Photo by Miss Sandy

Define Your Goals:

When you decide to market your app, it is important for you to have a clear path to travel. Are you going to have a soft launch? Word of mouth? Twitter launch? A promo? All of these are things to consider when you start your marketing. Are you going to run teasers on your site somewhere, making your customers get more excited by the day until you launch? Or are you just going to blindside everyone and come out of nowhere?

When you think about the how, you also need to think about the cost. Are you going to design these ads yourself or is someone you know going to do it for you? Are you going to pay a designer for marketing? If you have internal resources, use them. Your staff designers are perfectly capable of creating some marketing materials.  After all, going cheap and bootstrapping is not too shabby. Now we’re not saying you have to go full-on and have a press kit, but you can make a teaser page, web page, twitter background or something like that to “announce” and market your app. If you are going to hire a designer, how do you decide how much to spend? This is something you need to decide upfront.

photo by James

What Makes You Unique:

What makes your app unique? Did you make your app because you needed a utility that no one else provides? Play off of that. If you are the first app to tell how many cows it takes to make a gallon of milk, play it up.  After all, that’s what makes your app unique. Defining your niche and what makes you stand out from the other apps can put you leaps above the competition. Maybe something about your app is that whoever purchases it will be entered into a raffle to win a new Ferrari. Find something unique and utilize it. You can do it. After all, you just came out with the next new kickass app.

Implementing your Strategies:

Remember that really cool and creative strategy that you came up with in the beginning? It’s time for you to implement it. Ask for favors from your friends when you launch. Ask them for tweets, have them blog about it or ask them to put you in touch with some of their key friends. Drawing on your connections when you launch something big is the whole point in having them. The reason you have their business card on your desk or in your wallet or their email floating around in your contact book is because you know them somehow and wanted to do something with them in the future. Ask politely and be sure to thank them for helping you out. Many people always “seem” busy, but you would be surprised how many would take the time to help someone when you ask nicely.

photo by lozzd

Monitoring Your Campaign:

Make sure that once you get your great app and your amazing marketing plan out the door that you keep tabs on it. If your app is great you will hear about it and if your app is horrible you will hear about it then as well. Use things like Twitter search and Google alerts to set up some monitoring tools. If you have a site they are visiting, you can always check out your analytics for the dates you have been marketing and trying to get people to your site.

While monitoring your campaign YOU WILL HEAR HORRIBLE COMPLAINTS! You are dealing with people. People are not easy to please especially when you try to please everyone. It’s important to remember NOT to let it get to you. Is it a valid complaint because something is not working? Fine. Log it and then move on. If it’s a nasty complaint, just let it roll off your shoulders. Learning to accept that not everyone will like you and your app will make your life a lot easier.

Updates:

It’s a good idea to have a blog or a Twitter stream. These tell people the company is being active in the public eye. These mediums give you a chance to address problems and a place for other people to come and read about them. If you are having bugs, you can tell the public you are having problems and you are working on it. The most important relationship you are going to have is with your consumer. Be open if something is not working correctly and try to fix it as soon as possible. Hiding behind excuses is not a good way to make your brand memorable or build a good relationship with the customer. Through your platform of choice, be it a blog or twitter, make sure that you keep them informed about things that are going on with the brand. If you are going to go to a conference, talk about that. If you are going to give a bunch of free apps out, talk about that. Being in the public eye and showing that you are indeed human is a great way to build brand loyalty.

Resources:

How to Build Massive Word of Mouth with Twitter Giveaways (The #SquareSpace Success Story)

How much is a twitter follower worth? With that kind of growth since June 8th, 36,000 new followers (and counting) at a cost of $6000, they have basically paid 17 cents per follower.

The Amount And Value Of Twitter Traffic

Jason Calacanis wants to pay $125,000 a year to have Twitter recommend him to other users, for example. He thinks that over time accounts with massive followings will somehow be able to pull in $1 million a year or more in incremental revenue, assuming they then have millions of followers.

Moonfruit’s Twitter Push Provides Cautionary Tale

Moonfruit, a U.K.-based company that offers free Web site building tools, saw a great opportunity to raise brand awareness on Twitter. The company last week kicked off a sweepstakes, giving away 10 MacBook Pro computers to Twitter users that include the #moonfruit tag in their tweets.

Convert App Stealth MacBook Pro Giveaway’s

Grab it now for a limited time at the introductory price of just 99¢. Be sure to check out the Convert promo video by MostlyLisa and screencast by Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline.

5 Social Media Lessons Learned From Whole Foods

As a company, Whole Foods has impressively embraced social media more than most, gathering over 1.2 million followers on Twitter and 123,000 fans on Facebook in the process.

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App Marketing Series: Your Groundwork For Success

Photo by: Ben Cooper

We all have great ideas floating around in our heads but how do we get them out into the world without any help and startup cost/outside help? Bootstrapping. This is a term that is thrown around a good amount with start-ups and is not something that is “explained”. Wikipedia defines bootstrapping as:

Bootstrapping or booting refers to a group of metaphors that share a common meaning, a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help. The term is often attributed to Rudolf Erich Raspe’s story The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, where the main character pulls himself out of a swamp, though it’s disputed whether it was done by his hair or by his bootstraps.

Now that we know the definition we can now venture into achieving the goal. Bootstrapping is a way for you to start your company or your app (or anything else) without any outside help. This is VERY important CRUCIAL when you have an idea in your head and want it to be successful and get it into the public.

Key Points:

1. Be Prepared

This is something that should not be taken lightly and as with anything that affects your finances and your lively hood every possible solution should be explored before you “jump” into it. Now it may seem from first glance that Bootstrapping (since it requires no outside help) would be very easy for any sort of savvy person to just whip up something and sell it to the public. Not the case.  In a previous post: Launching Your App: Are you Committed? I talked about several things that sometimes people over look and this is not an exception. Make sure you have a timeline laid out even if its just rough. Make sure you know what the desired outcome is and work backwards and most importantly: Make sure you want to do this. This may sound dumb however, I can’t even think about how “cool sites” I have wanted to make  and start then think “I really don’t want to do this” and I give up. Make sure you have all this sorted out from the beginning.

2. Profit

I listened to Noah Kagan (worked at Facebook back in the day) speak at Awesome Inc. about his failures when he first started. He talked about how he bought $15,000 Dell servers because he thought he would need them. Til this day he still has the dell servers and they are collecting dust in a rack somewhere. He was never able to use them. Point of this story? Concentrate on what makes you money so you can get on with what you are doing. Focus on getting money through the door so you can gain steam by getting the small fish that pay quickly instead of the large ones, that are slow to pay but pay big money.

Quality Resources:

There are more than two points in how to bootstrap because it is a very broad topic. However, many knowledgeable people/sites have contributed to the topic and in order for content to be the best it can, here are resources for you to refer to.

Bootstrapping Your Startup – David Worrell, Entrepreneur

No, you don’t need investors to start your dream business. Here’s how to make it happen with your own money.

BootStrap Austin – Bootstrap Austin

I started the group to save myself some time – I was meeting with my fellow-entrepreneurs for coffee and lunch and thought it would be easier if we all just met up together! I also faced a distinct lack of support for bootstrappers and the bootstrap approach to building companies.

How To Bootstrap Your Startup - Read Write Web

The aim of many entrepreneurs is to take a business idea and convert it into a professional and functioning business on a low budget. This is typically called “bootstrapping” and it is fraught with potential pitfalls and dangers. But when done well it can really help get a company going fast, professionally and without the founders having to give up much (if any) equity – or bankrupting themselves.

The Art of Bootstrapping – Guy Kawasaki

Someone once told me that the probability of an entrepreneur getting venture capital is the same as getting struck by lightning while standing at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. This may be too optimistic.

The Cost of Bootstrapping Your App: The Figures Behind DropSend (part one) -37 Signals, Ryan Carson

I bet a lot of your are thinking about building your own web app. But how do you get started if you have no idea what it’s going to cost you? How can you budget for the unknown?

Overnight success? – Seth Godin

The goal, I think, is to be an overnight failure, but one that persists. Keeping costs low, building a foundation that leads to the right kind of story, the right kind of organic growth.

How to bootstrap your startup

The aim of many entrepreneurs is to take a business idea and convert it into a functioning business on a low budget. This is typically called “bootstrapping” and it is fraught with potential pitfalls and dangers, but when done well can really help get a company going fast, professionally and without the founders having to give up much (if any) equity or bankrupting themselves.

How to Bootstrap Product Sourcing for Your Online Retail Store

Retailing is one of the hardest hit industries in today’s recession. However, retailing plays an important role as one of the driving factors in economic recovery. Whether you start your retail store off line, online, or both, you need to have a long list of products for sale, as retailing strength is in product variants. However, the costs related to off line retailing are very high, these days. Today, the key word in retailing is bootstrap. Probably the best way to bootstrap is by moving your retail store operation online.

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Bootstrapping: What it is and how to do it.

Ask 37signals: How did you come up with pricing for your products?

37 Signals answers a question from a user in depth: “I am developing an internet product and I am rapidly approaching the point at which I will need to set a pricing scheme for this product. Problem: I have no idea what to shoot for! I have done some research which shows a wide range of similar products with varying pricing schemes. When 37signals was developing Basecamp, how did you come up with pricing?”

How To Figure Out If Your iPhone App Will Get You Rich (AAPL)

“As a number obsessed techie and ex-management consultant, market sizing and research were a big part of my launch preparations for Exit Strategy NYC. Since launch, I’ve received many questions from people struggling to estimate the market for their iPhone app ideas.”

How not to price your app

“How much to charge for your web application is a question with no right answer. You will never make everyone happy. Nor should you. I firmly believe that if you hear no complaints about the price then you are not charging enough.”

Kevin Hale: Converting Free Users to Paid Users

Slide presentation from FOWA Miami with great content and background information on brands and converting users from Free to Paid.

How To Price Your App: Learning from Basecamp

Five years worth of screen grabs from Basecamp’s pricing chart. This allows you to see what they changed and how they advance their quality and their technology.

How to Price your Web App

“Pricing is always somewhat of a black art, and a subject about which there is precious little written with regard to web applications. It’s something I’ve always been fascinated by. The question of how to price our web application, Litmus, was subject to countless hours of discussion. Here I’ll discuss some common factors and hopefully help spark some ideas which can help you decide upon the price of your own application.”

AppStore Secrets

“We’ve published the presentation we gave tonight at the New York iPhone Developers Meetup, based off of our first 30,000,000 application downloads”

App Marketing 101: Pricing your iPhone App – Art and Science

“We’ve published the presentation we gave tonight at the New York iPhone Developers Meetup, based off of our first 30,000,000 application downloads”

Pricing your Web App

“What ingredients are needed to market your Web 2.0 Application? A quality marketing site, well written content, decent networking skills, unique product features and benefits, understanding your target market, etc.”

Pricing Round Up:

Did you find any of these links useful? Do you have any other links on pricing that are more useful? Drop them in the comments for discussion!

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9 Must Read Sources On Pricing Your App

1. Money

Figuring out how to setup the logistics of paying for an app is something that people often just barge into without considering what it is going to take. Unless you are a developer/designer and can learn to whip out some lines of code in your sleep and design something while driving to work you are probably going have to hire someone that can.

Developer

A key point to remember if you are using a developer is you are going to want to use a good developer. This will save yourself some time and headaches in the long run. Don’t get sticker shock on what the cost of a good developer could be. After all they will be giving you the tools to have a great application that could sell all thousands of copies. DO NOT try and get a developer to split profits 50/50 as business “partnership” or ask them to do this for their portfolio or anything of the sort. If a developer wants to spend their time doing something for free it is going to be on their own ideas and not yours.

Furthermore, you asking them to do it for their portfolio or free is degrading all the time and effort they have put into making themselves a competent professional so save yourself the hassle and don’t do it. Now if your a developer your money that you invest will be a bit different, it would be in hardware/software to make the app and not in labor.

Design

Your app needs to have an interface that is intuitive and something of beauty. Now I am not saying that this thing has to have all the bells and whistles in the world from a design standpoint. Some of the best apps have simple interfaces. Remember K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple, Stupid. The idea is to make something that people can use without having to think about it. A well designed application will blend into the background letting the user DO what the app is supposed to do instead of trying to figure out how to use it. As with a developer a good designer is an investment and is not something you can just pick based on coin toss.

A designer is not wanting to do something for their portfolio or for free for the exposure. They like the developers lead very busy lives with extensive project time lines and if their free time are bettering themselves in their field. You offering them $200 for 60hrs worth of work or trying to make it a freebie will anger the designer, devalue their work and just make the entire situation a nightmare. Now before you have a designer make the interface MAKE SURE you know what you are wanting your application to do. The designer only knows what you tell them and cannot read your mind. Communication is a HUMONGOUS money saver when working.

Marketing

Another thing to consider is advertising. Are you going to sell this app based off of word of mouth or are you going to place ads? Marketing of your app is just as important as designing/developing it. So in order to “make the most” of your money consider all of these factors before you get started. If you don’t really have an idea on how to market your app sit down and think about: What steps can you take? What market will your app be sold in? How are you going to attract customers? Do I need a website?  Am I going to use social media? Etc etc. You can make the best app in the world but if no-one knows about it or where to get it from how are you going to make money?

2. Time

I know what your thinking “My app is only this one little simple thing”. Stop right there. Rewind and lets try this process again. Just because it is simple in theory does not mean that a developer/designer can just sneeze, wiggle his nose and it will automatically appear. This is very important to realize from the get-go. Maybe your simple idea takes ten complex steps to figure out and it needs X, Y and Z to work. Maybe X isn’t invented yet and the developer needs to figure out a way to make it work.

Remember these kind of things take time and cannot just be Googled, slapped into a code window and then given to you. Once you get a simple problem solved there maybe another issue… Your server may not be able to handle the load…. The application keeps crashing…. etc. etc. Just be ready for a realistic time table and having setbacks and errors. Going into the process with an open mind and thinking about the worst case scenario will make you less apt to blowing a gasket and driving yourself crazy.

3. Sanity

Your mental state of well being will be pushed and beat on, abused and tested. Keep that in mind from the get-go. Just like these few things could happen, the app won’t work, your hosting will go down, your designer will be sick for 2 weeks. Things happen in life and creating a picture perfect time line and launch is setting yourself up for disappointment.

Let your people work. Watching them like a hawk is going to drive them crazy as well as yourself. “A watched pot never boils” is a perfect example. It does eventually boil but if you watch it you are consumed by it, engulfed in it and nothing else matters. If you do this with your application without taking time to  unplug and letting the people you paid do what they are supposed to do then you will go insane.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully this post has shed some light onto planning your app before you just run in there guns blazin’. This post was not meant to scare you out of making your app. It is a polite wake-up call before you get 3 months in and are wondering what you should do next.  Just remember to keep your head on straight and do the cliche’ thing and “make lemonade when life gives you lemons”.

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Launching Your App: Are you committed?

Mobile Mini-Conference

What a cooler place than Awesome Inc. If you haven’t checked out the video of their office you probably should. (See here) Awesome Inc. is a creative collaboration space that if you are a creative (artist, designer, developer, dancer etc.) You can rent a space and have access to all of their wonderful amenities so you could have conferences with clients, showcase your work in the gallery, or just have some plain old creative fun. (rumor is they have some fun games) If you are interested in going you can also send them an e-mail or you can give them a shout on twitter.

Can I Have More Info?

You most definitely can! If you want more info about the mini app conference and all the details on who is talking, what the schedule is and where they are located check the event page. Awesome Inc. Mobile Mini-Conference or if you just want a quick overview check out below.

Quick Details

Registration

To register for the event, head to the Eventbrite page. Tickets are normally $30, and students receive a discounted price of $20.

Location

Awesome Inc.
348 E. Main St.
Lexington, KY 40507

Time

July 18th, 2009

11-8pm – General – For attendees with a general interest in mobile technology, business, and applications.

1-5pm -Technical – For attendees with a more general interest in the technical details of mobile platforms, applications, and technology.

1-5pm – iPhone Beginner – For eager developers wanting to get their hands dirty with iPhone development. Macbooks will be provided for development.

1-5pm – iPhone Experienced – For those developers already familiar with the iPhone development platform, there will be more advanced discussions on how to get more out of your applications.

Can’t Come?

It’s ok! I will have a blog post recap about what happened, who was there and some photos to go along with it. Hopefully you can come if you do I will see you there!

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FuelYourApps will be at Awesome Inc. 7/18/09