We’ve been live for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve spent more time than I would like to admit watching what people do in the app. It’s early and the group is small, so I’m not reading too much into the numbers, but some patterns are already showing:
- Goals bring people back. As we hoped, the collectors who set up a collection and tick off the cards they own are the ones who keep coming back.
- Many never get there. Onboarding currently ends with logging a first card, and a lot of people drop off right after, before they ever find collections. The collection looks like the a-ha moment, so onboarding probably needs to take people straight there.
- Browsing is the way in. Many people find cards by browsing the catalogue set by set, which makes all those hours spent getting the checklists right feel very worth it.
- It’s a tool first. Few people use the showcase or sharing features yet, and most treat the app as a practical way to find and track cards. That’s probably to be expected, since those features are pretty thin in v1. The interesting exception is binders: the people who lay their cards out in binders are among the ones who stick around best, so there’s something there to build on later.
So the app works best when someone’s chasing a goal, which gives us one test for every new idea: does it help them finish the set? Everything else I’m holding loosely until we’ve talked to a few of them properly.