My friend and I have been building an app over the past few years, and it's been a slow, sometimes painful grind. We quickly realized that paid ads are expensive and often ineffective when your audience is broad and not super easy to target. Also paid influencers suck. I am sure there is a right way to do it, but we aren’t full-time marketers, and every time it has been a nightmare working with one.
What’s worked better for us is steady organic growth: talking to friends and strangers about it, and just being active wherever we can. Word of mouth and small network effects have been key. It’s not fast, but it’s been surprisingly durable.
We’ve been building an event planning app called dateit(https://dateit.com) similar to Facebook events but better, and most of our growth has come from just optimizing the product to be simple and useful, and constantly refining it based on feedback. If you’re bootstrapping, you really have to lean into creating content and iterating fast. It takes time but it does compound if the product is good.
This was always the app/company I would have made given the opportunity, so wishing you luck. Nothing replaced Facebook events and the sharing of photos from said events after Facebook died.
Thanks!! Yup that is exactly why we built it! We pretty quickly added photo upload and a memories feed after out initial feature set. People definitely appreciate it.
We relied heavily on network effects early on starting with our friend group and encouraging word-of-mouth growth. We built a multiplatform app called dateit(https://dateit.com/), which is kind of like Facebook Events but with a better user experience.
Obviously, our product is very different from yours, but one thing that worked well for us was focusing on building momentum within small communities first rather than trying to appeal to everyone immediately. Tight-knit groups tend to generate stronger early engagement, which can give you the traction (and feedback) you need to grow.
Another thing we learned: making it dead simple for users to share made a big difference. Even small friction points kill word-of-mouth, so optimizing for effortless sharing really amplified our reach. In your case remove as much friction as possible whatever that is.
I’m cofounder of an app called dateit an event planning and RSVP app we have been developing over the past couple of years. We started it because we noticed many of our friends were leaving Facebook, and group texts were becoming a hassle. While it might not have every feature you’re looking for just yet, we’re actively working to expand its functionality. In the future, we’re hoping to introduce features like communities and a public events feed.
You can check it out at https://dateit.com/ I’d be happy to offer you and maybe some others here free access to our premium features so you can experience everything the app has to offer. Just create an account and email me at rob@dateit.com and mention this post.
My friend and I have been working on a replacement for Facebook events in our social circle. We found that a lot of people are not using FB events anymore and were having a hard time planning social events. Not making any money (yet) but we hope to someday! We designed our app to make it easy to share invites on any social platform/chat group without being tied down.
We started with our friends and family. We have been running ads on the App and Play store. Nothing too crazy. We are starting to look into more local advertising to drum up interest!
My friends and I had the exact problem. We used to (host and attend) parties all the time.
In my experience it’s because: Covid decimated any chance of gatherings for 2 years.
It caused all of our friends to be paranoid.
People started getting older and it was hard to communicate with everyone.
Platform fragmentation. Some people use SMS or messenger exclusively and no one uses facebook events anymore.
We actually started to try and use different apps, partiful, evite etc… We found the UX to be a challenge to interact with and no one wanted to use them.
So we built our own event planning app that tries to solve these problems: https://dateit.io/
I honestly thought this to be true years ago. I recently bought a MacBook and am completely sold on their keypads. Wouldn't be happy if that was my desktop keyboard but for a laptop it's the best out there.
What’s worked better for us is steady organic growth: talking to friends and strangers about it, and just being active wherever we can. Word of mouth and small network effects have been key. It’s not fast, but it’s been surprisingly durable.
We’ve been building an event planning app called dateit(https://dateit.com) similar to Facebook events but better, and most of our growth has come from just optimizing the product to be simple and useful, and constantly refining it based on feedback. If you’re bootstrapping, you really have to lean into creating content and iterating fast. It takes time but it does compound if the product is good.