IPhone App Marketing

Archive for the ‘iPhone App Marketing’ Category

Startup Plays: How to market an iOS app

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

Woah, way too much me in that picture

Startup Plays is a really cool concept: break down the information and processes it takes to run a successful startup into actionable “plays”, templates to success in a particular aspect of the business such as getting your company incorporated or pitching a VC.

I was a bit skeptical when Scott Annan first asked if I could help build a play on iOS app marketing but, after looking through a sample play, I found that the format is really unique and valuable. It is essentially a down-to-earth to-do list your team can run through from start to finish with detailed information and expert advice on each step. You can also collaborate with your team by commenting on the different steps and adding additional steps to the play. The plays will really help you hit the ground running and the company has had a tremendous response so far.

Working with Scott was amazing and I think the play turned out really well. The steps in there are based on my experience in marketing my apps and what I’ve seen work in the industry. Some advice will be familiar, some won’t, but it’s really the format that goes beyond what you’ll get on the Tapity blog.

So there you have it, check out Market and Launch your iPhone Application like a Pro, by yours truly. I hope you find it helpful.

Full disclosure: I am definitely getting a very fair cut so you can feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt. We’re in luck, though, since it looks like Macgasm recommended it this morning too.

Posted in iPhone App Marketing | Comments Off

Learning from Steve Jobs

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

Folks all over the world are shocked by the passing of Steve Jobs, even though we all knew it was coming. I think the shock is from the realization that the Edison of our time is gone. As we recover from the shock, it is fitting that we ask, what can we learn from Mr. Jobs? On one hand, the combination of creative, marketing, consumer, and industrial genius that resides in a Jobs (or an Edison or a Disney) cannot be studied and mastered. On the other hand, I believe we can learn and master aspects of Jobs’ pattern of genius.

The best summary I have seen of what we can learn from Steve Jobs is Guy Kawasaki’s post: “What I learned from Steve Jobs.” The fact that Guy knew Steve directly is notable, but I think it more important that Guy is a great learner and does a terrific job of articulating what he has learned. So I highly recommend his post.

Well worth a view is “A Tribute to Steve Jobs,” hosted by Charlie Rose. His first interview with Eric Schmidt at the beginning is particularly good. Schmidt’s emphasis on Jobs’ ability to marry art and technology is very insightful.

At Tapity, we hope that our focus on designing apps that respect, delight, and serve the people who use them will demonstrate that we have learned a little bit from Steve Jobs.

Posted in iPhone App Design, iPhone App Marketing, iPhone App News | Comments Off

Back-to-school Blitz

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

The back-to-school season has propelled Grades 2 upwards in the charts. We are approaching 200,000 downloads. And we’ve recovered a position on the top ten Education list. The reason for this is two-fold.

For starters, Apple put us in a “back-to-school” app collection that is one of the app store’s rotating banners right now. They also inducted us into the “College Survival Guide” app store essentials collection (as the #1 app to boot). We’ve been eying that slot for some time. This will give us a semi-permanent presence in front of the eyeballs of students searching for college apps.

Screen Shot 2011-08-25 at 9.46.26 AM

Then we started seeing Grades all over blogs. Little ‘ole blogs like Mashable and The Huffington Post (the No.2 and No. 1 blogs in the world, respectively). But the real kicker is this: the HuffPo article wasn’t a “back-to-school apps” article, but simply a “back-to-school items” article. So now, at least according to HuffPo, Grades 2 has joined “backpack” and “TI-84 calculator” as a back-to-school essential. You won’t hear us protesting!

We also wound up on USA Today’s and ABC News’ websites as one of 8 tech tools for college students.

But, to bring this self-congratulation party to a conclusion, what market lessons does all of this teach? Before WWDC I broke my back trying to get the attention of the big boys. One Apple Design award later, the big boys pick up the story without my doing anything. Blogging, bragging, waving, prodding, pleading, screaming like a maniac—everything one might do to get in front of important faces is ineffectual when compared to crafting a remarkable product that markets itself.

So the take-home message is: Seth Godin was 140% right when he argued that, in order to stand out amidst today’s plethora of products, you have to market by designing something truly remarkable. Have a purple cow. Why? Because when you give birth to a purple cow, people will be intrigued and will market it for you.

Posted in Announcements, App Store, Business, Grades, iPhone App Marketing | 2 Comments »

100,000

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

Throw your mind all the way back across the eons to 2010. In May of that year Jeremy and I began to brew up Grades 2. Nine months, forty days, and forty sleepless nights later, we launched Grades 2 with great ballyhoo and fanfare. SXSW had been good to us, giving us contacts with lots of great folks and eminent bloggists. We also had lots of great connections from the Grades 1 launch.

Hence, when Grades 2 first launched, lots of great people Tweeted up the story. We were featured on blogs such as MacStories, HackCollege, and AppAdvice. The synergy of these blog posts and tweets, combined with the newsletter we sent to our users, launched Grades 2 into the top 100 education apps. Our goal: to be featured by Apple on “New and Noteworthy.” Our thought: Apple helps those who help themselves—you need critical mass to get the nuclear explosion of being featured by Apple.

Our machinations worked. On the Thursday of our second week Apple featured us on “New and Noteworthy,” keeping Grades 2 up for two weeks. This made us the top app in Education for over a week and blasted us into the top 200 free apps overall. Our goal: 100,000.

Over the month of May, we accrued over 90,000 downloads. We wormed our way in front of several television cameras (the local Fox and NBC affiliates), as well as getting into the Charlotte Observer, a Japanese higher education magazine, and several student newspapers. But we still hadn’t reached that elusive 100,000.

Jeremy decided to go to San Francisco for WWDC (winning a student scholarship helped in that decision). It just so happened that, at the Apple Design Awards, Apple invited Jer onstage and gave him a glowing cube. We had won an ADA in the student category. Craziness.

Press coverage came in thick and fast. We found ourselves on the New York Times, Consumer Reports, ZDNet, Mac Rumors, PC World, TUAW, and MacStories, to name a few. Jeremy also did an interview with MacWorld.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Apple put us on the front page of the App Store, along with the “Apps of the Week.” Downloads soared. And that’s how we reached 100,000 (107,270 as of today, to be exact).

So we’ve come a long way. We’ve learned how to design a delightful app. We’ve also learned how to market said app. Our next project, which we will be blogging about over the coming months, is to learn how take full advantage of the freemium model. So far with Grades 2, ads and in-app purchases have brought in a measly $1000. We think we can do better. We also are turning our hobby into a legit business and have some pretty amazing opportunities pouring in. So stay tuned for the next part of the story.

-Josh

Posted in Announcements, App Store, App Story, Grades, iPhone App Marketing | 7 Comments »

What better time?

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

I am excited to announce what most of you have probably already heard by now: last night I went up on stage in front of thousands of developers infinitely more brilliant than myself and accepted a ridiculously cool glowing box. Grades 2 is officially an Apple Design Awards winner. We’re still a bit in shock about the whole thing. Did that really just happen?

Just one more thing…

So…What better time to make another exciting announcement. This one you probably haven’t heard about. I have been getting some pretty amazing opportunities to work at some pretty amazing places. But I’m not. In fact, I’m doing the opposite – Josh and I are both going full time on Tapity. With the help of our business savvy dad (who goes by the name of Todd), we’re going to turn our hobby into a legit business.

This is pretty big for us. We’ve got some really cool products in the pipeline, and we are also opening our doors to client work. Starting today we are offering design and marketing consulting services along with full fledged product development services.
download

We’ll be updating the site soon with more information on our services but if you need quality help building an app, feel free to email us. If you’re a developer and like the idea of working with us on projects, get in touch! We’re looking for some great developers to help us with our future projects.

Bonus: Grades 2 update

And by the way, yes, I’m working on a post about the Grades 2 launch but have been quite swamped as you know. Here’s the short version: we had almost a hundred thousand downloads in the first month thanks to some nice press and Apple’s New and Noteworthy feature. iAds make 7x more money per thousands views than AdMob does and is giving us about a 60% fill rate. Despite all that, you need tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of users using your app every day to be really profitable with iAds. We’re getting there but we’re not there yet. So far we’ve made more money on people getting rid of ads via the in-app-purchase but that still isn’t too much.

… And a business would not be a business without a business card. So we made some. If you see me at WWDC, please say hi and I will most likely end up giving you one.

Posted in Announcements, App Story, Grades, iPhone App Design, iPhone App Marketing | 3 Comments »

#1

Sunday, April 17th, 2011

Today Grades 2 officially took the coveted prize of becoming the #1 ranked app in the Education category. Yesterday the app was downloaded by over eight thousand people, and that on a weekend, when downloads are typically the lowest.

Grades 1 peaked at #2 in the paid Education category so #1 is a new record for us. Needless to say we are extremely excited about it all. We’ll keep you posted as the story continues to unfold and I’ll be sure to post about how the ad-model is working when we get more data.

As to continued marketing, now that we’ve got a number, we’ve got a pretty cool story for a lot of local and perhaps even national press so I’m going to be capitalizing on that in the next week. We’ll see what happens.

Posted in App Story, Grades, iPhone App Marketing | 1 Comment »

Success is repeatable

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

New and Noteworthy for the win! If two kids can build two apps in a row that are featured by Apple, I think success on the App Store is repeatable. Luck is involved but there are things we can do to seriously beef up our chances. Just look at Tapbots. Thank you, Apple!

I’ll be sure to let you know how the free+ model works out.

BTW, huge congrats to my friends who built Tea – they did all the right things and I frankly would have been surprised if they didn’t get featured. Also big kudos to Tapbots for another amazing launch today. If you haven’t tried out Tweetbot, you need to now!

Posted in App Story, Grades, iPhone App Marketing | Comments Off

Grades 2 – we are go for launch

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

I have been looking forward to this day for many moons and now it’s finally here. Grades 2 is now available on the App Store.

This is probably the riskiest endeavor I’ve ever been involved in. I took a 5 month leave from my job to finish this thing and I’m trying a new revenue model: free + ads and in-app-purchase to get rid of ads. Maybe it will crash and fail. Maybe it will do really well. One thing’s certain, it’s gonna be a fun ride. I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Here is a snippet from the description, in case you’re wondering what this thing is all about:

What do I need to score on my next test to be on track for an A? There’s an app for that.

Now with due dates and a handy GPA calculator.

★ Features ★

☞ Tells you what grades you need on upcoming assignments and tests to get your target grade in the class.
☞ Helps you calculate your GPA and figure out what grades you need in your classes to gain or maintain a certain GPA.
☞ Helps you remember when upcoming assignments are due.
☞ All wrapped up in a crisp and delightful interface.

Grades 2 will serve as your roadmap to an A.

★ New in 2.0 ★

☞ Completely new look with retina graphics
☞ Due Dates
☞ GPA Calculator
☞ Sub-grades
☞ Drop grades
☞ Lots of little improvements
☞ Free (ad-supported – $1 to kill ads forever)

Promo video Josh made:

p.s. The early reviews are really important so if you want to make my day, consider posting a review of the app early on!

Posted in App Story, Grades, iPhone App Marketing | 3 Comments »

Launching an App

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

It’s Saturday and I’ve been so busy prepping for the Grades 2 launch next week that I forgot that it was my turn to blog on iDevBlogADay. Okay so I do have big announcement to make: assuming Apple approves it on time, Grades 2 will launch this Tuesday! I’ve been preparing for this moment for many months so it is pretty exciting to be so close to the big day.

Maybe it would be helpful to summarize what we’ve done up to this point to pump up our chances for Tuesday being a success. I think our pre-launch marketing efforts can be summed up into three targets: iOS community, PR, and students (the actual target market).

iOS Community

Breaking into the iOS developer community was a big help in the success of Grades 1. Not only did I learn a ton from talking to developers but a lot of developers helped build a lot of buzz for the app when it came out.

So what? Developers aren’t my target market! Yeah, well if the developer community knows what you’re doing, chances are folks at Apple know about you too. New & Noteworthy, anyone?

I’m not suggesting everyone needs to go out and do exactly what I did but I think it may be helpful to see some tangible examples.

Prior to Grades 1…

Started this blog and shared what I was learning about iOS design and marketing. Got a big break when TapTapTap talked it up.
Built a Twitter following the same way.
Engaged in iOS related discussion on Twitter and other developer’s blogs. Also started engaging with Apple employees on Twitter.

Leading up to Grades 2 launch…

Started contributing to UX Magazine.
Contributed to Ken Yarmosh’s awesome O’Reilly book, App Savvy.
Chronicled Grades 2 development in semi-weekly videos.
Posted Grades 2 preview shots on Dribbble and Forrst, garnering lots of feedback and thousands of views overall.
Blogged for iDevBlogADay.
Went to SXSW and got to meet so many awesome iOS designers and developers. In-person is the best by far! Also met some folks from Apple over there.

PR

For PR, the less cold-calling, the better (though cold calling is definitely better than nothing). Best case scenario is that the press already respect you before you pitch anything to them.

Grades 1

Got to know some folks in the press via Twitter and by the time Grades 1 was about to launch, some of them were actually contacting me to write about it.
Did the traditional cold calling – sending emails to all the major press outlets and review sites. Each pitch was custom tailored to the blog it was targeting, at least for all the major blogs. Definitely read their guidelines and don’t make dumb mistakes. I think my pitches tended to be longer than they needed to be. Here’s some tips for pitching review sites. I did win a few reviews via cold calling. The ideal scenario is if you are able to provide them a promo code. If it’s pre-launch you can get promo-codes after Apple approves the app but before you officially release it on the store. Definitely a good idea to allow for a week or so between approval and launch so that you can give out promo codes in time for folks to publish reviews right around your launch.
Allowed MacStories to do a preview/giveaway before the app came out.
Entered a demo video into the AppStar Awards (didn’t win but was a finalist).
Created a pretty website with a signup form.

Grades 2

Reached out to my old press contacts, offering beta access to some of them. That worked pretty well.
Pitched several folks from the press at SXSW – all were positive and will be writing about Grades 2. This was pretty phenomenal. To give you the idea of the scale of their sites, I plan to upgrade from my Hostgator Baby Plan to the highest end dedicated server they have to be sure the site doesn’t go down. I’ll keep the dedicated server until traffic dies down.
I plan to do another round of cold-calling. We made sure to have a nice video ready and I prepared a fairly comprehensive press package with a detailed press document, screenshots, icon images, and various promo images in wide and narrow formats. I wanted to make sure writing a great looking story about Grades 2 is as easy as possible.

Students

Our actual target market. We actually didn’t do much to target students directly with Grades 1, other than starting a Facebook group. Here’s what we’ve been doing for Grades 2:

Making the app free – college students tend to be quite stingy (not to mention high school students) so we think that switching the app to a free+ model (ads, $1 to remove) will help this thing spread virally on college campuses.
Josh started blogging tips for getting better grades with less sweat over on the Grades Blog. He has been able to grow that blog to hundreds of visits per day (which is actually pretty good).
Josh also regularly guest blogs on a number of college related blogs and networks with other blogs on Twitter. A lot of these blogs will be posting about Grades 2 when it launches.
Built a Grades 2 preview video into a Grades 1 update and integrated a MailChimp mailing list subscription feature into the app. Over 200 Grades 1 users have signed up to the mailing list from inside the app!
Josh will be contacting lots of student newspapers to see if they would be interested in reviewing the app.
We built Facebook sharing into the app. Not optimal – it is best to have something to share rather than just a plea to share the app itself. But it’s better than nothing.

Phew. That took longer than I expected. Hope it was useful. Be sure to look out for Grades 2 next week. I’m pumped to see how it all pans out!

Posted in Grades, iPhone App Marketing | 2 Comments »

6:45AM – it is finished

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

I am extremely delighted to report that Grades 2 has been submitted to Apple as of 6:45AM this morning. If you want to see me ramble a bit about it you can check out the video I recorded around 6:30 this morning. I didn’t post it inline since I’m not sure everybody wants to see the zombie version of me after coding and testing for I don’t know how many hours, all the way through the night.

Also, last night I gave the Grades icon a refresh which turned out surprisingly decent given the hour of night I designed it (right).

Thanks everyone for all your support. The fun starts next week.