About
→ An affordable agent to help people’s health
Concept
The concept of William Support was to be a free agent to help people with disabilities or long-term treatments cope with the challenges of their situation, at a cost to the doctor or a small cost to the user, with upsells to improve the agent’s intelligence.
Monetization
Volume was the strategy with this product—serving a broad market through pay-as-you-go strategies, free trials, and the possibility of getting a discount if you invited someone else. However, distribution was the most complicated part—the product didn’t have enough social proof to convince others it was viable.
Internationalization
Following the logic of a broad market to obtain a return on investment with just a large number of users, the application was made accessible in different languages using i18n. With translations in Spanish and French, the application covered a good portion of the digital population.
About the interface
While working on the project, I realized that the user interface was the most time-consuming part. The content didn’t even qualify for Google indexing and was complicated to build. The screens, colors, viewports, and internationalization made the user interface and content an arduous and manual task. I concluded that the front end should be as easy to build as the back end, so in my next project, I will use WordPress for the front end, along with a series of subdomains to generate the application infrastructure.
Main Costs
Given the low volume of the application, one of the biggest costs was the front end. Hosting the main pages and blog for this project, plus the PayPal transaction cost (almost 40% of the overall $1 price), was the biggest cost of this application. Some alternatives could have been using cryptocurrencies, although these were challenging due to wallet management.
Conclusion
From this application, I learned not to waste time on the front end. It’s worth paying $20 for a cloud subscription or hosting the site on WordPress rather than spending weeks working on the application’s features.
WordPress increasingly sounded like a better alternative, where the tools were already built and the ecosystem was quite developed with many plug-and-play solutions.
- Pay as you go from the start
- Proof of concept with WordPress
- Advertising from the beginning
Next
Do the distribution as if you were building a Shopify store?