Launching Fortune
It was a day months in the making, the day that all the maybes and what ifs are decided — launch day.
It's exciting showing people something you have been working on for months. You are mostly hoping for something to take off and have your product find the right people instantly. This is quite far from reality.
Since this was the first paid application built by us, we took our time when it came to launch day strategy.
At first we thought we would hit the usual suspects:
- Hacker News - Reddit (Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Litecoin) - Twitter
This is usually good for a burst of traffic from interested consumers in the community and get the word out on your product. Alas they do very little for longevity of sales and a long term marketing strategy. You need to capture hearts and minds, more on this in another blog post!
That being said, we looked at our other options:
- Product Hunt. - Cryptocurrency Blogs. - Tech Blogs. - iPhone App Review Sites.
We reached out to all parties letting them know what we were building and how we would appeal to their respective audiences. I did my research when it came to contacting the right journalists considering our space (cryptocurrency) and platform (iOS).
Some of the responses were truly bizarre but definitely a great learning experience for us! We were fortunate (yes, I just said that.) enough to hear back from Lifehacker though!
Check out the email that landed us the spot!
We were super excited.
Launch Day Coordination
So as you all may not know, there is a review process for these applications. This is where Apple reviews application for standards and makes sure your application actually does what it says it will. Luckily, I have been reaching out to journalist since before the application was fully submitted for review. Plan ahead because journalists get a lot of email and are slow to respond because of it.
Coordinating all your launch day hype is crucial so wait for your application to come out of review and set the date of release sometime in the future (you can always change it back). This allows you time to get your ducks in a row and coordinate with your contacts.
Alright application is out of review, and we have a few people who want to share it with their readers.
Launch day is a go!
Launch Day Traffic
This by far the most interesting aspect of the launch. We shared the application with as many people as possible, while engaging with as many users as possible.
Here it goes.
I am happy to announce the release of @getfortuneapp Cryptocurrency tracking for iPhone -- http://t.co/uRnXFv1LyC
— Mahdi Yusuf (@myusuf3)
July 15, 2014
Here is a breakdown after the first week.
Here is a breakdown after the first month.
Some quick observations. As you can see Hacker News provided the biggest boost of traffic, but dropped off a cliff once we weren't on the homepage anymore. Product Hunt on the other hand followed a more gentle drop off. But later in the month we were featured again, as one of the most popular cryptocurrency applications.
This also caused us to be featured at CoinTelegraph as well! Very humbling!
pretty awesome, if you google cryptocurrencies. I was double checking my spelling and bam. pic.twitter.com/X4nnusaZL5
— Mahdi Yusuf (@myusuf3)
July 15, 2014
4th most downloaded app in finance in canada! http://t.co/0x75xJDQ62 #bitcoin #dogecoin pic.twitter.com/1IBMajQKdU
— Fortune (@getfortuneapp)
July 15, 2014
We actually ended up reaching Number 1 and 2 in Finance in Canada and United States respectively!
We have been employing a strategy to grow through subreddits of various coins and cryptocurrencies and picking up customers in that manner. We will go through how we do that in our next blog post!
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