On the go towards success in Mobile App marketing

Be creative. Be shameless. Be dedicated. A story of a mobile app start-up and its struggling to go viral whatever it takes. The app is Yolify - The Bucket List, which is a highly social and beautifully designed Android app to inspire yourself and discover goals in your life.

[yolify-blog]

24 Oct 2014 - Betalist aftermath

Still checking the aftereffect of Betalist. 11 sign-ups arrived in the last 2 days from Betalist and two more from somewhere else.

User count: 133

Total cost: $330

[yolify-blog]

28 Oct 2014 - Creative solution! Be shameless!

How many creative approaches are out there waiting for us? I believe every door you open, opens another three ones at least. You just need to find them! Such deep, so wow, oh yeah. Why am I saying this?

In the morning a great thought occurred to us: we have already published apps for Android, let's update them with popping a dialog up when the user intends to quit saying "Hey man, the storm is coming, check out Yolify and join the dark side. NOW!". Maybe expressing another way.

Whatever, the point is that we have an app reaching 1.5 million installs soon, so we decided to implement this lovely dialog into it. Even if 1-2 sign-ups come from this way it would mean another 45-90 early adopters in the next 1.5 months. Wouldn't be bad after the 3 minutes of work.

User count: 162

Total cost: $407

[yolify-blog]

27 Oct 2014 - Second facebook campaign & Twitter

New keywords included: bucket list. Why did we forget about this before is always gonna be a mystery..

The results:

Reach: 17900

Engagements: 35

Total budget: $20.43

Cost per click: $0.58

CTR: 0.19%

Including the keyword "bucket list" worked. If the same amount of sign up occurred it would have costed $5-6 per sign up (instead of $6-8). There is gotta be a way to decrease it more!

We also tried Twitter campaigns today.

Impressions: 12,634

Engagements: 27

Total budget: $16.90

Cost per click: $0.63

CTR: 0.21%

Looks even better but we have a strange feeling after receiving 3 sign-ups and one of them had a seemingly unreal e-mail address.

Let's think in large-scale. We spend ~60$ in the last 2 days, but we screwed up the settings of adwords somehow and we cannot determine the number of sign-ups coming exclusively from these ads. I would say 7-10 sing-ups arrived, which would mean spending $1k would bring 110-160 early adopters (or more with better keywords). With a low-budget financial plan we cannot afford it, but we will test it later for sure (for instance targeting people who have seen the move Bucket List etc).    

User count: 157

Total cost: $407

[yolify-blog]

26 Oct 2014 - First facebook campaign

Ahoy! We launched a targeted facebook campaign today setting the demography to 15-20 years old people living in the United States with interests as “android apps”, “travel”, “adventure” and “challenge”. This is how our ad looked like:

The results:

Time: 48 hours

Reach: 21582

Engagements: 34

Total budget: $25.41

Cost per click: $0.75

CTR: 0.15%

We are not sure how many sign-ups received from this campaign, but somewhere around 3-4 is a fairly good estimation, which would mean that one sign-up costed around 6-8 dollars. The pattern however, is really small, determining how our campaign performed wouldn't mean anything. Let's keep this option for later with different keywords.

Meanwhile we tried another fiverr seller just for fun. She had 315,000 followers. You gotta be kidding me. Also emphasized that she had REAL followers who would retweet our content blabla.. We got 113 retweets, with around zero sign-up. For $5 it was rather a validation that keeping us away from fiverr as far as possible is one really great idea. 

User count: 150

Total cost: $370

[yolify-blog]

25 Oct 2014 - Good Ol' Fiverr

In nutshell: we paid a guy on fiverr $10 to promote our website on his Facebook and Twitter page. 

https://www.fiverr.com/fb_dami/promote-your-link-for-1500000-facebook-members

Its funny how he promises that customers get hundreds of clicks after he posts your content on Facebook and Twitter. My million dollar question would be: who would follow someone posting whatever shit he is paid for? And the other question: why does his page have tens of thousands of likes and followers then?

It is known that advertising on Facebook - clearly for likes - is cheap, we tried it before with our previous start-up to see it with our own eyes and it is ridiculous: people coming from Egypt, India, The Philippines showed ZERO engagement. And 99% of our likes came from those places. Totally worth it.

So business of the decade: create a Facebook page and with a Fiverr service, buy 10k likes and present your customer's content to 10 thousands sweet and smiling robots.

User count: 140

Total cost: $340

[yolify-blog]

22 Oct 2014 - Pure statistics

We didn't want to use up our next advertising idea, so we could get a clear picture on the effect of Betalist and Reddit. We are also monitoring the people who shares Yolify to have a chance to win the Samsung tablet and we started to have users who had been registered via another user's referral code.

User count: 120

Total cost: $330

[yolify-blog]

21 Oct 2014 - The power of Reddit

I personally never read anything on Reddit before, but we were aware of its awesomeness. Targeting people is easy here, let's find the specific subreddit and spam tell them about your service. There are 150 million visitors per month, so we will surely find some people who would be happily interested in an upcoming bucket list app for Android.

We had a fairly virgin account with 2 karma points (karma is given after posts, comments but only if you get upvoted!) and we were completely stupid as hell regarding how reddit works. So what does Mr. Moron do? Let's make some topics for our awesome app and wait for redemption. 

In your face! We don't have enough karma to post wherever we want to: we can post into subreddits with an average of 10 people present hooray, but we are not able with 1000 people present. 

So this topic was born:

http://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/2joosj/working_on_a_bucket_list_app/

We got 1 comment - which was really useful anyway - and according to Google Analytics 7 people visited our website from Reddit. Counting with one sing up, it would be 14% CTR \0/. This means obviously nothing.

We relentlessly started to post funny interesting edifying random content just to have some karma so we will able to post into bigger subreddits later. 

User count: 116

Total cost: $330

[yolify-blog]

19 Oct 2014 - Betalist, is it worth it? First numbers.

Paying $79 for Betalist was always on our bucket list. Uhm, occupational hazard, I mean in our financial plan (yes, we have one). 

In a while we received an e-mail from them that they review that start-up and they scheduled to post it in 24 hours. 2 hours later we were featured on Betalist!

But the behavior was odd as hell. We quickly received a bunch of e-mails, but I am sure you will also notice the oddity in the dates.

10/20/2014 14:15

10/20/2014 14:17

10/20/2014 14:18

10/20/2014 14:19

10/20/2014 14:20

10/20/2014 14:21

10/20/2014 14:25

10/20/2014 14:27

10/20/2014 14:28

10/20/2014 14:28

10/20/2014 14:29

10/20/2014 14:34

10/20/2014 14:38

10/20/2014 14:40

10/20/2014 14:42

....

So either this webpage was worth very well, or some tiny little cute robots are partying on Betalist servers 24/7. Why am I saying this? In the first 24 hours we received 80 sign-ups, today on 20 Oct we received around 8-9 coming from Betalist.

However, this quite odd behavior can be explained: our start-up was on the front site of Betalist for around 24 hours, afterwards new ones took our places and we fell out from the front site. This can easily be the scenario if most of the returning visitors on this site check the front page with the latest start-ups and make up their minds immediately if they are interested or not but never check back for previous start-ups. 

Whatever happened, we are happy about the results. Until we discovered another thought-provoking thing. Betailst offers another service, they tweet your serice on their Twitter. Watch the number of retweets:

Is it coming with their service that always approximately the same amount of retweets occur? Of course it can be only the part of the service. What do you think?

And was it worth it? We exactly know the e-mail addresses of the people who signed up via Betalist. We will know more when we publish the app in December.

User count: 112

Total cost: $330

[yolify-blog]

16 Oct 2014 - Friends like it. Friends like the tablet. Friends want the tablet.

They might be biased but their impression is also important. We already presented them the idea months ago and they were really into it, now they had the chance to see the site. Most important was their opinion if the site explains well what our product is about although we were aware that they couldn't judge objectively. 

They liked it. And they want the tablet also. Who would have thought it? So get your sorry ass on facebook and share it! Good attitude isn't it?

Now let's check out Betalist!

User count: 23 

Total cost: $250

[yolify-blog]

14 Oct 2014 - Win a Samsung Galaxy tablet!

So the idea we implemented today is quite straightforward: you sign up, you receive a referral code and if 5 people sign up using that referral code you become eligible for winning the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4. 

This is a win-win situation: we will surely have a low number of "entrants" (with respect to other promotion giveaways) and smart people will notice this making their willingness for sharing our content stronger. On the other hand this can start the exponential growth with the help of social media.

The winner will be chosen randomly on the day of publish (in around 2 months). It means the more we spread our product in the next 2 months the more this investment (~250$ with shipping) returns.

But it's not all. We decided to play around psychology a bit: whoever signs up will receive a special goal that can only be completed until the day of publish. We believe this will make one feel as using the app right now and will share yolify with less hesitation. 

User count: 0

Total cost: $250

[yolify-blog]

13 Oct 2014 - Considering our budget

I don't think I have ever mentioned what budget we are on. I might need to tell you, that one of the most important reason I started this blog is that we have already failed a start-up half a year ago. We spent around 1.5 year of work and thousands of dollars for marketing than quickly abandoned the project 1 month after going public! 

Sounds bad huh? Sounds like an epic fail? Nope. It would only sound like an epic fail if we hadn't learnt from our mistakes, just like Einstein said:

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

I don't even know precisely (maybe better) how much money we spent for stupid, absolutely ineffective advertising platforms, but I remember the devilish feeling "I wanna try this ad platform, sell more and more and buy a 65' mustang later..." and not thinking over what I really expect from them.

The point is that I don't consider any cent wasted money. We have learnt a lot and the feeling of a failed start-up along with a lot of money makes us think smarter and use our budget on more reasonable ad platforms this time.

Tomorrow I would like to show you the first example we came up with. 

[yolify-blog]

Yolify: The Bucket List app on Android

A mobile app to track and find your life goals on the go. This is what we achieved in less than 10 days of planning, designing, developing and publishing. 

And some really good idea for spicing it up a bit has just crossed our minds! Details tomorrow.

[yolify-blog]

11 Oct 2014 - Landing page done

To advertise our awesome mobile app even before publishing we need a landing page where people can see what Yolify exactly is. We have checked dozens of landing pages to see how professionals do it, but we also had to keep in mind that we didn't have weeks for building a website.

We need to have as many early users as possible before middle of December (publishing time) so we had to be fast, efficient, minimalist but at the same time we needed a persuasive website communicating our product clearly and unambiguously for our future customers. Stay tuned for the result, we post it soon!

[yolify-blog]

End of summer - promotion becomes the challenge

Four months passed and we developed the application whenever we found time for it during the summer. It became clear that we had the competency to develop every feature we need, so a deadline has been set out till we need to finish the app along with testing it inside out. 

2nd or 3rd week of December. Which means we have 3 months to elaborate a perfectly working marketing strategy to rule the world with and spread Yolify for all the 7 billions human being on Earth until 2016.

Uhm, sorry.. got unreasonably excited for a moment. 

The interesting part of the blog will come from here. We will definitely try forums, blogs, articles, social media ads, press and other uniquely creative solutions that will make us sell our soul to help selling our product as well. Whoa maan, it was deep!

Let's get to it!

[yolify-blog]

Yolify: The Bucket List app for mobile

So what is exactly our application that we want to change the world with? Its called: Yolify - The Bucket List. If you've seen the Bucket List movie starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, it is a list of things that one has not done before but wants to do before dying. 

The Google Play lacks of an app like this. There are some, but those ones either have ugly design, or misses the social functions, or it's only a bucket list for yourself etc.. Our one is expected to be amazing, the design is already simple but fascinating and we have features in our basket that everyone will love to use! (rule no. 1: believe in your product! )

On the other hand we do not forget about the power of MVP (minimal viable product), we will not implement most of those amazing features as we firstly would like to validate our product and see if the whole development is worth it or not. 

Here's a snapshot of the splash screen:

[yolify-blog]

So what is this blog about?

Once somewhere I read: "Finishing your app is only 50% of the work, the other 50% is marketing it". I would like to take the liberty and refine the statement like

"Finishing your app is 5% of the work, the other 95% is working your ass off on spreading it".

Recently with bazillions of apps in the app stores this has been quite a challenge which can only be overcome with a creative, shameless and dedicated attitude. And this blog is all about spreading an upcoming Android application, the challenges, the struggling, the ups and downs and - hopefully - the achieved success.

Let's roll!