my app is not growing, should i become Steve Jobs?

Today, when I was having lunch with a really good friend, one of our topics of conversation was about the process of getting more users and keeping them using the app. Let's face it, the only reason we can increase the valoration of our softwares is based on how many user we have and the retention. Here, I would like to quote “The Lean Startup”, Eric Reis talks about the importance of measuring as a part of your product development cycle. Seeing how your users react to and interact with new features and ideas should influence your decisions about those features and ideas.

That is a key, we need to measure things like:

• Daily Active Users (DAU)
• Monthly Active Users (MAU)
• New Users
• Retention

Those are really important values that show you if you are on the right direction, but knowing the retention do not give you the answer to what to do, lets suppose that the users are not coming back to your website, you will see a drop in the DAU, so do you know what to do? if you want to solve the DAU drop you will need to find out how to get your users back. So this is the answer to your problem:

you need that the user to likes your app

It is kind of obvious that increasing the DAU means to keep the user coming back as much as possible, for that I would like to share with you what I think are keys:

• having an idea do not makes you an expert
• never consider yourself a regular user, come on, you got the idea.
• if you want to develop something new and you are having a gut feeling, it could be food poisoning.. you need features that are oriented to keep the users.
• investing lot of time and resources to develop what YOU believe that is ok could be really expensive, it is better to invest the resources in a smart way in whatever is aligned to the users.
• do you need A/B testing
• because you need users to come back you need to develop what users want/need/expect. At this point you need to know that you are not alone in this task, there are tools for collecting the user feedback (like opinionlab, ideascale, userecho, feedbackify, survey monkey, google forms or any custom tool developed by your self
• there are techniques like QFD, that could translate user requirements into functional requirements, PLEASE USE THOSE KIND OF TOOLS/TECHNIQUES
• usability is really important, the UX (user experience) is also important, do not forget about that!
• use your own data, direct marketing is a good option, take you data and profile your powerusers, try to get to more people like that, again.. BE SMART.

I would like finishing answering the question:

NO, YOU SHOULD NOT BECOME STEVE JOBS.

He was a visionary, one of his abilities was understanding people. You are special because of the abilities you have developed during the time, that effort that makes you shine over the crowd and everything you can do and everything you know.