People come, nobody stays. Start here.

You shipped it. You sent the link to a few people, maybe posted it somewhere. Now you're staring at a stats page that shows visitors and almost no signups. Your stomach drops a little every time you check. Before you assume your app is bad, walk through the usual reasons first. Most of them take under an hour to fix.

Small numbers lie to you

If you've had 20 visitors, you don't have a bounce problem. You have a sample size too small to mean anything. One person clicking away because their phone rang looks identical, on a graph, to ten people hating your app. Wait until you've had at least 100 visitors before you read anything into a bounce rate. Under that, treat every number as noise.

The five checks, in order

1. Does the page load fast and look right on a phone? Open it on your own phone, on regular mobile data, not wifi. If it takes more than a couple seconds or looks broken, fix that first. Nothing else matters until this works.
2. Is it obvious what the app does in five seconds? Cover the screen, then look at it fresh. If you can't tell what problem it solves without scrolling, rewrite the top of the page in one plain sentence.
3. Does the first button do something useful without an account? Let people try the core thing before asking them to sign up. Move the signup wall to after the first taste of value, not before it.
4. Is the signup form asking for too much too early? This is the most common culprit by far. Email and password is the whole form. Not a company name, not a phone number, not a "tell us about yourself" box. Every extra field loses people. Cut the form down to the minimum and watch what happens.
5. Is there an error happening that you can't see? Check your browser console on the signup page. A lot of "nobody's signing up" turns out to be "the button is broken and throwing an error nobody reported."

Go through these in order. Most apps get stuck on one and three, but check four before anything else, because it's the fix that pays off fastest.

Watch one real person use it

Numbers only tell you that something's wrong, not what. Sit next to a friend, or hop on a video call, and ask them to try your app while you stay quiet. Five minutes is enough. Watch where their mouse hesitates. Watch what they click first, not what you expected them to click. If they get stuck on the same step you skipped past a hundred times while building it, that's your answer. This one session usually tells you more than a week of staring at a stats page.

What's worth checking weekly at this size

When you're small, most metrics are just noise wearing a costume. Here's what to actually look at, and what to leave alone until you have real traffic.

Once you're past a hundred visitors a week, more of these numbers start meaning something. Below that, spend your time on the five checks and the five-minute test instead of the graph.

If you're on Plyo, you can see visitor counts and publish a new version in one click, so testing a smaller signup form doesn't cost you an afternoon.

Fix the form first, watch one person use the app, then decide if you have a real problem or just an early one.