived as a problem) and then built the app. If they dove deep on the problem and talked directly to people who they thought would most benefit from the app, they certainly would have uncovered more information about why Birdly would or would not work for them and could make important product choices based on that feedback.

I use Expensify to track expenses for work and WaveApps for some consulting I do on the side. I disagree with the thesis of the piece, because I'm perfectly happy to keep installed apps that I use once per month, or even once per quarter.

WaveApps is great for invoicing, but their expense reporting module is ludicrously bad (it does OCR on the receipt images, but then doesn't include them in a nice report, so you have to download the images separately and convert them to a PDF manually).

I would have used Birdly if I had known about it. Anyone know about another Expensify competitor, preferably one who doesn't charge for single users?

As for Birdly, good luck with the Slack pivot, which looks clever.

This was a great read, and I was right with the story line.

Yep, you're right. It's hard to get to your target market from the app store. Yep, they forget about your app. Yep, Yep, Yep.

Oh look, there's a link at the bottom to the new Birdly! Let's see what their new approach is!

It's a.....slack bot? Wut?

Just being honest here: I think that's one of the stupidest pivots I've ever seen.

I am using a mobile app to track the milage of my car and thus pull it up only at the gas station. While a little more specific than general expense tracking, it seems to be similar enough for a comparison. According to the article these apps are a hard sell because they are used so rarely. I can't comment on how the app creator is doing but it's still an app that I would pay for. But maybe the market is too small and the simplicity of the app creates an unsustainable race to the bottom.

I wonder if they considered breaking the app up into smaller parts that can be sold to different markets:

  * API that accepts the scanned images, parses and returns the receipt data.
  * API (that does the above and) stores the data to allow later exporting of
    receipt data in Quickbooks, Excel, and other formats.
  * IOS and Android Libraries that integrate with the API.
  * Birdly app build on top of the library and API.

Also if there was a solo API plan, I would probably consider something like this for some personal expense tracking software I've been thinking about writing for myself.

It's worth noticing that this is not only an app problem. When it comes to Corporate systems, the fact that a user has to work with different systems is incredibly painful. In fact, it's so painful that having 1 person managing the system and everybody else just sending email requests to this person works wonderfully.

One thing they could have tried is human support. Like let's give them a human who takes care of things or helps out or is always available to give training.

Do users actually hate "app clutter"? I have plenty of apps I only use rarely, but when I need them, I need them. Space isn't a concern unless it's a huge game or downloads tons of media. 100MB or less is nothing.

Really weird to read this being someone who is using the Expensify app on a daily basis. Super simple, I just photo the receipts as I go about during the month and then at the beginning of the next month I create my expense report.

A productivity app that involves the camera? The slowest workflow on the phone? No thanks.

The right answer is to get those receipts into a digital format some other way, not with the camera.

I would have deleted this app after I tried wasting 30 seconds taking a nice little picture of a $20 receipt the first time.

This is a good shutdown analysis. But they didn't really mention that their sector has been pretty heavily dominated by traditional accounting software like Quickbooks for quite some time. I'm not sure how long, but I remember using Quicken in the 80's.

And what has it been like moving to Slack? Are people using Birdly more?

Saving four hours a month is great, and if you have a captive audience who is being told to use the mobile app to submit expenses, that will force adoption.

Trying to get individual users to adopt a workflow is going to be much harder.

The target audience for the mobile app might not be the users themselves, but their managers.

Also, your workflow of using Slack to enter expenses, which looks awesome btw, might actually be easier for people to use than stopping midstream to use a mobile app.

The new service looks really useful but I'm bummed out it's only available as a chat bot?!

I, for one, would love to try and use this app daily. I currently use Microsoft Office Lens to snap all my receipts. Unfortunately, it has some very awful ways to store it which is primarily in the Photo Album... Would be lovely to have a generated excel of things.

I like this article because for anyone who has not tried to sell a product, it can be very easy to become deluded about how hard it is, due to the endless noise from the press and VC community that tends to talk up successes and gloss over the difficulties (the notable exception to this being Ben Horowitz).

I've found this thought experiment to be useful when evaluating new product ideas: People will buy your product for sure if a) there is a law saying they must, otherwise go to jail or b) by doing so they straight away save a significant amount of money vs something they were already doing/buying. If your product isn't close to either of these cases, you are likely to fail.

I've tried several receipt tracking apps, and they all failed to overcome the OCR challenges.

If there is even a 20% chance the app cannot recognize the total amount (ignoring taxes and tips), then suddenly I am manually reconciling unrecognizable receipts.

So, if I'm always manually reconciling expense reports, then why bother with an app... I'll just continue taking pictures and forwarding them to my email for manual expense reporting. 100% of the task can be done in one sitting.

That being said, I SINCERELY HOPE somebody WILL develop the machine learning algorithms necessary to get 99% OCR accuracy in this space.

Is the problem more that this is a feature, not a product? That is, integrated with expense report systems, tax management, any other business tools, this makes sense. But as a standalone, it feels like an island.

This was similar to TripIt which organized your trip based on parsing confirmations. At the end of the day, it was a great feature, but struggled to grow beyond a certain point as a product.

Love the idea behind Birdly... but I think it belongs in other apps/tools used for more frequent and broader business needs. (i.e., here's hoping for a great acquisition and adoption for you!)

This guy's business was "take a photo of a receipt for every single thing you buy, then upload it to us, and (supposedly) save four hours a month." It's hard to imagine it not failing.

OneNote & OfficeLens has replaced many apps on my phone. It's true that the other apps were better tailored to the problem, but the effort to install and maintain so many apps with a couple mobile devices (tablet and phone) is just too much: app features and layouts keep changing, credential info needs to be re-entered and then I get to my desktop and there is no application for Windows or Mac. For better or worse, if the requirement can even partially be met with OneNote or Evernote, they will probably just use it.

It's not a terrible write-up but I think it may be a little delusional both ways. I'm not totally convinced that they type of app they built could not find a decent audience. The app "makes sense".

And "Don't bother creating a mobile app" is terrible advice. But if you are going to create a mobile app, you have to really try an understand if it makes sense, how people are going to find it, if it's compelling enough, if it takes advantage of "mobile-ness". Etc.

I'm not that surprised. I would never remember what an app named "Birdly mobile" did, when finding out I installed it last month.

Neither would I find it again, if looking for that "receipt scan app I installed last month".

I tend to forget what apps I have installed, what they do, and their names, and anything else than a really descriptive name, such as "RunKeeper", would not get used much in the long run.

Reading the article, all I could think was "sounds like a problem with getting users to form new habits."

Those categories they listed are apps you'd use on a daily basis, or that have some kind of notifications (read: dopamine hits) built in. They build up a habit loop by making the app fun to use, and emitting notifications to keep the users coming back during that formative early usage period.

Monthly expense reporting (or monthly anything, really) seems like a rough road for building habits.

From my own patterns, I sort of agree with the conclusion but there's one app that I keep even though I only use it a few times a year and it's a PDF "scanner" app. The difference is it replaces an expensive piece of hardware and it does it better than the hardware. I'm not sure Birdly really solved any problems that couldn't be solved just as easily with built-in apps or even pencil and paper.

I think they fell for the myth that "ideas don't matter, execution does"

If you start with a flawed idea there's no saving you, no matter how hard you try.

I'd like to use something like this to verify that my credit card statements are accurate. I don't want to give an app access to my bank logins (as I believe Mint requires). So I envision a workflow where I snap receipts, the app digitizes them and produces a transaction list which it either compares against a monthly statement PDF, or I do the verification by hand.

Anyone have a good, established workflow for this?

I imagine it is very hard to make money with the types of apps that fall within those most popular app categories. Mostly free apps with advertising.

I guess I don't really understand the shift of ONLY creating a mobile app for productivity or business type stuff. Seems like these types of apps can more easily be monetized with a web app and "maybe" complimented with a mobile app.

i believe that we - as programmers, product managers, ... - often have the wrong ideas about mobile. three examples from my experience:

idea: an app that helps people find shops with offers nearby

how people use it: users look up offers while they are already in the shop (nearly always inside big supermarkets.)

idea: vegan restaurant finder

how people use it: users look up pics of food of that restaurant while they already sat down in the restaurant (but as Instagram has more pics, they always switch to Instagram)

idea: apartments for rent app with awesome "find apartments nearby" feature

how people use it: to look up the newest apartment in the city while in the metro home

i believe it will take a few years more until we get mobile more right than wrong, until then be prepared to question your product hypothesis! (and best do it while you are running around, stressed, on your way to work or during business travel, you know, while you actually are "mobile" / or at home at your couch (also a mobile scenario) ... not while in the office in front of your mac book pro)

Really weird to read this being someone who's using Expensify on a daily basis in exactly the use cases they describe.

Yesterday I put together a guide for making profitable mobile apps that might interest people - https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-mone...

It looks like you made the right pivot, moving away from a native app to a web app.

FYI - your mobile navigation isn't working.

Is the title meant to be linkbait? Cause this is quite the blanket statement.

How do you know what I'm building (if anything) and if it falls in a category that might benefit from being a native app and the distribution that comes with it?

What worked or did not work for you need not apply to every other business.

I think this is a good article, but I don't like it when someone uses just one experience to generalize about something as broad as whether someone should or should not build a mobile app.

This is a sincere question. Is number of times app is used per week/month/year a good metric to build an app? Wouldn't that be a typical utility for a Uber/Lyft?

But do bother to advertise your new product on Medium!

Might a monthly reminder notification have helped?

How does Birdly/Bill do the processing of the receipts? Is it OCR software, a person,...?