App Marketing: An Indie Developer’s Journey

Our feature this week is written by John Tran of Continuous Integration, developer of the Montessori-based app: Monte-Lingual 1 to 10. John dives right into to the world that many pending app developers are so curious about: how do you market your app amidst thousands of others in the App Store? He has taken the time to recount this journey for you – and what an interesting set of perspectives it lends!

I never knew how important of a role marketing would play when we released our first paid app, Monte-Lingual 1 to 10, an app that utilizes the Montessori method to teach the basics of counting.  Sometimes I think I spend more time trying to market our app rather than developing new features for it.  Our company, Continuous Integration, Inc. already had one existing free app (called Stock Wars) on the App Store prior to releasing Monte-Lingual.  For Stock Wars, we did zero marketing with little-to-no budget and spent over 6 months developing it in our spare time.  When the time came to release it, we were just so excited to actually have an app on the App Store that we really didn’t think about marketing and how it could help us.  Through time, luckily that decision did not prove to be costly since the app eventually gained a following by being one of the first apps of its kind on the App Store and genre.

Stock Wars had been out for almost a year and it was around that time that we started to think of a new app to develop.  We knew that we wanted to develop a paid app since we had not done one before.  However, we did not know what type of app we wanted it to be.  Two of the three partners of the company (myself included) have children enrolled in Montessori schools. We were so fascinated by the teaching method and how it allows children to learn. With the initial release of the iPad, we thought that it was a great opportunity to develop an app that fostered and promoted this style of learning.  So we set forth to develop Monte-Lingual.

Four months later, we had completed development of Monte-Lingual and were ready to release it to the App Store.  It was right before the holidays and we really wanted to get the app out there beforehand.  We knew we needed to do something in terms of marketing since it was a paid app.  Being developers new to this realm, we had little experience and turned to the web for advice.  Through research, we decided that we would contact app review sites and bloggers in addition to sending out a free press release.  The app launched on December 15th, 2010 without a full blown PR campaign.  Looking back, we should have just waited until after the holidays and carefully planned out the marketing strategy.  Initial sales were not what we expected, but it was too late. The app was already out there and we needed to do something about it.

We did more research and decided a week later to do some aggressive marketing.  The free press release we had sent out with the launch was not effective since it did not get too many views.  We needed to reach a wider audience.  Luckily we found a site called prMac that seemed like the best and most affordable way to submit an extended press release distribution using their services.  This proved to be vital in the sustainability of our app.  Once we had a spike in downloads, we made Apple’s “New & Noteworthy” in the Education category.  We were pretty happy about that but it was just a matter of time when sales dipped back down to where they were initially before the press release; it was back to the drawing board.

Now we were scrambling to right the ship. Should we drop the price or release a Lite version?  Our decision was to release a Lite version.  While it was in the process of App Store approval, we continued to contact app review sites.  Our first wave of app review site submissions were not very successful.  Most of the time we never heard back from anyone or we received the dreaded auto-reply and “we’ll get back to you”.  Some sites and bloggers just wanted us to do paid advertisements or paid reviews; it was a struggle.

After the repeated attempts in contacting app reviewers, I happened to find the popular app review site called The iPhone Mom.  This site was unique in its own right.  It was not your cookie-cutter app review site.  This site was aesthetically appealing and geared towards reviewing kids apps and apps for tech-savvy moms.  This was coincidentally the time when the light bulb switch went off and we realized that (as the saying goes) any publicity is good publicity.  Prior to this, we were looking for full reviews of our app.  This time around we would be happy with just about any type of mention.  Thankfully, Heather “The iPhone Mom” was kind enough to assist by including our app in one of her Friday Findings along with other apps.  This brought a slight increase in downloads and gave our app some credibility in the educational/kids apps space.

Once the Lite version was approved, we submitted another press release through prMac and contacted Heather again to see if she could put out another mention on her site.  Although it wasn’t an individual app review, this time Heather gave us our own dedicated post to relay the news.  We were so ecstatic that she did this as it helped to gain a bit more exposure for our app and the Lite version.  Through The iPhone Mom site, it was at this time where I ran into a certain site called – yep, you guessed it – Moms with Apps.  This literally was the turning point for Monte-Lingual as an educational app, and once we made Apple’s “What’s Hot” list in the Educational category, we knew things were looking upward.

Since becoming a member of Moms with Apps, I must say that I am very happy and thankful to be accepted into such a great community.  It has been a godsend for me since the site provides so much information and is a vast resource for knowledge sharing through the forums.  In regards to app discovery and the marketing of apps in this space, it has given me a place to turn to for ideas and suggestions in helping further and grow our app.  Through initiatives such as App Friday and the MWA mobile app, Moms with Apps has greatly contributed to the recent success of our app.  In this tough and competitive genre, Moms with Apps has given an indie development shop like ours more visibility that we might not have received elsewhere.  They are such a great advocate in helping to spread the word and providing a place where developers and parents alike can come to get anything related to family-friendly apps.

Recently, we have released new versions of the app and have been heavily involved in using social media such as Twitter.  It’s kind of funny since I was not well versed in Twitter before all of this, and now I can’t stop tweeting or help out someone else by re-tweeting something of value.  Go figure 🙂  I must say though that Twitter and Facebook have changed our perception and the way we view marketing.  Through these mediums, we have been able to network and associate ourselves with some great review sites and bloggers.  We have been featured by Nathalie van Ee of funeducationalapps.com, Gary James of a4cwsn.com, Heather Leister of theiphonemom.com, and most notably Dan Donahoo of wired.com’s GeekDad.  We appreciate the professional work and feedback we have received from the review and blogging community.

To put it all into perspective, sales aren’t exactly where we’d like it to be at this point.  Hindsight is 20/20 and I definitely know that we will do things differently the next time we launch an app.  Perhaps before the launch we could be more active on Twitter, or maybe we can reach out to bloggers and review sites ahead of time to distribute a pre-release version of the app to give them a sneak peek.  In the end, I think it’s all about a good app and generating a buzz to get people talking.  We have come to grips that marketing is a constant journey.  If you don’t keep at it, you might miss the boat on something important and you may never get a chance to seize that moment again.  Thankfully for us, we have been fortunate enough to stay afloat. But we do have a long way to go before we can truly say that we have figured it all out.