Mobile Apps: Tools We Wish We Had

Our panel at the Women in Technology Summit on “Creating Killer Apps” – From left, Nikita Kapoor of Sprite Labs, Libby Roin of Polk Street Press, and Jennifer Wong of Alt12 Apps. Moderated by Lorraine Akemann of Moms With Apps. 

The most interesting part about moderating our WITISummit panel, aside from the amazing panelists themselves, were their ideas for improving the app ecosystem. So many useful snippets were flying around that almost ditched my microphone to grab a seat in the audience.

After discussing standard topics about app launches, tips for success, and challenges, we tackled this:

“What tools, in terms of app creation or app marketing, don’t exist yet that you wish existed? “

Oh, you could hear a pin drop! Their eyes lit up as they each had a chance to describe dream tools for apps.

1) Targeted Promotions

One thing we need (said Libby) is the ability to offer app promotions to particular groups of users. For example, wouldn’t it be great if a puzzle app could run a promotion with a toy store, or if a toddler app could run a promotion with a car seat manufacturer. Their customers would benefit from exclusive access to a free or discounted app, to generate buzz and word of mouth.  The reality is that any price change on current app store platforms are uniform to all customers across the platform. There is no programmatic audience segmentation that is easily accessible, aside from a few promo codes.

2) Crowdsourced Beta Testing 

Another thing we need (said Nikita) is a way to manage beta testing in a more uniform fashion. It is always a challenge to find app testers and solicit quality feedback while preparing to finalize and launch your app. If a preexisting captive audience of app testers were readily available for developers, the burden of finding beta test groups would ease up. Jennifer likened this to a “Task Rabbit for App Testing”.

3) Public performance metrics for apps

In the web world (says Jennifer, literally), sites like Compete and Quantcast provide insight on web metrics and performance of a website. I’d love to see one for native mobile apps. One of the biggest challenges as a small developer is reaching key media/brand stakeholders and media buyers are looking to do advertising or partnership deals their exact demographic. Providing public facing, opt-in analytics will provide transparency in the mobile app space and perhaps reward apps with engagement and traction. [Jennifer’s comments made me think about the value of Consumer Reports when making a purchasing decision, or looking at Alexa rankings when trying to evaluate a web site.]

Given we were limited on time, and couldn’t march off to a pitch competition in the middle of the conference, we settled for sharing some of the tools the panelists would recommend for making Killer Apps… [keep in mind, kids’ app developers, that 3rd party tools integrated in-app need to be COPPA compliant.]

• Pivotal Tracker – for agile project management tools
• Flurry – for mobile analytics
• Mopub – for ad mediation
• Net Promoter – for measuring virality
• Appoxee – for user engagement
• Test Flight – for beta testing

And my favorite – the “Slow Engine” – by Jennifer Wong

“Slow Engine” is what I refer to when building a community, it is like a slow moving engine. It’s a heavy and large undertaking to get moving in the early stages (and often feels like you’re not getting very far) but once it’s in motion it can be very powerful in fueling movement and growth in your app. So I always tell new developers to focus on making movement with a small but quality audience. 100 hyper-engaged users is far more valuable than 1000 users that downloaded your app once and never use it again. Those 100 users could mean a multiple of 10 or 20 if they love your app. The WOM (word of mouth) engine we have with our apps was built over time. Once we reached a critical mass of around 1M downloads we started to really feel the impact.

Thanks again to these fabulous panelists for sharing their expertise.