Chris shares how he acquired his first 100 users for his calorie tracking app, Amy, and focuses on improving retention by adding engaging features like widgets and gamification, fixing bugs, and enhancing user onboarding. He plans to onboard the next 500 users with these improvements and aims to boost retention further while sharing his app development journey on social media.
In this video, Chris shares his journey of acquiring the first 100 users for his newest app, Amy, a simple calorie tracking app designed like Apple Notes where users type what they ate and see calories displayed instantly. He emphasizes the importance of starting marketing early by building a waitlist, which helped him gain the initial 10 users and now has 1,600 people waiting. With 100 users onboarded, Chris focuses on understanding retention, specifically the percentage of users still active one week after signing up. Currently, Amy has a 3% week 1 retention rate, which is on the low end but aligns with industry averages for calorie tracking apps.
To improve retention before onboarding the next 500 users, Chris dedicates a week to building features aimed at increasing user engagement. The first major addition is widgets, including home screen and lock screen widgets, which serve as constant reminders and reduce friction by allowing users to quickly log their food. He highlights how widgets occupy valuable phone real estate and can significantly boost retention by keeping the app visible and top of mind. Chris collaborated with his fiancée, Cecilia, to design attractive widgets featuring Amy the Cat and nutritional summaries, enhancing the app’s appeal and usability.
Next, Chris introduces streaks and gamification to encourage habit formation. The streak counter tracks consecutive days users meet their goals, while animated badges based on cat memes provide motivation and reward consistent use. Although gamification might seem gimmicky, Chris believes it can effectively support habit-building, similar to popular apps like Duolingo and Snapchat. He also notes that thanks to AI tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Whisper Flow for voice dictation, he was able to develop and ship these features much faster than before.
Alongside new features, Chris stresses the importance of fixing bugs to improve retention. After onboarding 100 users, several bugs were reported that negatively impacted the user experience, such as issues with saving edited nutrition info and calorie calculations not updating correctly. He points out that unresolved bugs can frustrate users and cause them to abandon the app, so addressing these issues was crucial. Additionally, he discovered a significant oversight: the app lacked a place for users to input essential data like weight and height. Chris revamped the settings page and onboarding process to include this information and added support for metric and imperial units to accommodate international users.
With these improvements, Chris feels ready to onboard the next 500 users and hopes to see retention increase. He mentions future plans to enhance notifications and improve app accuracy to build trust and engagement further. Chris invites viewers to follow his journey on Instagram and TikTok for behind-the-scenes content and encourages subscriptions to his channel. He concludes by expressing excitement about the upcoming app store launch and continuing to share his experiences building productivity apps.