I'm a 17yo CS student. Built a micro-SaaS for my CV, hit 110 users, but I'm stuck at a 9.6% week-1 retention rate. Need advice.
Hey everyone. I'm Ali, 17, CS student. About a month ago I started building Bloom as a project to put on my CV. Something I could point to and say "I made this."
The idea was simple. A habit tracker where your goals become trees. Show up daily, your tree grows through 9 stages. Miss a day, it starts to wilt.
I built it, got friends and family to use it, and something clicked. The wilting mechanic, the aesthetic of the app, the part of watching a tree growing for two weeks and then starting to die because you skipped the gym? That hit different. So I decided to stop treating it as a portfolio piece and start treating it as a real product.
Here's what Bloom does:
Every goal becomes a living tree that grows from Seed to Ancient (9 stages). Miss a day and your tree visually wilts, and that's honestly the hook. There are 7 tree types (Evergreen, Blossom, Goldleaf, Willow, Sage, Summit, Ironwood) so everyone's garden looks different. 3 visual modes including light, dark, and dawn. Bloom Teams lets you create a team with friends, grow side by side, and send "water drops" to encourage each other. There's also a daily journal with calendar view and the whole thing is available in English, French, and Portuguese.
Tech: React + Vite, Firebase for auth and database and push notifications, deployed on Vercel with a custom domain.
Numbers after 4 weeks:
-About 110 registered users.
-306 Instagram followers at justgobloom.
-Users from 27 countries, mostly Canada and UAE.
-67.5% of users come from Instagram. 9.6% week 1 retention which is my biggest problem right now.
-Zero revenue and zero ad spend.
Biggest lessons: Building is the easy part. Getting people to come back is brutally hard. Instagram Reels drive almost all my traffic while organic search is basically zero. The "wilting" mechanic sells itself because every time I explain Bloom, that's the moment people get interested. And having a friend who pitches your product in person is worth more than 100 Instagram posts. My friend Filip and I have been doing in-person demos on Fridays and it's been huge for growth. What I'm working on next: launching on the App Store and Play Store this summer and trying to crack the retention problem.
Would love feedback, especially on retention. What made YOU actually stick with an app?