Build in Public: GoKiddo [Part 6]

Welcome back to my GoKiddo build in public journey. If you missed Part 5 , you can check it out here.

Almost ready to launch

I have made loads of progress behind the scenes the last few weeks, and I have not shared all of it here, because frankly, a lot of it is very boring, technical or not fun to read about at all.

Web App ✅

The web app is live at explore.gokiddoapp.com feel free to play around with it. As I have explained in Part 4 I am building the app using Flutter, which means I will be able to build a web app, an iOS app and an Android app from a single code base.

At the moment only the web app is live until I am confident enough with the product and cough up the listing fee for Apple’s app store. Website Screenshot

Marketing Landing Page ✅

I build a landing page using Framer. Framer is a very easy-to-use web builder, especially useful for building landing pages and marketing pages.

Why is this necessary? Web apps and mobile apps are not built to have good SEO (search engine optimization), which means it will be very difficult for people to find GoKiddo when they search for fun things to do on with their kids on Google. Therefore I chose to have a separate marketing website where I can publish marketing content, links to the app stores and blog posts to drive traffic for app downloads.

You can see the landing page at gokiddoapp.com

It is still a work in progress, but I am already very proud of it. Once the actual GoKiddo App is running with real users etc, then I will update it with actual values, pictures etc.

What still needs to be done?

There are a few features which are critical before I can launch, and they are:

Businesses need to be able to DELETE their listings
After a business publishes or edits its listing, it needs to go into REVIEW , to allow me to keep the platform clean and disallow content that can be harmful to our users.
Polish user sign-up and EMAIL VALIDATION.
Businesses need to be able to MANAGE their subscriptions.
I need to finalise the list of AMENITIES I want to allow the listings to be filtered by for example swimming, petting zoo, free wifi etc.

And then it is MARKETING

Don’t get me wrong, building an app like GoKiddo is hard, but I think the real challenge is going to be to actually get people to use it and to get businesses to add listings.

In Part 3, I outlined a marketing strategy I am going to use. In the meantime, I have changed it slightly to the following:

Start with a specific location. For example Cape Town. Luckily with the way my app is built, I can start with any location in the world.
Approach 30+ businesses in the location and offer to list them for FREE for 6 months. These businesses need to be smaller businesses that might benefit from the app (pay it forward to other small businesses)
After I have a reasonable amount of listings start approaching bigger businesses in the area and motivate them to join by using a FOMO (fear of missing out) tactic.
After the 6-month free trial, give the early birds a summary of their listing performance and motivate them to become paying customers.
Repeat in a new location.

Hopefully, if I pay enough attention to SEO and other organic marketing strategies, the number of users of the app will increase and it will become a no-brainer for other businesses to start listing.

But what about the parents?

You might realise when reading the strategy above, that is very focused on getting businesses to create listings.

My reasoning is, we need listings before we can actually be useful to parents. Therefore focus on them first. And once you have enough focus heavily on the parents.

To get parents to use the app, I will focus on:

Social media posts
Local blogs
Hopefully word of mouth

I don’t always know how things will turn out

You have probably realised from my blog posts, that a lot of the things I write about are uncertain. I don’t know if things are going to work or not. But that’s the beauty of it. No one knows and unless you try, you will never know.

So take the leap. Try something new.