Monday May 09, 2022
#105: How we bootstrapped to 1 million users with Ania Wysocka, Founder At Rootd
Anxiety. If this word doesn’t tell you anything, lucky you. So many people on this planet are familiar with anxiety. Essentially, it is a fear of what is about to come, it’s a dread over something you anticipate.
Sometimes your feel of anxiety is justified, on many occasions it is not and what is worse it triggers a panic attack. But there is a way to calm yourself down to be able to dealt with it.
Today Ania will tell you a story of connecting her panic attack & anxiety relief mobile app Rootd with a million people who needed help to deal with these issues.
Today’s Topics Include:
- Polish Canadian, living abroad in multiple countries, graduated in Vancouver, Canada, Ania had a personal reason to create an app like Rootd to help people deal with anxiety and panic attack.
- Focusing on a niche - how Ania managed to reach out the first audience for the app, starting with a narrow problem to address with the app and than going more broadly.
- Engaging the app’s user base
- Story submissions
- Press Releases
- Translation to go international and reach broad audiences in multiple countries
- Onboarding
- Being praised and criticized by the app users
- Android or iOS? iOS
- What was Ania’s first mobile phone? Nokia
- What features would Ania miss most leaving his smartphone at home? Rootd :-) and Google Maps.
- What’s missing from mobile app technology? iOS features and the iPhone & Apple Watch hardware advances to address more health related issues.
Links and Resources:
- Ania Wosocka LinkedIn profile
- Rootd website.
Quotes from Ania Wosocka:
"Fast forward a few years, I learned a lot of different tips and techniques that helped me to understand anxiety, where it comes from and really just learn to manage it in my daily life. And that is the promise of Rootd.
And I think one key point is that as a bootstrapped app, it made a lot of sense for me to get users who are downloading via the keyword and they are getting what they’ve searched for exactly.
Often local papers want to feature local entrepreneurs and so that who it started and that was the first one I did when Rootd was launched and it was picked up by local papers.”