Is making money the only measure of an app’s success?
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A successful product is often seen as one that is well-commercialized, with users willing to pay for it. But is that always the case?
Today, I came across many products that are incredibly fun and creative. It made me wonder: are there products that don’t fit the conventional definition of success? Maybe some exist just to bring joy, even if users simply visit, smile, and leave.
Some might argue that if something brings value, people will naturally be willing to pay. But is that always true?
Let’s discuss:
💬 Is profitability the only way to define an app’s success?
💡 Do you create apps to make money, or is there another motivation behind your work?
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Hi there,
I have thought about this topic and I believe I "deepseeked" into it. As a product operation affiliated personel, I do not fully agree with the idea, that the prodominant criteria to define if any product is successful being: how profitable an app & software attains.
For me, I can't speak for any other colleague, but I wish my own ultimate motive to be based on , not solely profits. But the interesting, newly found ideas, strategies discovered and developed during the working experiences. As I myself being fairly new to this industry, I still have a tons of things to learn from, doesn't matter who is willing to give me a hand, or I can ask AI, or even coming here. I wish a product is measured by multiple metrics, instead of the popularity, the traffic it receives, and financial earnings.
Imagine a product being newly set for a starting program, and from, just say nothing, through all the means of development, testing, renewing, optimizing the products, paying potential users to try the product and give recommendations & suggestions, and such procedure can repeat for multiple circulations before the team can confidently say, okay for now, we've matured our product and made the functions more comprehensve, the features more engaging and user friendly. Let's launch it, coming soon xxx(product name)! I would not say the product is a failure, regardless of its future fate.
Some might say, a product needs to be able to survive the ups and downs, in this competitive market. While that sentence always holds its truth, I'd say that for a team to start building, developing and eventually launching the product, this itself can be called a success. It takes times, money, efforts and most significantly, mental grinds to get to the final stage.
Tempo-Pulse
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Honestly, I think money is a pretty solid way to measure success.
There might be great products that don’t make money yet,
but if a product’s already successful, chances are it’s definitely making money.
At the end of the day, people only pay for something that gives them real value —
so yeah, revenue is one of the clearest signs something's actually working.
Graphify
It depends on why you created the app. If you want to make money with the app, then yes, this would be the greatest measure of success. BUT and there is a big "but", making money on what costs. You could trick people with good marketing to buying a bad product, like it happened with me many times, where I would purchase a product and it turns out it is not as I expected. Then you would make some money, but people would be unhappy and leave your app as fast as they can.
In my opinion there are two measure of success, first is money (you should definitely try to improve this with time) and the other is Satisfaction. Both are correlated to each other, so growing one without the other is hard. You want people satisfied with your product, so much that they pay for using it and maybe also recommend it to friends and family. You focus on these two things and you are good to go!
absolutely no if the origin goal is not the money
It was decided by the definition of success,if you think the product bring joy is successful.The most interesting app is successful.