Woow! It's 2020 and this story got too old to still be relevant. Regardless, I think we should keep it published. We're now working on CreatorKit, a new video marketing tool to help creators grow online. It has tools to make it super easy to with engaging motion graphics. add text to video =================== A little over a year ago, we with the goal of creating engaging mobile apps, tailored to young millennials and gen Z. Fortunately to this day, have downloaded the apps we built in 2016. founded Beta Labs more than four million users Top Nine, Game Switch and Animately on the Charts So what was the key to our success? A simple three step process. [TL;DR] There are many ways to succeed on the App Store. Ours was the combination of influencer marketing and building an app that exploited some kind of trend. We’ve partnered with hundreds of influencers and owners of social media accounts with a large audience, mostly on a per-impressions or per-posts scheme. Influencer marketing has always been at the core of our strategy. Influencers enabled us to advertise and promote our apps successfully, but with more than 500,000 active developers and 2,200,000 apps on the App Store, . In our case, another key factor was that we would always exploit some kind of trend or opportunity gap. I’ll cover only our experience with Game Switch, Animately, and Top Nine on this article. you need to do more than just apply great marketing skills to differentiate from the crowd The process is pretty simple: Our three step process As you can imagine, execution is not that simple and straight forward. However, it worked for us pretty well most of the times. 1- Detecting trends and opportunities [TL;DR] Exploit seasonal trends. Pay attention to newcomers on the Top Charts. Uncover the trending searches on the search tab. Check out OS release notes regularly. Use mobile data intelligence platforms. There can be hundreds of different ways to succeed on this crucial step. We used many as well. , based on the trend that every December, Instagram users look for an app that generates a collage with their best 9 photos of the year. . Take a look at the trends last year: Top 9 was Andy’s idea The takeaway is that Google Trends may be a great tool to validate seasonal trends With Game Switch, we just looked at the Top charts. “ ” appeared on the 150th position of the App Store. We saw that playing games from the iOS notification center was an interesting paradigm, so we jumped right in. Then it reached the top charts, and the . Steve — The Jumping dinosaur buzz around it started Another in the App Store. This was the case for Animately. We saw the keyword “Wallpapers,” and after looking at the “Live photos” section of the we saw the opportunity to create Live Photo Wallpapers. key method to understand trends is looking at the search tab release notes for iOS 9.1.0 A simple OS update may give way for the creation of an entirely new app space. To give you an example, if you open the App Store search tab almost EST, you’ll see Truth or Dare is a trending search. That’s because there have been more than 7 million users searching for the keywords “Truth or Dare” almost every weekend for the past 5 months now. Cool opportunity right? Yeah, it an amazing opportunity. Now it’s saturated and it’s only cool for those who are among the first results, which happen to be the first ones to have created a decent and engaging app. As with any other search algorithm, it will favor the older over the newer ones. every Saturday 8 PM was If you want to create a profitable business out of building apps, is critical to understand that My grandma and my 7-year-old cousin have app ideas. It’s more about You’ll find tons of interesting posts about how to find profitable opportunities, this step is very different than having an “app idea.” understanding potential, competition, trends, and the opportunity out of developing something relatively simple with the right marketing strategy. including ones calling out the less morally-equipped ones, for exploiting the system in order to scam the more vulnerable users. 2- Build the app before the trend is over [TL;DR] You’ve detected a trend or opportunity; that means dozens of others probably did as well. Be fast and build with an MVP mindset. A lot of developers will copy innovator’s app in no time. In technology, there’s always a tradeoff between the time it takes to develop something and the quality of the end product. Charly is a detail-obsessed, design-centered software engineer. You get the picture, right? As the leader of our engineering team, he wants to make sure our infrastructure will be able to handle thousands of users at any given moment, providing the best possible UX. Most of the apps we’ve made went viral, staying at the top charts for a couple of days. Being on the Top 10 of the US App Store spells at least 100,000 downloads a day. If you are building apps based on trends, be advised that hundreds of similar apps will pop up. is perfectly mirrored on the App Store: First are the . Then there’s the . Then there’s the . Idiots saturate the business. Warrent Buffet’s idea of the “Three I’s” Innovators Imitators Idiots There are many developers who will create incremental innovations to an existing app. But This means roughly the same icon, same UX, and even almost the same UI. As an innovator, you invest time understanding and A/B testing the high converting UX for in-app purchases or better engagement (= more ads). As an imitator, they just need to copy it! The way the App Store handles copycats is very frustrating. To be honest, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. there are many, many others who will create an exact copy of your app. MVP mindset You want the design to be amazing and to launch with 100% of the features, but it’s better to be one of the innovators. If you’re not fast enough, you may be already among the imitators. Getting the time/quality tradeoff right can separate your app from failure to success. We learnt this the hard way. Remember the Pokemon Go Chat apps? Have you heard of the GoAtlas app? Of course you haven’t, because it was too late by the time we were going to launch it, so we didn’t. We were confident it was going to handle 300K active users a day, not like the #1 app . Developing an architecture that complex for real time messaging at scale took us more than what the market could wait. that crashed for not being able 3- Marketing strategy based on Influencers and viral loops [TL;DR] Read if you want to understand how viral loops work for apps. Influencers are an amazing way to execute “the big push.” You’ll also find many marketing secrets as well. If you want to create viral apps, the most important insight to take into account is that Ideally, the app needs to be designed for growth, integrating the marketing strategy with the product. Otherwise, you need to have a good picture of how the ad creative is going to be like. If it’s a game, That’s how made it to the top initially. Another example of an amazing marketing strategy around a simple app is the current hit: “The floor is lava”. Look at the creative from the geniuses behind it: the marketing strategy needs to be created before anyone writes a single line of code. consider using videos of influencers or random people playing it. Color Switch BuildBox Clear brand + engaging video playing floor is lava at WallmartInfluencer marketing , as companies are “required to ensure that its influencers clearly disclose when they have been compensated in exchange for their endorsements.” And believe me, . Influencers on Instagram began using the #Ad to comply, and that’s why Instagram . Influencer marketing has become somewhat of a buzz word lately, but it’s a very effective way to entice someone’s followers. After all, they’re following the account because its influence makes them tick. Influencer marketing is the grey territory between an ad showcasing a testimonial and a subtle product mention that almost blend in. That’s also exactly what the FTC doesn’t like this is enforced is launching a “paid partnership” now like parody accounts or ones that simply post engaging content. We’ve never worked with celebs, partly because we didn’t have the budget for it, but mainly because these influencers don’t drive instant conversions. Instead, they help you develop the brand image. We normally combined the other two. We would use niche influencers to generate social proof, together with large accounts to help us amplify it. The social network of choice will depend on the audience you are targeting. We used Twitter and Instagram mostly, but you’ll find influencers on all networks. Pinterest influencers are a gold mine for targeting women in their 30s for example. Snapchat and Youtube are well known ways to approach Gen Z, but you’ll be surprised by performance. There are different types of influencers: celebrities, niche influencers, or publishers with a large following Musical.ly’s You’ll need to negotiate with each of them, and they won’t be cheap. We stay profitable by knowing we will get organic downloads after hitting the top charts and trending searches. If the viral loops structure breaks somewhere, we may even lose money. is an influencer marketing agency that will be able to help you with all this effort. However, working with influencers is not simple. Coast9.com Viral loops This is how viral loops works for the App Store, and the process for any of our marketing campaigns: Viral loops for Apps Every marketer will tell you, the only way to understand what the best creative is, is to test with several ones until you see better results. Once you get some results, increase the budget on the better ones. We invest a lot of effort on creatives, trying to . For instance, this was one of the creatives we used to promote the Animately app: As with any marketing channel, the advertising creative plays a key role. make them as relatable as possible for the social media influencer’s following . If you check the account, you wouldn’t have been able to stand following us, as we would have spammed you during 10 days. That stage represents “the big push” on the viral loops model. We used a wallpaper that the audience could easily relate to @animateiy (UPDATE: This account is not active anymore) Ad Spent through time (not exact values) Analyzing the strategy for Animately, you can also see a few phases: First, what I call . During this time we optimized both the creative and the app (wording, captions, etc.), until we found the best performer. This stage involves scheduling a synchronized campaign with all the influencers simultaneously, so the effect is amplified. The key lies in investing most of the budget in only 2 days, preferably Saturday and Sunday if you rely on influencers. “the three T phase” Test, Tweak, Test Then, “The big push.” Engagement and conversion rates during weekends are much higher. The big push combined with an engaging creative seeds the next loop, where users share, comment, and like the creative, generating buzz. The bigger risk here is not being able to get to the next loop. However, we don’t want to spend more budget than what’s needed for it. When doing viral loops for apps, This will bring hundreds of thousands of “organic” views that we’ll try to convert into downloads with an amazing App Store listing. the next loop is triggered when reaching the trending searches and top charts. Two weeks ago, . It doesn’t matter if the revenue made with the app during the first stage doesn’t cover the cost of “the big push.” Believe me, it will work out after reaching the top charts, just make sure to reach them in the first place! Tim Cook announced that 500 million people go to the App Store every week searching for apps . At this point how good the app is doesn’t matter that much (yet,) as long as it’s aligned with an interesting trend and the marketing campaign is good enough (including the App Store listing.) Top 9 was designed for growth. To understand how we got to the next loop, you can read the marketing strategy we used for it here, and also The next loop really depends on the app If your app was designed to encourage organic growth, then reaching the next loop will probably be easy. learn how we got 300,000 users in 24 hours using Coast9. If on the other hand your app wasn’t designed for growth, As you can see on the chart, you’ll need to save an ad budget for the final stage. This stage consists of making efforts to “hang on” to the charts. Even for a while after the trend is starting to drop, there will be new App Store visitors who will see your app and download it. After 2 or 3 days however, this will not be enough to hang on the charts. , perhaps not as big or aggressive as the last one, but just enough to offset the decreasing amount of organic downloads you were having before. That’s why you should progressively increase it until it’s no longer a good tradeoff. the bad news is that viral things don’t last too long. You’ll need another push You could try using native Twitter and Instagram ads, posts of a certain influencer. Make sure to also target friends/followers of that audience. Again, social proof is key. targeting people who have engaged with all the past tweets and Instagram . The opportunity lies in the fact that there aren’t many advertisers on the platform yet, so your bid can be relatively low. With the right targeting/set up, Another secret of the App Store is Search Ads you can get installs for as low as $0.10 (yes, 10 cents.) Does this mean I can easily build “the million dollar app”? [TL;DR] The only way to crush it on the App Store is by building something really amazing. That takes a lot of work, and it’s a very different business model than the one we had with Beta Labs. Read on to discover ASO tricks. Haha. For a second I pictured myself like that when we first reached the top charts. Great feeling. So no, the answer is no. Hell no. This post is meant to be helpful for anyone on that path. Of course there are many highly profitable growth hacks, but none will last too long. The only way to succeed is working really hard every single day of the year, no gimmicks. (though reaching them will certainly enable you to get short term profit out of it.) and wrote the bible for this, . Huge thanks to for it and for all the support so far :) Achieving high retention and organic growth is what will differentiate a HUGE success from just one more app that made it to the top charts and dropped Nir Eyal Ryan Hoover use it Tory Make them search First of all, understand that influencers need content to keep their followers engaged, so if you’ve got something that’s aligned with their content, they’ll be happy for not harming their audience, even more if you . An example of this is our creative with Game Switch. We have an amazing relationship with the owner of the “Dory” account on Twitter, so we were able to get a post for free. Of course we bought the owner a huge gift afterwards, as the account has 1.7M followers, and conversion was amazing. don’t show any link. That’s where the trick lies for ASO and trending search You’ll be able to tell this just by doing a quick search on Instagram. Although don’t look for “Link in bio”. Another way to do it, is by linking directly to the in-app search. Be careful about this, as the algorithm can penalize you. If you’re reading this on an iPhone, check out how it works . Otherwise it will break. We did well with this for Want, although it wasn’t crowded. If you analyze the trending searches on the search tab right now, you’ll notice that there will be at least one app that made it there through Instagram influencers. following this link Want is #1 for the Key Word The reason we made apps a profitable business was mainly because we were able to leverage our influencer network. However, As you can imagine, there many ins and outs about this topic. I recommend you paying for Keyword analysis data on . iOS 11 just rebuilt the App Store app. There are also . Personally, I think the fact that videos will play automatically is key, so if you’re publishing an app, make sure you have a captivating one. ASO is a huge source of acquisition as well. Mobile Action plenty of opportunities for newcomers here Why did we write this? We’re recruiting. The main reason we began writing this post was to be helpful to as many app makers as possible, but we are also looking to work with people who would like to contribute to this huge project. What kinds of profiles? All kind. From all ages and willing to work in San Francisco, Uruguay or remotely. If you feel this post was helpful to you and know someone who may be a good fit, encouraging them to is how you can give back. Developers, marketers, content creators, influencers, advisors or really anyone who’s invested 20 minutes of their life into reading this. contact us Enjoyed this post? Share it! We've come to know a few things about viral loops when working with a younger audience, but this is our first time creating something for people in tech. We believe this content is valuable to your network, and if so please It would mean a lot to us. help us reach the next loop by clicking any of the share buttons. is a new company established in the U.S., so thanks to Stripe for creating , and for all the support from the team on that process. . Subscribe to the or follow on Twitter! Beta Labs Atlas We will share insights on many topics we weren’t able to cover here, like monetization secrets for marketers, tips for developers about our technology stack, and interesting stories in our journey Beta Labs blog here Beta Labs
