The Death App Disaster: A Case Study in Market Research

A few days ago I had an idea for an app. So I spun up an EC2 and started furiously coding out the front end with some hastily chosen bootstrap template. I reached out to Lighter Capital, stood up a perfunctory WordPress site for the app, and changed my LinkedIn title to CEO / Thought Leader / Founder.

Actually, I did not do any of that.

Judging from the /r/startups community, this attitude permeates where members of the startup and non-tech world intersect. You’re at a social gathering, and someone hears you can code. They pitch some hazy idea that they swear is the next Uber. They have no industry experience nor have they drafted even an outline of a business plan. They want you to code it out for free while they take all the equity as the “idea guy”.

Talk about insulting.

Anyway, here was the vision of what I wanted to do: reduce the fear of dying with regrets by allowing users to upload pictures, messages and other digital media to a service. Upon their death, the service distributes the memorabilia to loved ones. (The user designates these loved ones while they’re alive.) I often struggle to keep in touch with people, and frequently fail to tell them how much I value their presence in my life. I suspected this was a real problem many people face in their final hours.

What follows is a short marketing case study. I sought to answer the question, “Is such a death app even remotely viable?”

Competitor Research

Who has built this before and what can I do better? I found a few: Afternote, Final Wish, and Meminto. Two of them exuded the mawkish atmosphere of a funeral home (lakes, lighthouses). With a sleek mobile app and well-designed site, Meminto stood out as the obvious winner. But how popular were they?

Here are the Alexa ranks:

• Afternote: 18.1million
• Final Wish : Insufficient data
• Meminto : 12.2million

Additionally, I ran Reddit and Quora searches on these services. Nothing. None had a noteworthy social media presence. By any industry standard, none of these sites are very popular. I was already getting skeptical.

Calculating a Potential User Base

Next, I reasoned about the number of potential users. Here were some thoughts:

• Older folks are both less familiar with technology and more likely to suffer from age-related dementia. They certainly wouldn’t qualify as early adopters, so I factored them out of the calculation.
• I did wonder if this app could attract individuals with dangerous jobs, such as the military or law enforcement. But I couldn’t really be sure.
• I reasoned that the young, computer-literate crowd with a cancer diagnosis would be the most likely user. Cancer is a broad disease and it’s mortally scary. Moreover, there is no shortage of statistics.

Let’s look at some numbers. Keep in mind the methodology is imprecise, but it does show how quickly the vertical narrows down.

Sources: 1 , 2

Price Point

135,000 users is a small number that immediately reveals something about the price point: the death app can’t be free. Apps like Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook are only free due the ad revenue generated by tens of millions of users. Even if I accounted for the European population of young cancer patients, there just aren’t enough diagnoses to make a free app or service like this sustainable.

So I settled on a SaaS model. For both practical and moral reasons, I settled on a low price point. Here are some sample calculations at various prices.

Observe that without capturing a substantial amount of these users (>25%), the death app would be hard-pressed to sustain itself (SaaS infrastructure ain’t cheap).

Lessons Learned

I had some dollar amounts, but would anyone else actually use this thing? I put together a Google form and threw it out in the wild. A few statistics of note:

• 96% of respondents between the ages of 18–44 have not written a will.
• Only 3% of respondents actually had a loved one leave them messages or photos in their passing.
• 83% of respondents would not use such an app.
• 8% of respondents would only pay for it if they were seriously ill.

In short, healthy people just don’t think about their death enough to use something like this. Or maybe they find notion of communicating from beyond the grave creepy and unsettling.

Beyond that app itself, there were larger lessons to learn.

• Brutal honesty. From behind a keyboard, no one is afraid to tell you how they really feel.
• Timing. I posted this survey in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal involving Facebook. Respondents scoffed at filling the cloud with even more personal data.
• Early research can be cheap or free. Post an interesting enough survey and you can get a good idea as to whether it’s worth following up. Had the results been more positive, I might have paid for a larger scale study.
• Survey the right people. I suspect the survey would have been different were it performed at a hospital or at any rate closer to the target user base. This represents one flaw with my own study. If nothing else, I simply proved healthy folks have little or no interest in the death app (and therefore that such an app is unlikely to gain traction beyond a very special niche).

At the end of the day, I don’t know if a death app will be successful. Meminto will try and I wish them luck. (The service employs several serious developers, so perhaps they know something I do not.) However, given what I’ve learned, I believe the death app illustrates the following hard truth: Either your idea is extremely novel and visionary or there just isn’t a market for it. Which is more likely?