Launching Your Indie App
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This document provides guidance for indie app developers on launching a new app. It outlines key steps including thinking of an idea, building the app, and launching it. For the thinking phase, it recommends focusing on what you can control and how people will find your app. When building, it stresses the importance of quality and usability testing. For launching, it discusses monitoring rankings, using tools to track performance, creating a press kit, and growing through marketing and code improvements over time. The overall message is that indie developers should thoughtfully consider each stage of the process from idea to growth as they work to successfully launch a new app.
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Launching Your Indie App
- 1. Launching Your Indie App Dan Grover @dangrover dan@dangrover.com
- 2. ABOUT ME ✴ Worked as an engineer at several companies. ✴ Wrote Mac shareware (ShoveBox, others), went full-time/independent in 2009. ✴ Created Etude, iPad music learning platform. ✴ Sold to Steinway & Sons in 2011 ✴ Led new music tech team in building and releasing v2.0 with commercial music store.
- 3. AGENDA 1 THINK 2 BUILD 3 LAUNCH 4 GROW
- 4. THINK
- 8. SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD - MARC ANDREESSEN
- 10. What can you control? 1 The app itself. Idea and execution. 2 How it appears on the App Store 3 How it is published/launched: self- publish or work with publisher?
- 11. How do people find your app? Featured Rankings OTHER Category pages APP STORE Search Genius / Related PAGE Press Ads YOUR STORE YOUR Social WOM SITE LISTING APP Email
- 12. Your Goal: Start a feedback loop Better marketing platform/base More sales Better ranking Apple attention Press attention
- 13. BUILD
- 14. “Ninety percent of . everything is crap.” - Theodore Sturgeon
- 15. Generating and Filtering Ideas ✴ Write them all down, revisit them. ✴ Define what would make them work, what it would take. ✴ Prototype, investigate any dependencies. ✴ Show it to trusted people, get feedback.
- 16. A Well-Executed App ✴ Fits into iOS visual language. ✴ Makes good use of software and hardware features. ✴ Lets you do something new. ✴ Icing on the cake: has novel, iconic visual gimmickery
- 20. LAUNCH
- 21. How do people get your app? Featured Rankings OTHER Category pages APP STORE Search Genius / Related PAGE Press Ads YOUR STORE YOUR Social WOM SITE LISTING APP Email
- 22. Example Launch Plan ✓ App goes live, site goes live. ✓ Emails, tweets to customers go out. ✓ Press releases go out ✓ Personal emails go out (who? what angle?)
- 23. How Rankings Work Based on weighted moving average of unit sales over 3 days (approx) You start with nothing, so the ranking is more volatile and easy to influence. Time your release carefully.
- 24. Tools for Monitoring Rank appFigures majicRank free/$4.99 per month free
- 25. Apple helps those who help themselves.
- 26. What’s in a listing? Name Description Keywords Icon Screenshots Reviews
- 28. What’s in a press kit? Press release with critical details Screenshots Icons Logos Photos high res, print-ready Video
- 31. Distributing Your PR ✴ Wire services. PRWeb, PRMac, PRNewswire ✴ Email addresses and forms for sites soliciting press releases. ✴ Specific pitches to journalists ✴ Work your network. ✴ Offer promo codes. ✴ Work with a PR firm or consultant. But not hacky ones.
- 32. GROW
- 34. CODE
- 35. APP CODE
- 36. PRODUCT APP CODE
- 37. BUSINESS PRODUCT APP CODE
- 38. BUSINESS? PRODUCT? APP? OMG CODE!!1!
- 39. “Business” PRODUCT? APP CODE
- 43. Thanks!
- 44. Further Reading Cookie Cutter Guide to App Store Charting, Phill Ryu The Submarine, Paul Graham Mapping Out Your Web Startup, Jude Gomilla Purple Cow, Seth Godin Marketing is Not a Post-Processing Step, Eric Sink
Editor's Notes
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- Here’s who I am (yadda yadda). Worked on other peoples ideas, worked on my own.\n\nI’m really friggin slow to learn most of this stuff, which hopefully makes me better at conveying it.\n
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- Apps are now a major type of media. Up there with books and movies. Notice that this doesn’t say “software.” “App” means something specific to regular people. Not what it meant to geeks 10 years ago.\n
- This is a graph from Horice Dedeau showing app sales vs song sales. This is not cumulative.\n
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- This is how a lot of people view the iOS scene and the app store.\nIf there’s one point to this talk, it’s that the app store is not a lottery.\n
- So \n
- Here’s a simplified diagram of how people get to your app. We’re going to talk about each of these things.\n
- - If you sell well, you get higher in the rankings, which makes more people check out the app, which feeds back into sales. You also get a better base of people to market directly to when you have new stuff or updates.\n- If your app is making a splash, Apple is likely to take note and give it even more of a prime place.\n- If you’ve got press attention, that helps sales, but sales also help press attention. And press attention helps press attention. Journalists don’t want to report on anything that isn’t news or isn’t notable, so when they see that others are viewing your app that way, they are more inclined to have an opinion one way or the other on it.\n- AND, not pictured, having more sales obviously gets you more capital to continue improving your app, make more apps, promote, yadda yadda. \nSo how can we hack this?\n
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- This is a popular quote. It’s especially true on the app store.\n
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- - It needs to look like an iOS app. Not a web app. Not a Linux app. Not a Palm Pilot app. It needs to look (and work) like some weird division of Apple could have made it.\n- It needs to make you think “*this* is why I bought this phone”\n- Hopefully it lets the device do something it hasn’t been able to do before. Or hasn’t been able to do well before. This doesn’t mean “don’t have competition” though. It’s not a zero sum game.\n- The icing on the cake, if you can swing it, is to have some sort of what I call novel, iconic, visual gimmickery. \n
- What do I mean by novel, iconic visual gimmickery?\nHere are some apps that do this well.\nIt’s not just “good UI” or putting polish in, though that seems to go a long way. \nWhen people *really* do it well, the gimmick is a trademark and can be thought of as a symbol for the app itself. \n
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- This is what we came up with for Etude 2. The gimmick is that you can see the notes falling on the keys and slow it down and copy it on a real keyboard. When people see it, they suddenly *get* it. It’s not great, or even very useful, but it certainly is distinctive.\n\nA friend of mine who couldn’t read music learned Moonlight Sonata on this somehow.\n
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- Let’s go back to this slide. The goal here is to look at this like an obstacle course. What are the obstacles in getting from the listing to buying? What are the obstacles in getting from your site (or other places) to the listing?\n
- Here’s an example of the things you may want to have ready by the time you launch.\n- You need some kind of nice email going out to your customers, or anyone who’s signed up to be notified. If there’s a large number, try A/B testing in the first hour or however long it takes to get a statistically significant result. (Tell Etude 1.0 launch story).\n- Press releases and press kits go out.\n- Send personal emails to people who ought to know. Press, influencers. Identify them beforehand and what angle you’re going to use. Hopefully you’ve started this process with some of them before your app was ready by showing them the app.\n
- For more on rankings, see Phill Ryu’s “The Cookie Cutter Guide for App Store Charting”\n
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- One thing I’ve found is that Apple helps those who help themselves. If you’re trying to get featured or put in ads, you have to work for it. You have to make it clear that additional attention will sell more copies, but much more importantly, more phones.\n\nYour idea needs to be good enough that it can stand on its own without Apple.\n
- - Name. Give your app a good name, obviously. Some people have the name itself, then some little description after. It looks a little sleazy, but it seems to work and people don’t mind it much.\n- There’s the description itself. They’re not going to read that much, so put the most important stuff at the top. Write “reverse pyramid”. You can include other keywords here.\n- Keywords: every conceivable thing someone would search for that’s appropriate for your app.\n- Icon. Get a real icon designed. Even if you don’t get anything else designed, get a good iconographer. Get someone who uses the canvas well and matches standards of icons on iOS.\n- Screenshots. Take the time to pick eye-catching, representative samples of your app in use. Some people like to put additional BS on them. That seems to be okay.\n- Reviews. How can you influence reviews other than having a good app? Set expectations properly and give people an outlet for venting problems. Fix bugs quickly. Price can affect reviews a lot. \n
- I saw this the other day. This is pretty extreme/silly.\n
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- Here’s some photos from the Etude launch.\n
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- So there’s three ways to basically get your press release out.\nThe easiest is using one of the wire services out there. They’ll charge you $100 or something and just spam people.\nAnother is to gather all the sites you want to promote to and send out some kind of blast.\nBut the most effective is to make the right pitches to the right people. This is really hard. \nThere’s an essay by Paul Graham called “The Submarine” that explains how screwed up journalism is. Suffice it to say, there are zillions more PR people than journalists, and the journalists are all overworked and underpaid and pretty much act as filter from PR people. So you can get to know a bunch over years and reach out to them personally, or you can hire people to do it. \n\nGood PR people don’t just save you time spamming people. They only take on clients that they can actually do something for, and they don’t pitch every journalist on every story. They guard their relationships with the press very closely. \n\nThere are a lot of individuals and firms catering specifically to iOS developers. A lot of them are really scammy.\n\nOne thing I’ve found helpful in maintaining relationships with people in the press is to send followups. Don’t ever thank them for coverage though, unless it’s for their stunning insight or something.\n
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- My problem starting as an engineer is that I see everything as code, when nobody who’s using it does. It’s kind of at the core of it, but you can’t launch an app with just code. It’s not really an app then. You need to give it a name and an icon and put it somewhere where people can get it.\n\nBut sometimes you can have an app that’s not really much of a product. To make it a product, you have to think about who’s going to be using it, how they might find out about it, how to appeal to them, what it does for them, what keeps them interested in it. You find out that sometimes the way *you* would want things done doesn’t make sense for a lot of people.\n\nThen the hardest part is actually making a business out of it. That means, like, having a name f, doing taxes, trying to find other people to work with.\n
- My problem starting as an engineer is that I see everything as code, when nobody who’s using it does. It’s kind of at the core of it, but you can’t launch an app with just code. It’s not really an app then. You need to give it a name and an icon and put it somewhere where people can get it.\n\nBut sometimes you can have an app that’s not really much of a product. To make it a product, you have to think about who’s going to be using it, how they might find out about it, how to appeal to them, what it does for them, what keeps them interested in it. You find out that sometimes the way *you* would want things done doesn’t make sense for a lot of people.\n\nThen the hardest part is actually making a business out of it. That means, like, having a name f, doing taxes, trying to find other people to work with.\n
- My problem starting as an engineer is that I see everything as code, when nobody who’s using it does. It’s kind of at the core of it, but you can’t launch an app with just code. It’s not really an app then. You need to give it a name and an icon and put it somewhere where people can get it.\n\nBut sometimes you can have an app that’s not really much of a product. To make it a product, you have to think about who’s going to be using it, how they might find out about it, how to appeal to them, what it does for them, what keeps them interested in it. You find out that sometimes the way *you* would want things done doesn’t make sense for a lot of people.\n\nThen the hardest part is actually making a business out of it. That means, like, having a name f, doing taxes, trying to find other people to work with.\n
- My problem starting as an engineer is that I see everything as code, when nobody who’s using it does. It’s kind of at the core of it, but you can’t launch an app with just code. It’s not really an app then. You need to give it a name and an icon and put it somewhere where people can get it.\n\nBut sometimes you can have an app that’s not really much of a product. To make it a product, you have to think about who’s going to be using it, how they might find out about it, how to appeal to them, what it does for them, what keeps them interested in it. You find out that sometimes the way *you* would want things done doesn’t make sense for a lot of people.\n\nThen the hardest part is actually making a business out of it. That means, like, having a name f, doing taxes, trying to find other people to work with.\n
- A lot of the time when I’m working on a project it looks a lot like this. All the things around the code start to suffer when I don’t think about them.\n\nIt’s okay to resign yourself to not being good at all the non-code stuff that has to get done, but it’s not a good idea to resign yourself to ignorance of those things. Everybody sees the world through the lens of what they’re good at. \n
- Some places I’ve worked at (especially on the east coast) are kinda like this. They love to try to find partners and weird things to do with other companies, but they can’t really think about if their product is any good. They lack that visceral sense of if something is shitty or not.\n\nI think the key is finding some kind of balance.\n
- This is a chart made by Jude Gomilla, who co-founded HeyZap, a game platform startup. If you google for it, you can find the whole thing. It’s way too complicated for most of the apps *I’ve* ever worked on, and it makes me a little uncomfortable, but it covers a lot of bases.\nSaurick’s chart from earlier today is also pretty awesome. \n
- The last thing.\n\n
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