Three weeks since the launch of MENO. In the first part there were 120 users and parsing bugs. In the second — 149 users and a new onboarding. Now — the third.
In short: more users, the bot became cleaner, and a comment from dev.to arrived that made me stop and think.
This is the third part of the series.
Metrics
Users
| Metric | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Change (2→3) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total entered the bot | 120 | 149 | 216 | +67 |
| Remained (without blocking) | 67 | 67 | 101 | +34 |
| Retention | 56% | 45% | 47% | +2 p.p. |
In the third week, 67 new users joined — more than in the second week, even though there were no new publications on Habr. Apparently, the long tail from previous articles plus the Telegram channel is working.
Retention is hovering around 45–47%. Half of the people come in, click around, and leave. This doesn’t scare me — many simply don’t have an immediate task and just came to take a look. More importantly, the core has grown: it was 67 people, now it’s 101. Those who stay are actually using the bot.
Also, Telegram recently added a built-in MAU counter for bots. MENO has 205 MAU.
This number is higher than 101 because MAU counts everyone who interacted at least once in the last month — including those who later blocked the bot. For a three-week-old bot, MAU is roughly equal to everyone who has ever opened it, minus the very earliest users.
Messages
| Message Type | Week 1 | Two Weeks | Three Weeks | Growth (2→3) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | 223 | 237 | 284 | +47 |
| Forwarded | 10 | 11 | 18 | +7 |
| Voice | 6 | 7 | 16 | +9 |
| Total | 239 | 255 | 318 | +63 |
63 new messages — four times more than a week ago.
Forwarded messages (+7) — I added a hint in the onboarding that you can forward messages from other chats to the bot. It worked well. Several people wrote that forwarding is the most convenient feature in the bot. The logic is simple: someone in your work chat says “prepare the report by Friday” — you forward it to MENO — and the bot automatically extracts the task and deadline. No manual typing needed.
Voice messages (+9) — grew from 7 to 16, even though I still haven’t highlighted them better in the onboarding. People are discovering it themselves. This means the feature is needed — people just don’t all know about it. Or maybe not everyone is comfortable dictating.
What I Did: UX Cleanup
There were no new features this week. Instead, I focused on something I usually don’t feel like doing — cleaning up what already exists.
Texts became shorter. Previously, the bot explained too much. Every action came with a description: what would happen, why, and what options there were. That’s fine for the first acquaintance, but when you use it every day, you want the bot to shut up and just do the job. I went through all the messages and trimmed them down.
Pricing became clearer. MENO has two plans — Free and Max. Previously, the difference between them was spread across several screens, and you had to click around to understand what you were paying for. Now, when you open the pricing section, you immediately see: here’s the free plan, here’s the paid one, and here’s the difference.
The referral system was moved. It used to live in the “Personal Cabinet” and took up a disproportionately large amount of space there. The cabinet looked more like a referral page than a page about your tasks. I moved everything to the payments section — it makes more sense: the referral program adds limits to your account.
None of these changes look important on their own. But together, the bot started to feel much more polished. It’s exactly these small details that decide whether a person stays after the first minute.
First Feedback from the West
There was the first activity on dev.to. Just one comment — but it’s worth ten likes:
This is great! I’m currently experimenting with menoapp_bot. I have one question: can I add it to a group chat? I’d like to create a “shared calendar” for a small group of Telegram users, and this would be perfect, but I can’t figure out how to make it work in a group.
This is already the second request for group functionality. The first came from a Russian-speaking user a couple of weeks ago.
One request is a coincidence. Two identical requests, in different languages, from people who don’t know each other — it’s time to start thinking seriously.
The scenario is clear: a small team, family, or study group — you add the bot to the chat, everyone writes tasks, and they see a shared calendar/list. It sounds simple, but the implementation raises many questions:
- Whose task is it in a group chat — the person who wrote it, or everyone’s?
- How do we avoid mixing personal tasks with shared ones?
- Do we need roles and permissions?
- How to display a shared calendar in the Mini App without turning it into Google Calendar?
I won’t rush to implement it right now. But I’ve made a mental note: group usage could be the thing that sets MENO apart from dozens of other task bots. I’ll keep thinking about it.
Website and POSSE
This week I launched the project website — a landing page + blog. I’ll tell you more about it in the next article, but I want to mention one thing now.
One of the reasons I started my own site was the POSSE approach: Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. The idea is simple: everything you write is first published on your own site, and then distributed to other platforms — Habr, dev.to, wherever.
Why? Your content remains yours, you’re not dependent on a single platform, and you can connect any mechanisms — RSS, newsletters, anything. If tomorrow some platform changes its rules or shuts down — everything is safely on your own domain.
The blog has just started and currently brings zero traffic. SEO is a long-term bet. But the foundation has been laid.
What’s Next
In the near future — a new way to display tasks. Right now tasks are shown in only one way, and I feel it’s not enough. I’ve already worked on three variants, but they all still look rough. None are ready to ship to production. Maybe by the fourth week I’ll polish one of them and release a patch.
I also finally want to highlight voice input in the onboarding. Since people are finding and using it themselves, it’s worth helping everyone else discover it. But I keep running into the question: “If it’s already written, how do I make it more visible without pulling all the attention to it?”
Try It and Follow
Bot: @menoapp_bot
Telegram channel: @na_derevo