6 Reasons Why Your App Is Not Growing And How to Make It Work

As a software house, our job does not end once the application we developed is launched on the market. We don’t just build mobile and web apps, we also make them work.

Every day, founders come to us frustrated because their applications are not growing and not generating profit. Some are apps that have just entered the market; others are the result of tens of thousands of euros invested. Some can boast millions of users; others have a good number of downloads but very few active users.

From our experience, we have learned to identify the problems that lead to stagnant growth and, ultimately, to abandoning the project. More importantly, we have understood what to focus on to build a successful digital product. Discover it by reading this article.

How to Know If Your App Is Not Working

How can you tell if a digital product is not converting? There are indicators that can easily be observed:

• There is a problem with acquiring new users.
• Conversions are low: users see the application on the store or visit the landing page, but they do not choose the product.
• Retention is low: users download the app but do not continue using it.
• Many users stop using the product or cancel their subscription, increasing the churn rate.

But what do apps that “don’t work” have in common? Often, they are not bad products. The idea is good, the design is functional, and the feedback received is not negative. The issue often lies in a few mistakes that, while small, are fatal and drive users away from the product.

Poor planning is enough to make even the best idea fail. The quality of the idea alone is not sufficient to develop a product that works, attracts users, and keeps them engaged; a solid strategy is also necessary.

The 6 Mistakes to Avoid If You Want to Grow Your Digital Product

At Mabiloft, we work with hundreds of applications every day. We have recognized a pattern: there are common mistakes that sink applications born from the best premises.

If you want your product to grow instead of becoming part of the sad statistic of startups that fail within a few years, here is what you must NOT do.

Not Validating the Idea Before Starting

You may have talked about your project with several people, and they all told you the idea was excellent, but once it hit the market, no one was interested in investing. Why does this happen?

This is a common situation, often with a clear underlying cause: the validation was not done properly. The mistake is frequently being guided by intuition without confirming it with data.

For your application to work, it must solve a real problem, address a genuine urgency, and ideally solve something that costs your potential users time or money if left unresolved. Only then can you ensure that someone is eagerly waiting for your next release.

Listening to Opinions Instead of Behaviors

You might be thinking, “But I already talked to many people, and they all said the idea was good. Isn’t that enough validation?” It depends.

First of all, avoid asking for opinions from people who know and appreciate you. The feedback you receive will be biased and not very useful. The right people to ask are:

• People you don’t know and who are not afraid of hurting your feelings.
• People the application is intended for, who personally experience the problem you aim to solve.

Moreover, it is not enough to ask, “What do you think about this project?” In fact, the solution itself is only the final step and can sometimes even be omitted. Instead of focusing on opinions, what truly matters is understanding how people behave when faced with this problem.

What you need to understand from your potential users is:

• How often they experience this problem.
• How much the problem impacts their daily life in terms of time and cost.
• What solutions they currently use as a workaround.
• What does not work in the solutions already available to them.

Only by answering these questions can you understand whether the problem is truly painful and whether your digital product offers an adequate solution. A common trait of successful apps is knowing the user better than they know themselves.

Not Identifying Your Competitors

Sometimes, when we ask founders who their competitors are, they reply that they have none. For us, this is a major red flag: underestimating other tools on the market is one of the worst mistakes a founder can make.

Every application has competitors, more or less direct. A competitor is not necessarily another application that performs the same function. Sometimes it can even be an application that does something entirely different but ultimately solves the same problem.

Let’s say you developed an application that reads personalized AI-generated bedtime stories to help people fall asleep. The idea is quite original, and it may be difficult to find other apps that do exactly the same.

Yet the list of competitors is not short: there are meditation apps like Calm that address the same need, applications such as YouTube or Spotify that offer white noise compilations to help people sleep, and even the publishing industry becomes a valid alternative.

None of these may integrate artificial intelligence, but that is irrelevant. A competitor does not need to use the same solution. The competition is about who responds best to the user’s need.

Being Afraid to Target a Niche

Many apps are created with the idea of being “useful for everyone.” It may seem like a good strategy: there are 8 billion people in the world, so if we speak to everyone, it should be easier to find users, right?

Well, no. If the target is too broad, the result is that:

• The number of competitors is high, because the problem the app aims to solve is easy to identify.
• Marketing is less specific and more expensive.
• Retention is low: a problem that belongs to everyone is, in practice, a problem for no one.

For these reasons, it makes more sense to have a niche in mind. This does not mean other users will not use the app, but this is the audience you primarily address and on which strategic decisions should be based.

Solving a problem for a small group guarantees a base of loyal users who will not only use the application because it speaks directly to them, but will also be willing to support it financially to solve a problem that truly affects them.

Not Investing in Marketing (Or Doing It Randomly)

One of the most common mistakes we see is failing to adopt a solid marketing strategy. But be careful: this does not simply mean investing money.

Many teams focus first on finishing the product and only later think about market strategies. Or, even worse, they spend their budget on ads without any real understanding.

The point is not simply to “run ads,” but to have a conscious funnel: from how users first discover the product to the moment they decide to renew a subscription, the entire journey must be studied and understood.

To support user engagement at every step, tracking core metrics is essential. It is impossible to fix a process that does not work if you do not know where and why it is failing.

Can you say how much it costs to acquire each user, or at which stage you are losing them? If the answer is no, before investing more money on Meta, Google, or other platforms, you need greater awareness of what is not working in your product.

Developing Many Features with Little Impact

Another common mistake is failing to focus on the most important features. Paying attention to many small things, often driven by isolated requests from a single user, leads to losing sight of the true value of the product.

Sometimes the presence of many features is confused with progress, but for a digital product, progress is measured by the number of active users, subscribers, or daily usage, not by the quantity of features.

An endless roadmap of new functions, seemingly indispensable screens, and utilities that no one will use is a sign of lack of focus. The risk is dispersing energy trying to please everyone at once.

It is much better to invest resources in improving a single metric within a defined time frame and, based on that, determine which few features are strictly necessary. A product that works does few things, but does them well.

How You Can Grow Your Application

If you recognized your product in some of the issues described above and are wondering how to recover from the current situation, in this section we provide concrete guidance on how to move forward.

Start by analyzing the data you already have, and if you do not have any, start collecting it. There are many tools that can help you with this, such as Google Analytics.

Identify your pool of users by conducting in-depth interviews that uncover what truly matters to those who genuinely use the app. At the same time, analyze your competitors, starting from the alternative solutions users adopt.

Finally, find where the flow is currently blocked. Based on that, choose one metric to improve and invest your resources there. Concretely, this means:

• Activating monitoring.
• Improving or developing ONLY the features connected to that bottleneck.
• Investing in marketing targeted at users who are in that specific stage of the funnel.

Very often, apps do not fail because of a lack of ideas or because the existing ones are not good enough. The problem is often trying to do too much without a clear direction and without listening to users.

If you feel overwhelmed by this roadmap, if it seems like too many initiatives to implement at once and you are afraid you cannot do it alone… Don’t. Ask us for help: we will be happy to explain how our usability check works.

We have done it for other companies, and we can do it for you. We can guide you in setting priorities, defining the steps to complete, and focusing your attention on the real issues of your digital product.