The Challenges Every Startup Faces and How Our Team Coped with Them
By: Aleksandr Lanin
Tags: Startup Life, Startup, App Development, Business, Startup Lessons

The path of any startup is not paved with flowers. Our history is no exception. We have been working on creating JOI — a diary of emotions that will help users improve their mental health. We’d like to share the problems we faced and the solutions we took. Perhaps our path will help someone get rid of the fear of screwing up — it happens with everyone sometimes, the most important is to learn how to cope with it :)

Even at the stage of developing the idea, my team and I encountered difficulties. In short:

insufficiently experienced developers and designers were our biggest problem: changes were implemented very slowly, we had a huge backlog of tasks that no one had time to do. It turned out that finding a specialist in these areas is not easy at all, despite the seemingly high competition on the market.

by the way, speaking about competition — there is a lot of apps related to mental health, so we had to come up with a unique selling proposition and work on the quality of the product to be competitive;

and again about the work of developers and designers: not all of them understood the concept of the future app. We aimed to build the work of algorithms based on the popular ABC method — one of the most famous techniques of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, used to analyze thoughts, behavior, and emotions. It seemed to them that it was enough to create an ordinary basic tracker to mark your mood quickly and that’s it.

The solution was:

not to be afraid to change the team. We had to go through many candidates before we’ve found specialists who understood our goals and shared our values. We managed to convey to the team the importance of diaries, mood tracking, and emotional intelligence for human health and successful social interaction.

communication with users is the key to success! We talked a lot with those who used our app and it helped us understand what they wanted, what problems they had, and how we could improve their experience, evoke positive emotions and support them in difficult times. We’ve managed to develop a useful journaling habit in people to prevent mental health problems.

And then everything suddenly became great, and money fell from the sky!

That was a joke, obviously. When JOI was released, the problems did not diminish — they just transformed, and became even deeper and more global :)

there are many startups, and only a few successful ones. And the problem is often the inability to promote yourself and your product. It was the time when we’ve faced the first difficulties — none of the team had any idea how important the proper advertising was for the success of our application. We didn’t realize that we needed to improve visibility, didn’t imagine how ASO works, and, to be honest, at first we behaved like blind kittens. Through trial and error, we’ve developed a promotion strategy, which, although not immediately, but began to bring results. If you want, I can share it in the following articles.

surely, we found bugs in our app and tried to fix them in time. This helped us grow and develop, albeit with difficulty, because initially we knew little about this area and were just a group of enthusiasts who wanted to create an interesting and useful product.

We got a pretty good reaction from users — nowadays the topic of working with your mental health is one of the most necessary and popular. Many people like the simplicity of our app, someone noticed the pleasant design. It turned out that some users even kept a diary on behalf of their children to track how certain triggers, people in the environment, and even games affected the child’s mood. In this regard, we are lucky — users understand the value of the app and we do not have to persuade them, trying to deceive or sniff out frank sh*t.

The app was almost immediately featured in Britain and then in other European countries, so users here have already tried it. Producthunt.com also featured our app under the Product of the Day category. We are very pleased that there are so many people sharing our idea to change the world, fight inequality, and create useful products to improve the quality of life.

Our team continues creating products for health and creativity, and we will tell you about them in the following publications. Now we are engaged in attracting investments for explosive growth and diversification of our projects.