“There’s a lot of competition” — I’ve heard it probably hundreds of times from many different people. The truth is they are right, there are over a million apps on Apple’s App Store alone. Many of which are produced by professional development shops, with considerably more time, programming talent, and money to spend on their apps than any independent developer could possibly muster. A big company can afford to spend thousands of dollars promoting their app to the top of the charts and there is simply no way to compete with that if you are an individual developer or a budget constrained startup. So why do I think we still stand a chance?

Lets compare the App Store to the entire Internet for a moment.

Saying you are competing with a million apps is like saying your new blog or website is competing with all of the 1 billion websites currently in existence. It’s just not true. Just as not everyone is your customer, not everyone is your competitor. When you go into business, you aren’t competing with every single other business on the planet and when you make an app, you aren’t competing with every app in the store. If you make a web app and launch it in two weeks without promoting it, you will get exactly zero visitors. This same (awful, lack of) marketing strategy applied to the app store will yield approximately 30 downloads a day for a brief period. The app store really helps get content out there, and while there is always “an app for that,” even in a billion dollar industry, there will only be about 5–10 real competitors. I developed an app “Reframe” over a period of about 6 months with two other friends; beautiful design and great App Screenshots, combined with the uniqueness of our app and a little App Store Optimization (ASO) got us to the top three glasses apps in the store.

We were right beneath Glasses.com, an app that cost over a million dollars to develop, that had ad’s on tv promoting it and our marketing budget was less than $300/month.

Once we gave up on the idea, because it wasn’t making any money and we couldn’t afford to keep running it, we just left it to sit there. The miraculous thing is the downloads continued. We still get about 1,200 downloads per month. I just looked it up, we are still the #3 result when you search for Glasses, not bad!

The reality is that the vast majority of the million or so apps are no longer updated, not in the same category as your app, or not effectively positioned with ASO (app store optimization) or their screenshots are awful or they were built for the iPhone 3Gs and only sort of work now. My suspicion is that Apple leaves a lot of the useless, abandoned content in the store because they enjoy the vanity metric of “A million Apps” and want to keep up with the number of apps in the Google Play Store.

There is another theme that commonly shows up when talking about the App Store, and casual onlookers always miss it.

Most people do not market their apps.

Individual developers are likely to spend nearly all of their time and money developing an app. We spend six months of our life or more developing what we hope is a brilliant new invention, and finally, it works! In all the excitement we forget that our job doesn’t end there. It doesn’t make any sense the first few times to keep a functional, even useful app out of the hands of potentially eager consumers. We upload it to the app store and exclaim “Oh no I need a screenshot?” after hastily snapping a few photos from their app they upload them and are done with it.

Two weeks later: “Overnight 30 people downloaded the app? That’s fantastic, I didn’t even tell my friends about it!” — it was my first app and I was excited, but a week later downloads dropped off to about 5 per day. Even worse, it shortly fell to zero for several weeks. Apple gives you a nice boost in the beginning, but it’s critical that you carry that momentum further.

“Just get it out there and see what happens” isn’t a successful approach anymore. Fortunately for those who are willing to do a little research, a LOT of developers take this approach, and it doesn’t take much to beat them in an App Store search.

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My new app Wink doesn’t have a marketing budget, but I’ve launched a few of these things and each time I learn a lot and get much better at it. While this is not a marketing guide, below is my (very long and untested) marketing checklist.

  • Write A Medium Article ; )
  • Create 5 high-quality and descriptive screenshots at every device resolution with the best one first
Funny, high-quality Screenshots can go a long way. The app also automatically takes pictures like this one at the exact moment the user crashes (looses the game). Since they have to control the game with their face, and they are trying to avoid a wall when they lose, these screenshots are almost always ridiculous and laugh inducing.
  • Create a screencast video preview for the App Store — Resizing videos for the uncommon phone resolutions is a pain, check out the link at the bottom for the tools I used to simplify it.
  • Create a demo video for youtube
  • Do everything humanly possible to get featured on Product Hunt
  • Submit the app to BetaList before launch.
  • Get custom business cards and attempt to hand out as many as possible at each of several local tech events — Include a call to action to download the app on those business cards
  • The Collision Install (Coined by a Y-Combinator team I read about on Paul Graham’s blog) the Collision Install simply means, whenever you talk to someone about the app, if they seem remotely interested, insist they download it on the spot. In person promotion in this manner is insanely effective and not very expensive if you talk to a lot of people. If you are passionate about your app, people will talk to their friends about it, which means you get multiple downloads each time you do this.
  • Submit to as many app review/promo sites as you can
  • Create a Press Kit
  • Leverage contacts, talk to people who have done it before, study success stories of other similar apps
  • Advertise in the Craigslist Free section (why not? Worth a try, the app is free)
  • SnapChat a screencast to all my friends
  • Localize to other countries ASAP (Many countries including the US, won’t download an app that isn’t in their language. Mercifully a lot of people know English, but it will never have the same impact as an app in someone’s native language)
  • Pester friends for 5 star reviews — This isn’t dishonest, if they don’t like it don’t ask them. But it’s very important that you get people who like the app to review it positively because it effects your rankings dramatically. If people don’t actually like it, then your problems can’t be solved by marketing.
  • Create a Facebook group and make a competition for the most bizarre or ugly crash-cam video
  • Prompt people to rate the app after they have smiled more than 100 times (this is trivial since my app revolves around face detection)
  • A leaderboard in the app using Game Center. (A little competition goes a long way)
  • Post on famous app reviewers’ YouTube channels
  • Over the shoulder UX testing (The only way to tell if your app frustrates people or is well designed is to watch them use it)
  • Use writing for Medium and PR and adapt it to post on Hacker News, Quora, Reddit, Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Tweet to people who you think are interested using twitter advanced search and FollowerWonk by Moz
  • Launch on a Tuesday ( Apparently Tuesday is the best day because downloads peak on the weekends and people are engaged in work on a Monday, you want to build up hype for as much of the week as possible, but Mondays can loose you momentum)
  • This also works great for me because the local Orange County iOS Meetup falls on a Tuesday and demoing the app there could give me a nice head start.

Games are the most brutally competitive category in the App Store, however my hope is through its sheer uniqueness and hopefully decent marketing, Wink will be a hit.

**Update: Since writing this article, my opinion of what is necessary to market an app has changed a little. I wrote this about 2 weeks before I was planning on launching and came across a post that said “two weeks before launch is not the time to start marketing” -uh oh that’s me.

If you’ve been around startups lately, you might have heard of growth hacking. Many people write this off because it is a buzzword, and it’s kind of hard to pin down exactly what it means.

I’ve since researched growth hacking quite a lot and the take away is that you need to integrate your marketing strategy into the product itself. You also need to measure the effectiveness of your different marketing strategies so that you can scientifically eliminate the ones that are a waste of time while redoubling your focus on what is working.

Fortunately I’ve already done a little bit of this with the sharable “Crash-cam” feature I added, but I realize I need to do more. These are on my urgent to do list:

  • Adding in Achievements to the game to encourage competition between users
  • Tag the images shared from Wink with the URL for the game
  • Offer ad-free time to those who tap ad free, without demanding tweets or Facebook likes in exchange (which is now against the app store policies), rather I will politely say “Enjoy 100 games ad free on the house. Please tell your friends about Wink!”
  • I left out the smiling triggering a prompt for feedback in the first version but I feel like that was a mistake, so I am working as fast as I can to add it in
  • I made a subtle change to the UI so that instead of “Share” the crash screen says “Save” — Hopefully people will go to save the photo and then share it later or just share it straight from the app
  • I’m adding in an about screen to engage with users on a more personal level, get them interested on some of the other things I’m working on, and also give them an outlet other than the App Store for any negative feedback they may have.

If I did one thing right, I hope I succeeded in creating an app that makes people laugh. People hate posting things to Facebook, and people can’t stand getting invited to play things on Facebook, but if it makes them laugh, they’ll talk about it in real life, and they’ll hand their phone to their friend to look at it and try it out. While that may not be directly trackable or practical to test, it is the only way most people will ever hear about it or use it.

I always despise submitting to the app store because I’m not a designer, the variably sized screenshots, app icons and videos are such a pain to produce but these 5 tools really helped this time, I have no affiliation with them, but if you are submitting an app these will save you HOURS: http://www.producthunt.com/@forddavis/collections/app-store-submission-toolkit

Also please check out my new app Wink — the first iPhone game you control with your face — on Winkinggame.com ;)