Sorry it’s a been a minute… but What Does it Take to Get People to Download a New App?

This may read like a public diary, but I’m trying to keep it real for posterity.

I learned from a Nikita Bier podcast that it’s really hard to get people 25 and older to download another app. Plus, after college, the number of people the average person texts seems to dwindle until retirement.

Although Yik Yak isn’t around in the same way anymore, it was all the rage my freshman year of college at Purdue. For those of you unfamiliar with Yik Yak, it was basically a Reddit thread—with comments and upvotes—but specific to your college campus. It was thrilling to read the latest tea and the sassy comments about campus. It was even more fun to participate and earn the validation of strangers upvoting my sarcastic commentary.

It makes sense why so many social apps and networks are born on college campuses. Facebook started at Harvard. Whitney Wolfe Herd grew Bumble at SMU, her alma mater, by promoting it at fraternities and sororities and across campus. People that age have FOMO, wide social circles, constantly meet new people, and are generally much more willing to download a new app.

The nature of college also makes it incredibly easy to repeatedly “collide” with people and eventually form friendships. You live in the same hallway. You’re enrolled in the same classes. You’re in the same student clubs. You go to football games. You work part-time campus jobs. You have the same major. You go to the same religious activities. You have friends of friends. You’re all relatively close to one another, often within walking distance, with flexible schedules that make meeting up relatively easy. Then you graduate.

Suddenly, you have a commute, work deadlines, different work schedules, and friends scattered across town. You just don’t naturally collide with as many people anymore.

I met another founder at Dallas Startup Week who is building a different kind of social app. She was curious about my feedback and asked me to try the app and promote it. Her app lets you indicate when you’re free and what you want to do—FaceTime, coffee, a walk, etc.—and then see who else is free and wants to do the same thing. I think the concept is novel, but my friends, who are mostly in their 30s, are not super interested in downloading another app. My friends would rather have a group message in the native Messages app—with the ugly green text bubbles because of our friends without iMessage—than transition to GroupMe or WhatsApp.

We want low-tech ways of operating. We don’t want to sign up and remember to check another platform.

One of the biggest indications that there was something there with the Vox Discord was that more than half of the users in that Discord were also joining Discord for the very first time. Discord shows you which day each user joined Discord and which day they joined the server. For most users in that apartment Discord, it was the same day. That was interesting to me. People who had never felt the need to download Discord before suddenly had a reason to.

People in their 30s and 40s aren’t necessarily unwilling to try new social apps. The problem just has to be painful enough to make downloading another app worth it.