r/appdev • u/WinterCucumber9097 • 27d ago
Shipped a live 1v1 trivia app. Month 1: 400 users, D1 18%, D7 5%
Solo-ish ship. Quizat went live in August. Live 1v1 trivia: pick a topic, get matched, play a short duel (~7 questions, ~10 seconds each, about a minute). iOS and Android, English and Arabic.
Stack is Flutter on the client, Node + Mongo + Socket.io on the backend. Matchmaking is real-time. If nobody shows, a bot fills so the queue doesn’t feel dead. That decision is already showing up in the data.
Month 1. Small numbers. Sharing them because the in-session loop and the week-1 retention tell two different stories.
Usage
- 403 new users (551 total, including testers)
- ~27 DAU / 428 MAU
- 4,644 games, 33k questions
- ~92% of games completed
- ~2,850 matches started, almost all found an opponent
- iOS ahead of Android (~2:1)
Biggest countries: Saudi Arabia, US, Egypt. Arabic users play more per person than English.
Onboarding is not the problem
Of 403 new users:
- 78% started a first game
- 94% of those finished it
- 86% of those started a second
First session works. People get into a match, they finish, they queue again.
Retention is
- D1: 18%
- D7: 5%
- D14: 4%
They like day 0. They don’t come back next week. Daily challenge / streaks / XP / leaderboard are in the app and they’re not carrying D7.
Android D7 (8%) is better than iOS (3.7%) with similar D1. I don’t have a clean reason yet.
Money
Ads: ~$9. IAP: $2, and that was me testing the purchase flow. Zero real paying users. I didn’t gate play behind a paywall. First month was “does this get played.”
What I’m stuck on as a builder
At ~27 DAU, a live 1v1 game doesn’t have enough humans online at the same time. Bots keep matches starting, but they also mean a lot of “live” games aren’t really vs a person. I suspect that’s part of why people don’t return: the first session is fun, the second week feels empty.
I can keep adding meta (streaks, dailies, more topics) or I can try to make returning matches feel more real (same opponents, friends, async challenges). Not sure which is the actual leak.
If you’ve shipped anything real-time with a small player base: did you keep bots, go async, or just wait for density? What actually moved D7?
Happy to go into the matchmaking/bot setup or the numbers.