Roast my startup: Nemlys—app to get to know each other better

[whiteisfamily]

Hey there, r/roastmystartup!

Year ago we we shared here the post with Nemlys app as an early MVP. We aimed to gather user feedback quickly, but were blown away by the valuable data we received, and we’ve completely rethought the idea of our app.

The product

• The Nemlys app helps people in relationship understand each other better.

Problem

• People who start relationships quickly with the help of modern dating apps later find out that they don't share common values, don't understand each other, and have diverse communication problems. To resolve these issues at a later stage, people spend a big chunk of money on personal and couples therapy. However, some will break up or divorce, resulting in negative and painful effects.

Solution

• Nemlys collects people's feedback at various relationship milestones. The app offers AI-personalized questions tailored specifically to couples based on their interests and priorities. It helps couples explore various topics and moods during dates and engage in meaningful conversations within a safe space in a playful format. Nemlys drives deeper understanding of each other's interests, values, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. By understanding each other better, people build stronger, lasting relationships.

Here you can download the app

• App Store
• Google Play

Competition

• We have several competitors, for example apps Paired, Agapé and Couply, and physical card games as We’re Not Really Strangers. They all provide questions, quizes and various activities to explore with partner. Some of these apps have millions of downloads.

Comparison against competition

• We help people in a different way: we provide tailored questions for each couple personally, as opposed to generic questions for everybody. This allows us to engage users more. We highly focus on easiness and gamification, aiming to make the experience deep and meaningful, but positive. We believe that this way we decrease the pressure and bring more value to people.

The market size and dynamic

• “The market size, measured by revenue, of the Psychologists, Social Workers & Marriage Counselors industry was $25.6bn in 2022. … industry in the US has grown 6.3% per year on average between 2017 and 2022”. — source
• “Online Therapy Services Market size was valued at USD 2,603.00 Million in 2021 and is projected to reach USD 8,296.13 Million by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 14.27% from 2023 to 2030”. — source
• “Paired's estimated annual revenue is currently $4.8M per year.” — source
• “The [Agape] startup in February surpassed $1 million in annual recurring revenue and has over 200,000 active daily users on its app”. — source

Tracking

• We got 1500+ installs for the previous version of an app, before redesign.
• After redesign we are aiming to get 10000 more users to prove or disprove our product hypotheses.

What stage we are in?

• We're currently in the process of refining our app to deliver the best possible experience to our users and finding the perfect product/market fit. We're not actively seeking funding at the moment.

Customer conversion strategy

• Current version is free. We plan to isolate a part of the value into premium subscription, as well as provide expanded content for additional price.
• We plan to attract users through social media first, connecting with influencers in this field later, and use any non-paid possibility to acquire more people for the app. We have some hypotheses for growth strategy, but we aim to prove the general value first.

Why now?

• People are becoming more interested in their well-being, more conscious of themselves and what's around them. Relationships are a big part of our daily lives, and more and more people want to make them more meaningful.
• When Nemlys first started in mid-2022, we thought of manually creating cards for dates, and then enhancing them with AI. But the AI summer unlocked high potential for real personalization for every user.

Why we are?

Our team consist of three relationship enthusiasts.

• We have a Product Design expert, who made dozens apps in the past 4 years to draw experience of Nemlys’ users.
• We have a Apps Marketing expert, who worked on user acqusition for 70+ apps from startups to well-established brands to communicate Nemlys’ value into the world.
• We have a Full-Stack Developer, who has written various types of possible solutions in Backend, Frontend and DevOps end to end, so this app is far from the hardest challenge.

We'd like to hear your thoughts on the app—if you're interested, ping me via DM, and I'll connect with you to provide more details.

Cheers!

 

[613jono]

@whiteisfamily This doesn't look like roast my business, more like roast humanity I would say

We need more apps to fix what was broken in the first place by apps...

 

[whiteisfamily]

@613jono Haha, that's true..!

 

[thomass]

@whiteisfamily Love the color palette, the app store content, and the whole idea.

I don’t feel compelled to download it myself but I may not be the target audience.

Me and the wife already communicate well and get into the difficult questions often.

For those reasons, I felt the preachiness of the app didn’t appeal to me. If I were to use an app, it’d be something that works around what we already do or helps habit forming and not try to get me to do new things.

So this is all from reading the app store content. Didn’t download it because again I felt it wasn’t right for me.

So my advice is you double down on your target audience, or see if other segments are large enough and have different needs you want to address.

 

[whiteisfamily]

@thomass Hey, thank you for a very detailed feedback! Yes, getting the better understanding of our audience is in the focus now. Our first assumption was that we are more for people who just started to date. But current app version have a poll init, and we see that this assumption was wrong—a lot of people coming in, who date for months or years.

Another struggle is to get exact 'Job' that people have when downloading such apps. We have several hypotheses, but still very vague. So, your points are valid

 

[nobert]

@whiteisfamily Why ? and why not for just for couples? Couples from varied background, status, geography and age group? Well AI is suppose to cater to all this...

Now you can define which one among these primary audience and develop your branding and colour scheme accordingly however you can still be inclusive to larger audience in description and functions...

I haven't seen your app, my suggestions are based on what I am reading on this thread.

'''Nemlys is the couples card game. We help you to get to know each other better. Our app provides AI-personalized questions tailored specifically to you and your partner, based on your relationship context, unique to your interests and priorities.'' Man simplify a bit- It feels like AI is talking to people...

This is the game of heart, you should make a connection with them.. as much as features and description is important equally important is that they feel the connect and emotions behind.