Congratulations! What did you do to market the app? Just stick it in the store? Or did you get blogs to do write-ups?
It seems like discovery has always been a huge problem for app developers.
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I've built up a list of 14,000 subscribers to the free web app over the past year and also had a journalist at LifeHacker who wrote about the project before. I offered the journalist an exclusive write up and then sent an email blast to the 14,000 subscribers all within an hour (starting today at Noon) and the app shot up the app store within a couple hours.
Still don't know launch day numbers since app store reports don't update until later tonight.
For further coverage, I'm reaching out to app review sites and any journalists who have covered similar apps in the past.
Great stuff, thanks for the info.
This is not the first time I've heard of this strategy, and it seems to be quite profitable: "hook" a large number of users with a no-strings-attached free app or web app and get their contact info. Then create an app in the same niche, but charge for it, and email blast them all on launch day.
The last time I heard of someone doing this, they did it with a game. They released an ad-free, excellent game for free and popped up a dialog after a few starts saying "Enter your email here if you want to be notified when I release <App Name> 2!". After a year or so, he had tens of thousands of email addresses. Then he released a $2 sequel and did an "email blast" on launch day. Similarly, he shot up the charts very quickly.
That's a great story about the game. I'm interested to see the actual download numbers tomorrow to see what Apple factors into the rankings.
How important do you think the offer of exclusivity was to the LifeHacker journo?
More widely to anyone reading this, how standard is it to offer exclusivity when soliciting coverage from the press? It's something I've never tried.
It's hard to say, but it typically is easier to get the first article written if you offer exclusivity. It's kind of a 'better to be safe than sorry' approach when going to the journalists. If you don't have a huge announcement, there's a chance you dont get any coverage and then you're screwed, so 1 exclusive is better than none.
Thanks for your reply! Did you offer exclusivity for the "launch" as an entity, or for a certain time period?
Kept it vague when I worded it, so it was really just for the launch day.
Can you tell us a bit about how you managed your list? How often did you send out emails, and what kind of topics did you cover? Thanks!
So the newsletter is for the web version of Noon Pacific. I send out a weekly music mixtape every Monday at Noon (Pacific Time) with a link to the mixtape (with a pretty* album cover picture) and the tracklist.
How long did it take for you to build up 14,000 subscribers and how did you grow the subscriber list?
Took me a little over a year, and grew it through various means: press, social media, a lot of word-of-mouth.
Any chance once you find the numbers you could post them on here? Very interested to know.
Sure, I'll see what numbers I can pull tomorrow.
Brilliant, look forward to it.