Spring break is here and I’m working full-time to finish up Grades and get people talking about it.

Yesterday was awesome. Last night MacStories, no small Apple blog, ran a glowing preview of Grades, “a must have application for students.”

There’s a story behind that.

The story

About a week ago, when I posted my marketing plan, I started engaging some of the larger sites that cover iPhone apps. At this stage, “engage” equals follow on Twitter. I was planning to start reaching out to some of these influential writers, retweeting them, replying to them, etc. but before I could get started they started reaching out to me saying stuff like “hey, keep me posted about that Grades app, looks great.” Wow, that was unexpected. I bet a lot of it has to do with the easy-to-grasp idea behind Grades coupled with its visual appeal.

Back to the story. Viticci of MacStories gets me in touch with one of their main contributors, Cody Fink, who happens to be a college student living in my neck of the woods! Great. So we did lunch yesterday and we talked about all kinds of stuff—really had a blast. And yes, I gave him a preview of Grades. Its much easier to market something that actually is remarkable, worth talking about. I don’t want to sound presumptuous but I have been taking the time (a full year) to go the extra mile on this one, and at least Cody liked it. I’ll leave it at that—the market will ultimately determine if it really is remarkable.

So MacStories was obviously going to review the app, and I was going to provide a pre-release copy so that the review could coincide with the launch, but I think pre-launch buzz is also really important and this was an opportunity to build buzz with a wider audience. I talked to Cody about doing a preview. I was a bit cautious since I noticed that MacStories didn’t have too many iPhone app previews. His response surprised me. If the app is good, they love doing previews! The reason they don’t have too many is that developers rarely offer them. Shame on us. MacStories has a huge audience and we aren’t taking advantage of it to build that all-important buzz on launch day. These people want to help us! And we complain about not having enough money for marketing. Hogwash.

Anyhow, the post went up last night and the response has been great so far. Based on my suggestion, they’re trying something I haven’t seen before: a pre-release giveaway. It actually makes a lot of sense. Giveaways have the benefit of building buzz but post-launch giveaways also have a downside: people entering your giveaway are less likely to go out and buy the app. Pre-launch giveaways don’t have that problem. Just pure buzz.

So far so good. Your thoughts, feelings, and advice are all welcome. I’ll keep you posted the best I can.

Update: for those who missed it, I also recently put out a video sneak peek of the Grades opening screen (when you open the app for the first time). It gives you a good peek at the kind of details I’ve been obsessing over for the past year (embedded below):

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 2:38 pm and is filed under iPhone App Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.