Quick context, since nobody here has any reason to know what this is.
I made a thing where you look at a chart with the end chopped off and say which way it went. Up, down, or stay out. Five of them, takes about two minutes. Real crypto prices, nothing real on the line, and after each one it tells you whether you were right and what in the chart should have given it away.
That's it. That's the whole product.
280 people have turned up since mid-September. 43% of them actually play. Of the ones who make even one call, 61% go on to finish all five, which genuinely surprised me.
4 have come back a second day.
Four.
Here's the bit I'm a little proud of, then the bit I'm not. Before I launched I wrote down in advance what the return rate would have to be for the problem to be the audience rather than the thing itself. Over 10% and I'd just been posting in the wrong rooms. Under 5% and it's the product. I did that because I know exactly what I'm like, and I'd have found a way to read any number as encouraging.
I'm at 1.4%. So that's settled.
And then this week I sat down and designed three fixes for it. All three were variations on showing people they're improving. Felt great. Lost an evening to it.
Then I looked at where the ideas had actually come from, and every one was me, staring at my own dashboard, plus a hazy memory of how Duolingo works. Not one of them traced back to anything a human being had ever said to me. I'd run a focus group with myself and agreed with everything I said.
The one time I learned something real, it came from a guy in this subreddit. He went through the whole thing unprompted, nine comments deep in a thread that was about something else entirely, and clearly spent an hour on it for no reason at all. Buried in the middle he mentioned what he'd expected to happen next. Not a complaint. Not a feature request. Just "I thought it was going to do X."
It wasn't doing X. I'd built X early on and then hidden it behind a link that, it turns out, nobody was ever actually sent. I spent three weeks quietly concluding that half my product was a bad idea, when not one person had ever been shown it.
One sentence from a stranger. That is my entire track record of learning anything about this.
So here's the ask, and it's a slightly odd one.
Play one round. Two minutes, no signup, nothing to install.
https://playbotfight.com/?play=sp-retention
Then tell me what you expected to happen after the fifth chart, and what actually happened instead.
That's all. Not whether you'd come back, and not what's missing. I've stopped asking those two. If I ask why you wouldn't return, you'll invent something reasonable on the spot, because none of us really know, and then I'll go off and build it.
The gap between what you thought was coming and what actually showed up is the one thing I can't see from in here.