The subtle art of panicking your users with Dwellin
And why I am no longer afraid my house is falling apart
I hate Tiktok.
Every single day, I log into this frustrating, glorious, awful, delightful app and am barraged with fascinating content that makes me laugh, cry, and realize that my house is about to fall apart at any moment because I didn’t change a filter I didn’t know I had last year.
As it turns out, there are hundreds of maintenance activities I could be doing to keep my house running smoothly, and most of them I have no clue about.
Dwellin is an app that helps hopeless homeowners like me keep track of their houses. They let you plug in every little detail about your home, and then they spit out cost estimates, carbon estimates, and maintenance reminders based on that data.
Home maintenance is a massive category in the U.S. with 65% of the population owning a home. Shockingly, there aren’t a lot of digital solutions offering a hub for homeowners to keep track of the most expensive thing they will ever own.
So, how can we help Dwellin capture that massive market?
Here’s the TLDR for today’s growth strategy:
Be where the eyeballs are.
Be clear, not clever.
Ease users into it.
Be where the eyeballs are.
Dwellin is currently a free app. They solve a very severe pain point for a very big market.
For Dwellin, finding their users isn’t intellectually challenging, it’s just a lot of work.
They need to spend all day, every day in different groups across the internet, posting useful content for homeowners and getting the brand name as visible as possible.
Here is my ranking of the platforms I would be super active on if I worked for Dwellin:
Tiktok
Reddit
Houzz
Quora
Instagram
Pinterest
Within this list, pick the 2-3 that fit best with the abilities of your team. If video is not your thing, focus on Reddit, Houzz, and Quora first. Once the team feels comfortable with producing videos, start incorporating Tiktok, and Instagram. Layer in Pinterest later or try it out asap if one of the others isn’t working.
The content needs to be non-promotional. As the right people encounter the content, they’ll see “Brett from Dwellin” being really smart about everything related to home maintenance and will go to your bio which will have a link to the app.
Let the user come to you. Don’t be desperate.
In terms of what topics to cover, pick what your users are interested in. Use Reddit, Houzz, and Quora to see what questions people are asking. Answer them on those platforms, and then make a video about those answers and post them on Tiktok. If you can run through this process a few times every week (or once a day if you’re feeling ambitious), you’ll start to see results.
Bonus tip - based on some limited research, there aren’t many well-populated Facebook groups for homeowners in the US yet. I would probably jump on that and create a non-branded Facebook group for homeowners. Post memes, questions, etc, and put some advertising dollars behind it targeting homeowners. Then use the same strategy that you used for the other channels above, on your own Facebook group.
Be clear, not clever.
I often fall victim to the allure of long, drawn-out, colorful language. It makes me feel good and is how I naturally write (side note: editing is very important for me 🙂).
There is a time and place for that, but a landing page is not it.
Dwellin gets pretty decent traffic to its website for a startup (it’ll be even better if they follow the steps above 😉). They get a few thousand visits every month without paying for any of them. Unfortunately, they have about a 95% bounce rate (this means that for every 1000 visitors, 950 of them come to the site and immediately leave).
That is because they aren’t clear enough about the problem they solve for their users, and how urgent it is.
In several places on the landing page, Dwellin is vague about what the app does. They opt for descriptions about how a home is a wonderful place rather than clear, concise descriptions of how the app helps homeowners, and why the homeowners need this thing immediately!
Dwellin should focus on specific language that directly addresses the questions homeowners are asking:
“Never wonder again about whether that filter needs to be replaced”
“Dwellin gives you custom reminders about every home maintenance need, so your spouse doesn’t have to”
“Understanding your home is like learning to speak a new language. Dwellin is your dictionary.”
“Your house probably needs a tune-up, Dwellin can tell you for sure.”
“Homes that go too long without maintenance cost Americans thousands of dollars. Save money with preventative care through Dwellin now.”
These are all first drafts, so they probably need a lot of work, but you get the point. Speak clearly about what the app does, create urgency in the call to action, and save the “peace of mind” until after they’ve downloaded the app.
Ease your users into it.
Dwellin is a really cool app. It’s got a lot of functionality that lets you track useful information about your house.
Unfortunately, there is a pretty steep learning curve.
Let’s consider our target user for a moment.
This person just decided to download an app because they needed help keeping track of all of the maintenance needs for their home. The one feeling you want to avoid giving this user is stress.
But when I first log into the app, all of that functionality is thrown at me right away. There are four different tabs, a projected annual maintenance cost in the thousands of dollars, and a carbon footprint number that says I’m killing the planet.
The result is I’m more stressed than when I started.
Dwellin can solve this with their user onboarding.
To be clear, Dwellin has user onboarding today. They ask for your address and ask about a few services that you may or may not use. But ultimately, it’s just a little short.
Dwellin could benefit from a longer onboarding that first asks more specific details about the house, and then walks the user through all of the functionality in their app.
To see a good example of this, check out Dwellin’s competitor Upkept (definitely not a startup as they are run by Consumer Reports).
Upkept takes a little bit longer to step the user through their app, but it’s worth it if the user stays with the app because of it. It should also help future Dwellin users avoid the heart attack I had when I saw that I should be paying thousands in maintenance costs without any explanation.
There are some great out-of-the-box solutions that make in-app user onboarding really simple to implement linked here.
Remember, now that they are in your app, you can take some more time with them to make it that much better of an experience.
Wrap up
Products don’t sell themselves.
There is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that go into getting a product into the hands of consumers. Dwellin has done the hard work of creating an awesome app.
Unfortunately, the work has really just begun. Attracting and keeping the users whose problem you solve is where the real magic in building a company is.
To do that, Dwellin needs to dance along the line of attracting users with urgency, and then calming users once they get in the app. Right now, it’s a little bit reversed.
That’s all for this week!
If you liked this, share it with your 2nd best friend.
If you didn’t like it, share it with your least favorite uncle.
-Brett