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How I went from financial App failure to finding success on the App Store

RJ the first

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I'm sure you know Chad Mureta -- he's offers a premium course that I'd definitely invest in if you're 100% ready to put your money where your mouth is. I'm pretty sure it's not cheap. https://appempire.com/class-session/

I've signed up to be notified of the next App Empire session, but so far they haven't scheduled any new ones. I have taken Carter Thomas's App Formula course http://www.bluecloudsolutions.com/courses/ and am in his and Muoyo Okome's facebook 'mastermind' groups. At this point I don't think I'd benefit that much from a new App Empire session after all of the research I've done. I'm on a weekly Google Hangouts based Q&A Webinar with Carter Thomas and have the ability to ask him questions about the business, it's been really helpful.

Yeah as you can tell from the progress thread I'm about 5 apps into creating my 'portfolio'. I'm stuck at low downloads for most of my apps, this latest one I discovered that the reason for low downloads is that I am 'blocked' from being ranked for a specific long tail keyword - which I found out later is trademarked.
So far profits have been negligible, I'm just trying to learn as much as I can at this time, I'm hoping somewhere down the line something clicks, all of this learning starts to pay off, and I start to make money. It seems I learn something new with every app I put out, but so far that has not translated into revenue.

I skimmed through your progress thread. It seems you're really serious about the "Massive app portfolio" strategy so I'll offer what advice I can - I would 100% focus on building niche apps that have less chance for massive explosions of popularity but higher chance for general success. The more specific you can define the problem the better.

So I had questions about your advice. I know there are two schools of thought about app business models:

1. Create a massive app portfolio of dozens of apps, optimize for trending keywords and subject matter, and promote your app as much as you can with a limited budget per app. Hopefully at least some of your apps wind up generating pretty good organic downloads and revenue from ads.

or

2. Spend a lot of time researching a niche, do things like review mining to identify features that are missing from competition - and then create a best in class, custom app that specifically solves that problem. On Okome's Daily Spark podcast, Tasnim Ahmed talked about how he went from riding the reskinning apps bandwagon - to focusing on one app and building a business around updating that app and listening to suggestions from users for new features. He was able to build Color Pop Effects to an app that makes close to 100k a month.

I'm following the 1st model and your advice assumes I'm following the 2nd model. I'm not making apps that solve problems like 'how do I make a collage of pictures for my Instagram', or 'how do I use my phone as a pdf scanner'. I tend to make funny photo apps and games, keyboard emojis, things of that nature. The reason why is - I tend to reuse code, I reskin my own apps and use templates sometimes - this is to minimize development time so I can get more apps out there hoping one will hit. I don't know how to translate 'the more specific you define the problem the better' - to the world of reskinning games and funny emoji apps. I hear what you are saying, though, business model 2 has more chance for sustained profits, and seems less of a 'crapshoot'. Due to my budget and time constraints however, I'm not able to pay a team of full time developers to create a custom app from scratch that will be best in class and solve a specific problem.

How would you adapt this advice to someone reskinning apps to build a massive portfolio like me?
 
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Rcaraway1989

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I'm following the 1st model and your advice assumes I'm following the 2nd model. I'm not making apps that solve problems like 'how do I make a collage of pictures for my Instagram', or 'how do I use my phone as a pdf scanner'. I tend to make funny photo apps and games, keyboard emojis, things of that nature. The reason why is - I tend to reuse code, I reskin my own apps and use templates sometimes - this is to minimize development time so I can get more apps out there hoping one will hit. I don't know how to translate 'the more specific you define the problem the better' - to the world of reskinning games and funny emoji apps. I hear what you are saying, though, business model 2 has more chance for sustained profits, and seems less of a 'crapshoot'. Due to my budget and time constraints however, I'm not able to pay a team of full time developers to create a custom app from scratch that will be best in class and solve a specific problem.

Ah that's fine. You're playing the VC strategy game (invest in lots knowing 1 home run pays for everything). My personality favors the 2nd model, where I've learned most of my strategy from web entrepreneurs and the startup world (lean startup, Steve Blank, Ash Maurya, etc).

My biggest concern with what you're doing is search and promotion -- what is your process for targeting keywords for your apps? What channels can users find your apps through?
 

loop101

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So I have to ask for your opinion, as this is a subject I've been doing a lot of thinking on lately.

I've been reading a lot of blogposts and such about the odds of making money by starting a mobile app business

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-worth-it-to-enter-the-mobile-apps-business-now-Is-it-too-late
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possibl...er-to-make-a-living-off-the-App-Store-in-2016
http://dazeend.org/2015/01/the-shape-of-the-app-store/
http://readwrite.com/2015/07/20/indie-app-developers-success-enterprise-the-man/
https://tyler.io/a-candid-look-at-the-financial-side-of-building-mac-apps-on-your-own/

There's tons more like this that seem to suggest it's harder these days to make money as an indie developer on the App Store - as there's more competition and most of the money goes to apps made by large companies with huge teams of developers and huge marketing budgets.

This is discouraging to me as my fastlane plan, initially, was to start my own mobile development business to 1. develop my own app ideas and sell them on the app store or 2. use my apps as a sort of 'portfolio' I can use to solicit contracting work making mobile apps for small businesses.
https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/software-dev-in-chicago.70118/

I have been hard at work on my first set of apps, they are almost ready to go. But I put a lot of work into them and once they're launched I then have to start marketing them. I may not make much money back, as my monetization strategy is a 'freemium' model with in app advertising.

I even talked to a 'business coach' - a certain well known startup blogger who I hired for coaching several days ago. He told me that the monetization you get from apps is not worth the time that you put into making them and marketing them. He advised me to look into other businesses like affiliate marketing and posting online learning courses.

All of a sudden my passionate idea to start my own mobile app dev business does not seem like a wise investment at all, given the effort vs the potential reward. It also doesn't seem very 'fastlane' to be taking a road that everyone seems to be taking, and with very uncertain chances of success.

Do you still believe in 2016 it's worth it to get into the app business? given my goal is financial freedom. Right now I'm sort of weighing if it's worth it to push through with my mobile app dev business plan, or if I would be better off trying to think of another plan at this time. I'm still committed to getting my first set of apps in the app store - but I'm not expecting them to turn over much money - as I basically did them as a learning experience, and did not do much market research before starting. I was planning to really focus on the marketing and them refine my approach with my next set of apps.

Any comments on this are appreciated. Thanks!

If you want to make a living as an app developer, I would suggest listening to the "Under The Radar" podcast by Marco Arment and David Smith. Also listen to old broadcasts of David Smith's "Developing Perspective" podcast. They have been doing it for a while, using different approaches. Marco works on a single app, while David tries lots of app ideas.

https://marco.org/2016/09/09/overcast-ads

http://developingperspective.com/

Marco was the guy who wrote the first iOS ad-blocker, had a ton of sales for a few days, then withdrew it and refunded everyone's money because it made him feel bad.

https://marco.org/2015/09/18/just-doesnt-feel-good

David was the guy who had a fairly popular RSS reader app and benefited greatly when Google unexpectedly cancelled their Gooogle Reader app.
 
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RJ the first

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Ah that's fine. You're playing the VC strategy game (invest in lots knowing 1 home run pays for everything). My personality favors the 2nd model, where I've learned most of my strategy from web entrepreneurs and the startup world (lean startup, Steve Blank, Ash Maurya, etc).

My biggest concern with what you're doing is search and promotion -- what is your process for targeting keywords for your apps? What channels can users find your apps through?


My process for targeting keywords is:
-I pick the top 10 competitors for my app
-I collect all of their keywords from App Annie, and I put them into a spreadsheet, I wind up with about 100 or so keywords
-While I'm gathering competitor keywords, I think of my own and add them to the list
-In my spreadsheet I also record difficulty and traffic for each keyword - my spreadsheets wind up looking like this -- http://prntscr.com/d8ey15
-I sort my spreadsheet by difficulty, then use sensor tower keyword suggestion and optimization tools tools to narrow down my list of keywords from my spreadsheet by - relevance, difficulty, traffic

My users can find my apps through Apple App Store search. I have not explored doing stuff like -
-targeted Facebook ads for mobile, manually promoting my app in forums and FB groups, cross promotion through Blog/Twitter/Youtube influencers. I haven't even tried localizing my ASO in other languages.

I basically release an app, maybe I'm lucky if it gets 40-50 downloads a day after several weeks, and several attempts to tweak the keywords and ASO. At that point I think that my downloads are so low - so my idea must be flawed - so why bother with doing further promotion or ASO optimizations. With the last app I really meant to follow through with promotion via FB ads for mobile and promoting it on FB groups. But I ran out of money, and have to wait on this for a while.
 
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toxicrain

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Ah that's fine. You're playing the VC strategy game (invest in lots knowing 1 home run pays for everything). My personality favors the 2nd model, where I've learned most of my strategy from web entrepreneurs and the startup world (lean startup, Steve Blank, Ash Maurya, etc).

My biggest concern with what you're doing is search and promotion -- what is your process for targeting keywords for your apps? What channels can users find your apps through?

thanks for creating this thread. i am an app dev myself, started in 2009 when first android phone came out. I wanted to ask you, can you dive in into YOUR process of search and promotion? what tools do you use specifically, besides quickmvp of course, and any of those research tools accurate when it comes to rev estimates for competitor apps?
 

Rcaraway1989

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My process for targeting keywords is:
-I pick the top 10 competitors for my app
-I collect all of their keywords from App Annie, and I put them into a spreadsheet, I wind up with about 100 or so keywords
-While I'm gathering competitor keywords, I think of my own and add them to the list
-In my spreadsheet I also record difficulty and traffic for each keyword - my spreadsheets wind up looking like this -- http://prntscr.com/d8ey15
-I sort my spreadsheet by difficulty, then use sensor tower keyword suggestion and optimization tools tools to narrow down my list of keywords from my spreadsheet by - relevance, difficulty, traffic

My users can find my apps through Apple App Store search. I have not explored doing stuff like -
-targeted Facebook ads for mobile, manually promoting my app in forums and FB groups, cross promotion through Blog/Twitter/Youtube influencers. I haven't even tried localizing my ASO in other languages.

I basically release an app, maybe I'm lucky if it gets 40-50 downloads a day after several weeks, and several attempts to tweak the keywords and ASO. At that point I think that my downloads are so low - so my idea must be flawed - so why bother with doing further promotion or ASO optimizations. With the last app I really meant to follow through with promotion via FB ads for mobile and promoting it on FB groups. But I ran out of money, and have to wait on this for a while.


Maybe I could help you if you can show me a specific app? Why not PM me with an app, the amt of downloads it got and its competition and I can give you a bit of advice on what you could improve moving forward.
 

hatzil

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I decided to outsource. with all the respect to my research, I'm not a tech guy and this is my first business. I need help to plan the best solution for my app; these are some of my roadblocks:

-should I go hybrid or native app
-what services best fit my app? (e.g. BaaS such as google Firebase or AWS? OR other?).
-if I want to hire a backend developer do I need to hire a front-end developer first?

My question is:
Is it possible to outsource the entire technical planning of my app?(services, programming languages, skills needed for long-term reliability, cost-effective, etc - ) to someone who knows's what he's doing that I can sign him an NDA upfront? -without hiring a developer and hoping for the best?

THANK YOU. :)
 
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Rcaraway1989

Rob C
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I decided to outsource. with all the respect to my research, I'm not a tech guy and this is my first business. I need help to plan the best solution for my app; these are some of my roadblocks:

-should I go hybrid or native app
-what services best fit my app? (e.g. BaaS such as google Firebase or AWS? OR other?).
-if I want to hire a backend developer do I need to hire a front-end developer first?

My question is:
Is it possible to outsource the entire technical planning of my app?(services, programming languages, skills needed for long-term reliability, cost-effective, etc - ) to someone who knows's what he's doing that I can sign him an NDA upfront? -without hiring a developer and hoping for the best?

THANK YOU. :)

native.
Firebase.
Firebase allows you to do all in one.
Are you new to outsourcing? Make sure you know enough about each subject before you hire others. Or you won't know what a "good job" looks like.

Since you are outsourcing, read App Empire by Chad mureta if you haven't yet. The only thing I'll add to it, since its kind of a dated book, is that if you want success, get ready to fail for awhile and the money you put into your business will be a sunk cost for awhile. There's nothing "get rich quick" about this way, but its still entirely doable.
 

jarvisdiego

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Thanks for all the info everyone has shared :D

I have a quick question
How much would you pay someone to develop an app for you? What is the price range?

Thank you in advance ;)

L
 

Rcaraway1989

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Thanks for all the info everyone has shared :D

I have a quick question
How much would you pay someone to develop an app for you? What is the price range?

Thank you in advance ;)

L

This is way too vague of a question to answer with any real substance
 
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toxicrain

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This is way too vague of a question to answer with any real substance

I wanted to ask you, can you dive in into YOUR process of search and promotion? what tools do you use specifically, besides quickmvp of course, and any of those research tools accurate when it comes to rev estimates for competitor apps?
 

Rcaraway1989

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I wanted to ask you, can you dive in into YOUR process of search and promotion? what tools do you use specifically, besides quickmvp of course, and any of those research tools accurate when it comes to rev estimates for competitor apps?

This is still a very vague question because search and promotion is 100% variable based on the idea you are working on and the mobile strategy approach you are taking.

One thing I can say is that I will often use App Annie's top charts, go through different categories and rank by top 500, and find apps that are trending but the market appears to be undervaluing (meaning their aren't a lot of competitors & the apps that exist seem crappy). However, I do this for fun mostly -- I don't personally like working on mobile companies that use this strategy.

If I want to find out how well an app is doing (because I like to work with big names/startups and help them grow faster), I will Google "[App name] Sensortower". This gives downloads per month estimates, which can help me figure out whether a business is legit or is all hype.
 
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Young-Gun

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Just wanted to say thanks to @Rcaraway1989 for this thread.

Great examples and breakdown of how Lean Startup methods can be applied to solo entrepreneurs.

And, nice comparison of the "Venture Capital" model (try 10 times, look for 1 home run) vs the "Silicon Valley founder" model (validate before building, do MVP and quick pivots to hit a solid triple in a reasonable amount of time)

I'm working on my SaaS startup right now, starting as someone who doesn't know how to program at all.
So, there's a lot of risk that I could waste time and money... but I'm doing everything I can to prevent that.
As a 2nd-time entrepeneur, I agree 100% with the "Validate BEFORE Build" method.

I know for myself, my first business has taught me: I'm no longer trying to "THINK of my great business idea."
I'm trying to research a widespread NEED that already exists in the market.
Then I'll build to solve that problem.
But, proving the NEED comes first.

Thanks again for all the great info, I read every post!
 

Rcaraway1989

Rob C
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Just wanted to say thanks to @Rcaraway1989 for this thread.

Great examples and breakdown of how Lean Startup methods can be applied to solo entrepreneurs.

And, nice comparison of the "Venture Capital" model (try 10 times, look for 1 home run) vs the "Silicon Valley founder" model (validate before building, do MVP and quick pivots to hit a solid triple in a reasonable amount of time)

I'm working on my SaaS startup right now, starting as someone who doesn't know how to program at all.
So, there's a lot of risk that I could waste time and money... but I'm doing everything I can to prevent that.
As a 2nd-time entrepeneur, I agree 100% with the "Validate BEFORE Build" method.

I know for myself, my first business has taught me: I'm no longer trying to "THINK of my great business idea."
I'm trying to research a widespread NEED that already exists in the market.
Then I'll build to solve that problem.
But, proving the NEED comes first.

Thanks again for all the great info, I read every post!

Good on you for thinking lean. Lean Startup processes are the way to approach ANY project: even if I were doing work for a large company.
 

coder_for_life22

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Yes. And yes, before I made the app, I posted on Reddit to see if anyone thought the idea was good.

Hey, where did you post on reddit?

I found this thread gold. I have been coding for about 6 years and released about 10 games so far.

The first 4 or 5 games were mainly experiments and were done back in 2012-2014 right before I graduated highschool.

My 7th game actually did pretty well. Clearing about $500 per month but King.com flagged my game for copywrite infringement even though my game was not even a match three style game. I think this is the time when there were 1000's of clones being published and king.com went on a rampage.

Long story short, that app was removed. I eventually went on to build more little games here and there but nothing that I ever intended to do well with. I mainly did those out of my love for building games and also to become better at coding(I now study computer science).

I took a break from developing apps for a while and began to coach people through the process of building their own games and coding. I also coached them through publishing and the process of ASO, etc.

This made a nice amount of money but unfortunately I got side tracked and let the business die.

Now I am currently working on a new mobile game and have built up an audience on Instagram of 30k people all directly in the niche of my game. I will be posting another thread about my progress with this and also to get advice in terms of marketing etc.

I found this thread to be gold and i'm wondering from the current position I am in with this game, with having the audience built up already, what would you do to capitalize on this opportunity?

I am currently doing a beta test right now. I posted on my IG looking for 20 beta testers and have 20 followers from my IG testing the game. So far the feedback has been great and inspired me to continue on with the project.
 
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Bon Appetit

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Just a post to say thank you.

Very interesting threat, I am a total beginner in the app business, I would like to create an app but I don't have any knowledge about this field yet.

I have found a lot a valuable informations in this threat and I would like to thanks everyone for sharing their knowledge and experience, especially @Rcaraway1989 who started this discussion.

I will start my journey by reading the recommanded books: app empire and appreneur. I will check out the bluecloudsolution website and check out the Okome's Daily Spark Podcasts.

if you have any others recommandations for newbies, do not hesitate :)

Wish everyone all the best.
 

Jade.backer

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Thank you. this thread is very useful. I will try to be more specific from onwards. :)
 

CivilianCone41

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Great example of why you should create MVPs for your business.
What would you say was your risk if none opted in while doing the trial run? 3 hours for free marketing and 1 for the whole setup?

Now some more ideas to make more money:
  • Did you contact app review blogs / Youtubers to review the app?
  • Increase the app price to 1.99, then contact 'App Deal of the Day' apps to get free promotion (for example this AppGratis). You'll get more reach and as you monetize the app via IAP it won't hurt you. Just don't forget to decrease the price after the promotion again.
  • Try to find out what your audience looks like. It's not easy, but it's very the money is at. If you know what your audience looks like you'll see tons of opportunities to make money money off your app by cross promoting a new app. You can do this by asking your audience simple questions about their life (3 choices, one tap will select and trigger the answer) every 10th time they use your app. This will be a little bit tricky to put together in the backend but gives you valuable insights.
  • Also try to get them to either opt in via email (best but hardest), Facebook page like or Twitter. If you can reach your audience through different channels you can get tons of downloads for your next app within a day (for free).
great pointers
 
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Vasudev Soni

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I spent 4 months developing my last app to perfection, building a fancy website, setting up support, only to have it completely flop. So painful, and it wasn't the first time I've done it.

I knew I needed better process, so I've since been seeking a more "lean" approach to the infamous anti-lean App Store.

In contrast, the initial release of my next app GifShare took 6 days to build, had no fancy features, minimal design, and was pretty buggy. Yet it was doing $800/month (now up to $1,200/month a month later).

So what did I change? How did I learn to ship faster more profitably?

1. Validate - I setup a landing page using the service QuickMVP which took maybe 10 minutes. I setup an ugly v1 of the App icon on it which took an hour. The point of the page was to convey what the purpose of the app did, and to see if people would click through to get the app.

2. Test - I wanted to see if I could drive traffic to the landing page with minimal effort. GifShare's proposed purpose was to allow posting GIFs to Instagram, so I search google for things like "post gifs to instagram".

I found things like blog posts, youtube videos, and Yahoo! answers where I left a comment saying "This app is built specifically for this - [app link]"

The way QuickMVP helps you test is, if enough people click through and give you your email in a certain time period, then your idea is "validated". For me to find this idea worth building, I wanted to see if I could get 50 emails in 3 days.

I got double that (101 emails). With less than 3 hours of total work.

3. Build - The important part about building is that you build NO MORE than a minimally working version. I marketed "Post GIFs to Instagram" so I built just that in its simplest form.

I did it this way because it would take me less time -- and if I solved the problem in its basic form in a way that would generate revenue for me. If the business model wasn't panning out, I at least didn't waste time or energy to figure it out.

I've since added extra features and tweaked the app a bit to do $400/month than it originally was doing.

There's a lot more complexities to the process, so feel free to ask questions. I'd love to discuss.
Congrats on your success.

I have some questions -
- Did you also launch the app on the Play Store?
- How much did you spend on marketing and advertising your app?
- Did you earn all revenue from ads?
 

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