The Story of Creating a Product, Part 7. The First Major Problem and Scaling Difficulties.

I continue sharing my experience developing a bot for calorie counting from photos Forma+.

Our main advertising channel was bloggers — the simplest and most obvious way to promote a Telegram bot. The first 3 months went well: we bought small budgets from nutritionists and healthy recipe channels, using the resources of my agency. The cost per user acquisition was about 40 rubles, and the economics worked out considering LTV.

But when we increased the budget several times, it turned out not everything is so simple. We started to lack suitable bloggers, so we had to become less picky in our selection.

We systematized hypothesis testing and decided to test new blogger niches – the results were mediocre. The cost per lead rose to as much as 145 rubles! Although we managed to increase the purchase conversion by 2.5 times, the economics no longer worked.

Then we concluded that scaling this product through bloggers would not work. The nutrition niche turned out to be too narrow in Telegram to consistently attract profitable traffic from there: such things happen.

Then it became clear to us that the project's development was at risk: the channel we had high hopes for didn't work, and TG ads, although profitable, did not scale at all. So we decided to go all-in...

Leave ❤️ if you're curious to find out what we decided to try

My channel: Ilya Kramnik