Thread by @rameerez

Awesome! @Wakefy_app's functionality has just been copied! Not by minor players, but by Spotify and Google themselves! This can only mean I might be onto something with Wakefy!

https://twitter.com/Okihita/status/1025583209541599232

Just for Android devices, though. Hard to make that work on iOS as far as I know (without forcing users to leave their screen on the whole night). Plus, Wakefy was born with a different use case in mind. But still that's a copy – and only 4 months after Wakefy's launch.

Pattern:

If your product's main functionality is another successful product's lacking feature, chances are they'll just copy your whole product.

Solution:

Don't base your products entirely off another successful product.

– Apple just copied Dropbox with iCloud [after refusal to sell Dropbox]
– IG just copied Snapchat's stories [after refusal to sell Snap]
– macOS just copied 10s of indie apps for their latest Mojave update

Now that we're talking about @Wakefy_app, let's do a quick #openstartup metrics update:

🗓️ 4.5 months since launch
📅 1 day spent on marketing
⬇️ 5k+ downloads
📈 Growing number of weekly active user events (good product stickiness, increasing MAU)
💵 $10 MRR, 8 paying users

Chart numbers are obviously off (due to buggy code, my fault), but proportions and tendency are OK.

Good: free product. Good stickiness. Users love it (based on emails I get)

Bad: pricing model / monetization. Donationware is not profitable. Only 0.1% of users donate.

Also, I'm getting many emails lately requesting new features and troubleshooting under very concrete setups. Sorry I'm not getting back, I try to do one at a time but they consume so much time + I gotta think a fair pricing model so I can afford to invest time on it!