5 Marketing and Distribution Channels for Sustaining a Successful App

Your app is not alone. Right now, there are more than 1 million apps in the App Store, vying for users’ attention in nearly every category.

Building a great product isn’t enough to make your app the next Angry Birds, and Apple knows it. Just last month, it introduced a “Best New Updates” section to improve the discoverability of apps long after their initial release. But to create a sustainable app, you need to build in solid marketing and distribution strategies to get your app into the hands of the people who need it most.

Take Everpix, for example. When the photo storage company closed its doors, it came as a total surprise to users. It was an excellent product that sorted photos with ease and stored an unlimited number of images for a small yearly fee.

Everpix had the potential to overturn companies like Dropbox and Flickr, but it made one major mistake: It put all of its budget into product development, leaving little money to sustain the company as it tried to grow its user base. While it seems unfair, the fact is a great product isn’t enough to succeed in the app marketplace. It’s important to strike a healthy balance between development and marketing to ensure sustainability.

Grow Users and Keep the Lights On

Here are five strategies to capitalize on the marketing and distribution of your new app:

Release early and release often. You may have heard this refrain before, but it’s vital for growing your user base and attracting investors’ attention. Release core features, then leverage communities such as Hacker News and Product Hunt to grab early adopters before building out the kitchen sink. Look at it this way: If you don’t have a user base, how can you be sure you’re building something people want?
Find your niche. You can differentiate your app in a crowded market in two ways: Introduce features that no one else has, or target a specific niche. These strategies aren’t mutually exclusive. Take QUAD, for instance — yet another entrant in the crowded mobile messaging market. QUAD focused on its unique ability to message more than 50 people and has heavily marketed its app to college groups like fraternities and sororities that have a real need for a bulk messaging system. By doing so, it’s enabled itself to live alongside other messaging juggernauts like WhatsApp and GroupMe, rather than compete with them.
Be exclusive. Nowadays, it seems like everyone uses Spotify, but it wasn’t long ago that the company was just starting out in the U.S. and only available by invitation. While Spotify used invitations to make it easier to scale in a new country, it also had the added benefit of creating buzz around this exclusive new app. By capitalizing on word-of-mouth marketing, Spotify helped itself stand out in an arena that companies like Rdio and Rhapsody had been occupying for years.
Optimize for the App Store. Much like the need to optimize your website for search engines, it’s important to make sure your app has the right keywords in its title and description so users can find you. It sounds minor, but if your app doesn’t come up when users type relevant keywords into the search bar, then it might as well not exist. That’s why app design and development companies like Fueled have started making App Store optimization an integral part of their development process.
Build in social calls to action. Social word of mouth is one of the best ways to grow your user base. Build in social sharing so users can brag about what they’ve just accomplished, whether that’s leveling up in a game or logging miles in a running app.

It’s easy to assume your app can become the next Snapchat as long as you build a solid product, but what makes that app successful isn’t the fact that it exists — it’s the efficiencies it creates. By focusing on marketing strategies alongside product development, you can create an app that not only makes life better for your users, but also makes a profit for your startup.

Gideon Kimbrell is a Miami, FL software engineer and serial entrepreneur. His software engineering work has been praised by companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Barnes & Noble and St. Jude Children’s Hospital. Born in Montana in a log cabin, he entered university at age 15. By 16 he had programmed his first “hot or not” style website. He is the founder of InList.com. InList curates the most exclusive international nightlife and charity events.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

11: Josh Davidson Talks Tech Startups & Having 6 Flags As A Client

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Joshua is the CEO and Founder of Chop Dawg, full service company lined up with leading designers and developers that take ideas from concept and turn them into reality. Chop Dawg helps create startups for inspiring entrepreneurs by providing them with a wide range of services including web and mobile development, branding and marketing strategies.

While most teenagers are busy getting their drivers license, he founded Chop Dawg at the ripe age of 16. Shortly after, at the age of 20, he went on to launch his second company, Subtle.

5 Steps for Giving Your Mobile App Exposure on a Global Scale

Flags Of Countries Around The World

Transcreation: The process of adapting a message from one language to another, while maintaining its intent, style, tone and context.

If you’re a mobile app developer or have a business with a mobile application, you’ve likely already put hundreds of hours into building, testing, and launching your app(s). With all of that time and energy invested into your application, why aren’t you translating your application in order to maximize your global exposure?

We are in the midst of a mobile app explosion. Here’s a look at what the research firm Gartner is projecting in the mobile app market:

Table 1. Mobile App Store Downloads, Worldwide, 2010-2016 (Millions of Downloads)

	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
Free Downloads	57,331	92,876	127,704	167,054	211,313	253,914
Paid-for Downloads	6,654	9,186	11,105	12,574	13,488	14,778
Total Downloads	63,985	102,062	138,809	179,628	224,801	268,692
Free Downloads %	89.6	91.0	92.0	93.0	94.0	94.5

Source: Gartner (September 2013)

When drilling down past this global data and looking at specific countries, more nuanced trends emerge. App Annie reports that Japan has surpassed the U.S. as the number-one country in app-generated revenue. Simultaneously, the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—made formidable gains in app downloads, setting the stage for strong future revenue growth in multiple languages.

At the end of last year, Google Play announced translation services for Android developers. Here are three highlights from Google:

Zombie Ragdoll combined app translation with local marketing campaigns. In doing so, they found that 80 percent of their installs came from non-English-language users.
Dating app SayHi Chat expanded into 13 additional languages and saw 120 percent install growth in localized markets and improved user reviews of the professionally translated UI.
The developer of card game G4A Indian Rummy saw a 300 percent increase with user engagement in localized apps.

When parsing through the global data and looking at these three examples, it becomes clear if you’re only distributing your app in one language, you are missing out on a large portion of potential consumers. Here’s how to take your app global and ensure that your hard work is getting the respect and recognition it deserves.

1. Set Clear Goals

Before you dive into the world of translation, figure out what your goals overall are. Mobile app developers generally want four things:

More downloads
Better app store rankings
More revenue
Continued user engagement

There are hundreds of ways to get to these goals, of course. Translating and localizing an app is only one of them, but it’s an increasingly important one. Once you’ve weighted how important each of these categories are — i.e. we’re only focused on downloads or we’re predominantly focused on revenue — you’ll be ready to start setting clear consumer targets and build strategies to have consumers find you.

2. Set the Strategy

If localization is on your goal list, the next step is to set a clear strategy in terms of target market. Ask yourself these questions:

What markets do we want to enter?
What languages are needed?
What content within our app will be translated?
Who will handle the actual translation?

Certain apps fit into certain markets better than others. The Wall Street Journal reported that China was the largest market for Fotopedia, a company that makes photo travel magazine apps — representing 20 percent of visits (compared to just 14 percent from the U.S.). Just three years before, China was their 10th biggest market. Today they operate in 10 languages, including simplified Chinese.

3. Get Found

By the end of 2014, ITU predicts there will be nearly 3 billion Internet users worldwide. Between English, Spanish, and Chinese, you’ve covered more than 50 percent of the global online population. Add in 10 more of the world’s most popular languages and you’ll have 90 percent of the world’s online spending power covered.

To boost your chances of tapping into these growing online markets, consider appeasing search engines and app stores by taking these four steps:

Generating quality content that is culturally sensitive
Utilizing relevant key words in the local language
Gaining positive reviews that are relevant to the app store reviewers
Listing all relevant languages and app features

Once you’ve found your consumers and they’ve found you, you’ll need to have your app translated and localized to ensure you maximize user engagement and don’t lose users.

4. Streamline Your Translation

Updating any app can be challenging. Updating a multilingual app can be an even larger challenge — one that requires adaptability and integration. When transcreating app experiences for our clients, we focus on three things: the strings and remove the executable code, the context of their app, and delivering clear instructions to the translator — nobody is a mind reader.

We did this for Baby Chords, an app that arranges notes so that music is very easy to play. By helping them expand into more than 10 languages, Baby Chords is now gaining customers from all corners of the globe.

5. Don’t Settle

Whether you decide to translate your app internally, through a translation agency, through crowdsourcing translation platforms, or through machine translation, you’ll need to revisit your initial goals and determine the level of quality you’re looking for — and how much you’re willing to pay.

Remember that app localization is just the tip of the iceberg. When you’re selecting a translation provider, be sure that they can help you translate other modes of communication — confirmation emails, fulfillment for in-app purchases, translation of newsletters, localization of websites, etc. — or at the very least advise you on how to navigate ensuing language barriers, so that you can truly capture the attention of the users you’ve been missing out on thus far.

I’ve written about transcreation and translation pricing in the past, and would interested to hear your thoughts on these two topics as they relate to mobile app translation. Feel free to email me directly at ryan.frankel@verbalizeit.com or leave a comment below.

Ryan Frankel is the CEO of VerbalizeIt, the company that connects businesses and travelers directly to a 19,000-person translator community to deliver real-time quality translation. He is considered an expert on global communication and international customer engagement. Ryan is also a Wharton MBA alumnus, former private equity investor for Goldman Sachs and an endurance athletics enthusiast. You can reach him via email at ryan.frankel@verbalizeit.com.

Flappy Bird Leaves Us Wanting More

From Tech Crunch

Yesterday, the developer behind Flappy Bird said he would be removing the remarkably/mysteriously successful game from the App Store in just 22 hours.

Sure enough, the game appears to be gone. And in its spot on the #1 spot on the iOS leaderboard? A Flappy Birds clone.

Flappy Bird’s developer, Dong Nguyen of Vietnam, suggested that the many pressures of success had become overwhelming. NibzNotes18

He later followed up to clarify that the game was not being removed for legal reasons, nor would he sell Flappy Birds to someone else.

According to an interview with The Verge last week, Dong Nguyen disclosed that the game was making upwards of $50K per day in ad revenue.

Many internet commenters had suggested that the tweet was something of a ploy to bump downloads up even higher; that Dong would have a “last minute change of heart” after the tweet lead to a surge of downloads and further secured the game its #1 spot. Given that the game is seemingly gone from both the iOS and Android stores (with a million clones left in its wake), that doesn’t appear to be the case.

4 Useful Apps To Help You Manage Your Startup

The modern business world is mobile — it’s not about brick-and-mortar offices and storefronts. It’s not about desks and computers wired to the spot. To work effectively on the go and with an equally tech-savvy customer base, you need to put together a custom array of business apps to get the job done. The following apps are excellent resources for startups, from media and marketing firms to goods and commodities retailers.

1. Square

If you’re a point-of-sale retailer and you don’t know about Square, now is the time to learn. With the help a simple peripheral, Square allows businesses of all sizes to create a mobile point-of-sale, eschewing cash registers and clunky credit card swipers altogether. Square lets you take payments, send receipts by email, set prices and track your cash flow by the minute. This is a must-have for any retailer, whether operating out of a single location or on the go.

2. Business Plan

Tracking your fledgling company’s data and presenting it to potential clients, investors, and employees is both essential and difficult. Business Plan allows you to keep all of this information in one, tidy package. It’s a great app for those who have never written a business plan before, presenting you with a simple, step-by-step template with clean graphics and a simple interface. As a bonus, Business Plan links to another app, Start-up Budget, that lets you calculate your base finances dynamically.

3. Basecamp

Just because your startup is lean and full of driven, talented people doesn’t mean it’s easy to keep all your ducks in a row. Basecamp is a full-service project management app that keeps track of info big and small. It’s a personal planner, memo-maker, inbox and filing cabinet all in one. Use it to create to-do lists, upload files to share with others in the company, and send and receive feedback to everyone on every project. Most conveniently, Basecamp isn’t entirely bound by its central app. Users can access their Basecamp account on any device that has Internet access, from a mobile device to a laptop or desktop computer.

4. BizXpenseTracker

When you’re on a tight budget (and startups are always on a tight budget), expenses can get out of hand very quickly without proper monitoring. BizXpenseTracker allows you to keep a handle on every cent you spend at home and on the road. It features trip-specific expense reports, mileage tracking, timetables, and other features to keep all the P’s and Q’s in order. It also has a handy receipt photo uploader that lets you digitize all the little purchases along the way. All of this info is easy to share via email and file managers like Dropbox.

These are just a few of the best apps out there that help startup businesses stay informed and efficient. There are many other tools for the small business community that make daily operations and networking that much easier. Apps let you run your startup free from paper, confusion, and miscommunication while saving you money and helping you make the most of the versatile technology at your disposal.

Need more knowledge check out these 10 startup tips at nibletz.com

Apple Fixes Issue With App Store That Caused Thousands Of Apps To Crash

Apple is a company that usually doesn’t have very many issues when it comes to iTunes or the App Store–at least as far as malware and large coding errors are concerned. However, this week has been a tough one for Apple, users, and developers alike as one of Apple’s servers had an issue delivering DRM code to the apps updated or downloaded. This faulty coding caused apps to misbehave and crash upon opening in many cases–nearly thousands in the App Store were affected. While this was just for a very brief period of time, a lot of uneasy customers were afraid their iPhone was either being attacked by malware or completely malfunctioning when it came to third-party apps.

The company issued a fix today however, that took care of most of the issues that we know of, and a few we didn’t. First, Apple fixed all of the apps added to the App Store or updated, and then pushed an update to apps that were affected for users to download. They also took care of the developers as well, by reviewing not just 1-star reviews, but all reviews published about an app that was affected. Ensuring that both users and developers have been taken care of, Apple again shows why they have the reputation of some of the best customer service around. If you have an iDevice that was suffering from any of these crashes or issues, be sure to check the App Store and receive the necessary updates.

South Carolina Startup: 52 Apps Will Produce 52 Apps This Year

Here’s a story that’s just screaming “everywhere else”. Two students who actually hail from Arkansas, Brandon Lee and Chris Thibault are two ambitious young entrepreneurs who have built a startup app studio with a twist. Their startup is working out of an incubator at USC where Thibault was a student.

Their development company, called 52apps, is set out to produce 52 high quality apps over the next year. They hope to produce each app in just five days, presumably cheating the startup culture and taking weekends off, which is ok considering they are also students.

While the 52apps concept isn’t entirely new, the way they’ve set out to find app ideas has an interesting twist. The startup held almost a “pitch” event Friday evening. At the event they took app suggestions from all walks of life at an event with a stage, pitches and brainstorming.

Lee and Tthibault heard a ton of great app ideas at their “Idea Day” that was held immediately following a launch and kick off event for their University of South Carolina, Columbia, based company,

These two aren’t guys who just decided to become app developers in College. Both Lee and Thibault are BFFs from high school, who developed their first app while they were till in high school, with the ambitious idea to make math homework easier and more automated. They were able to achieve that as part of a goal to stop taking backpacks to school.

52apps is just one of 32 resident startup companies at a fairly new incubator at UNC.
“These are two- to three-month projects,” said Steve Leicht, who serves as 52apps’ chief executive and part of the management team put together by the incubator and Columbia venture capitalist Don Tomlin, said Tomthe statee.com. “These folks pull it off in a week.”

The duo has already put out their first iOS app under the 52apps umbrella. The app, called Tap Notes, sells for $2.99 in the iTunes app store and helps students, and business professionals take notes, and record conversations for the notes that can be accessed at specific points rather than having to listen to an entire conversation and then pulling what you need.

Lee and Thibault report that they’ve received over 30 great ideas so far and will start developing straight away.

Linkage:

Check out 52apps at 52apps.com

Source: thestate.com

Nibletz is the voice of Startups everywhere else and could use your help click here

“Appreciate” Is Your Personal Android App Store

An Israeli startup called Triapodi has introduced a new kind of Android app store into the Google Play Store. Appreciate is part app discovery app, part aggregator, and also your personal Android app store.

Appreciate has already seen hundreds of thousands of downloads. People are loving the fact that Appreciate can make app recommendations based on the apps you currently have downloaded as well as apps that your friends have downloaded. To achieve this, Appreciate syncs with your Facebook account and other like users across the Appreciate network.

The app, launched in February, has garnered a lot of downloads and a lot of users because of the relevance in their app recommendations. This is due to their “Appreciate Relevance Engine” technology that scores apps on relevance to the user at a number of different levels.

“As we evolved Appreciate as a platform and improved the AI, we were able to make a complete departure from how other marketplace apps delivered recommendations to their users,” said Amir Maor, CEO of Triapodi. “We know our customer. We understand that generic lists of the market’s most popular apps do not meet the needs of the Android community, and we designed our latest version of Appreciate specifically to give our users 100% personalized and relevant app discovery for the first time. It is all about giving our customers exactly what they need.”

The current version of appreciate has these features:

* Connect to Facebook and see what apps your friends discover
* Get personal application recommendations based on what YOU like
* View for every app how well it fits with your personal taste
* Send applications directly to your friends’ device to install

* Get community updates on hot apps people discovered
* Manage your apps
* Gain quick access through app lists
* Share your favorite apps with other users and Facebook friends
* Widget with quick access to daily recommendations

It’s no secret, the despite the fact that Google’s primary business is search, discovery in the Google Play store is like searching for a needle in a haystack. That’s where you’ll come to appreciate, appreciate (see what we did there). Unlike some third party app stores, Appreciate functions within it’s own app and has it’s unique functionality to deliver the best possible app choices from the Google Play Store.

Try it out today.

Download Link at Google Play

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San Diego Startup: Monster Offers Releases 18 Localized Daily Deals Apps

San Diego based Monster Offers has teamed up with app development studio Iconosys to release 18 new daily deals apps to Android powered smartphones.

The 18 daily deals apps go by the name of Monster Dealies and Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Orange County, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Last June Inc magazine said the daily deals space could be worth $3 billion dollars this year in revenues. A BIA/Kelsey estimate suggests the revenue could reach $4 billion dollars by 2015. It’s also been revealed that a lot of consumers who aren’t taking advantage of daily deals sites and apps are leaving a lot of money on the table.

“The new ‘Monster Dealies’ apps bring to your Smartphone or Smart device those killer discounted Daily Deals that are specifically tailored for your local market or GPS-designated location. In view of the now huge size of the Daily Deal market, we think an app like this makes abundant sense, as it scours the landscape to highlight what you care about and what you want to see, while cutting out the noise and the deals that are clearly outside your particular target area. Why should you ever pay full price for a meal, massage, movie or show ticket again in your local area? Our Monster Dealies apps bring the best discounted deals to your Smartphone or Smart Device, so you are plugged in and ready to save money 24-7.” says Paul Gain Monster Offers CEO

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Uh Oh iPhone App Downloads Dipped 30% In March

Something has happened and the world is undoubtedly all shaken up about it. Fiksu has reported that Apple iOS app downloads dipped 30% in March 2012. Yes, take cover, this is news of monumental proportion.

The number of daily iPhone app downloads decreased from 6.35 million in February 2012, to 4.45 million in March. Now we bravely wanted to suggest that it may have possibly been caused by the mad rush to get to 25 billion apps. Apple was holding a huge contest to commemorate that huge milestone. Unfortunately for the month of March, that happened on March 3rd.

This feeble attempt to look at the possible bright side was foiled by more data from Fiksu. They found that iPhone users downloaded fewer apps in March than any other month since the iPhone 4S launched in October.

Fiksu contributes part of the decline to the cooling off period that came right after the honeymoon period for new iPhone 4S users. Also, we can take into consideration those who upgraded from a previous iPhone. Upgraded iPhone users have probably used their previous iPhone to download and try as many apps as possible to vet the apps that they really like. Now, graduated to a new iPhone they don’t need to download every app they come in contact with.

Business Insider also reports that Apple has cracked down on developers using third party bots to download their apps and over inflate their number of downloads. This may actually be a more clear picture of the health of the iTunes app store. Don’t for a second though, think that 4.5 million downloads is shabby.

source: SAI

Kansas Startup Front Flip Takes Their Virtual Scratch Card Platform National

In Overland Park Kansas, home to Sprint, a new startup called Front Flip has been trying out a new and fun way of engaging customers and increasing loyalty in Kansas, Chicago, Columbia, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Orlando, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, and St. Louis. As we’ve reported with startups like Lokalty and FreebeeCards the loyalty, rewards and engagement space is heating up big time right now. Part of the reason is because local merchants are becoming tired of killing their margins with daily deals sites that only attract a customer one time, and that one time is typically at a loss.

That’s one of the reasons why Front Flip co-founder and CEO Sean Beckner created Front Flip.

“The market is ready for a change. Daily deal programs aren’t building customer engagement or rewarding loyalty — in fact, they have rather the opposite effect,” Beckner said in a release. “Front Flip’s mission is to help businesses engage with their customers in a fun and exciting way both inside and outside the store by increasing understanding and building customer loyalty.”

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Former Vermont Secretary Of Agriculture Co-Founds Rural Location Based Mobile Startup ViewBoost

In January 2012 it was announced that former Vermont Secretary of Agriculture, Food and Markets Roger Allbee would be joining Vermont Technical College as Senior Scholar In Residence. It didn’t take too long for Allbee to go all in and help co-found a startup.

The startup called ViewBoost is a location based startup that is designed to enhance rural travel and beyond. ViewBoost is fine tuned to rural areas where similar mobile apps are designed for major metropolitan areas. The team behind ViewBoost looks at the app as a digital concierge connecting people to people, places, events and businesses. It also enables travelers to see their route, destination and recommend points of interest along the way.

The Vieweboost application integrates with Facebook to pull feedback and comments about places that users find along the way.

“Vermont has so much to offer, and is the perfect laboratory for the development of this rural tourism application. So many businesses and jobs depend on tourism that an application of this type is badly needed,” says Roger Allbee, a co-founder and former Secretary of Agriculture, Food and Markets in Vermont. “We are known for our landscape, agriculture, and food systems, and the state has been named as one of the key destinations in the world, so why should we not be at the forefront in developing this application that can better define what we are and who we are as a state and tourist destination?”

Viewboost is still in their infant stages. They are using Vermont as the test market and plan on targeting other similar sized areas as they build out. They are hoping to have the product on the market by spring of 2013.

source: BurlingtonFreePress

New York Start Up: Stamped Let’s You Put Your Stamp Of Approval On Things

Review sites like Yelp are great. The problem is when you’re looking for something in a hurry the last thing you want to do is read a 2500 word review on something. You want the meat and potatoes now and that’s what Stamped specializes in.

Stamped launched in November and was born in New York. Founders Robby Stein and Bart Stein previously worked for Google. The third co-founder, Kevin Palms worked with risk analytics at a New York hedge fund. They’ve already secured $1.5 million in seed funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Google Ventures.

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Chattanooga Startup Retickr Filters Out The Noise From News And Social Media.

Most of us are too busy to sift through the noise of news sites and social streams to get exactly what we want. Many times the important information is lost in the shuffle. That’s where Chattanooga based startup ReTickr comes in.

ReTickr was created by three young entrepreneurs and University of Tennessee graduates; Travis Truett, Brian Trautschold and Jared Houghton.

The threesome has seen enormous growth after being featured in the Mac App Store for three weeks back in October 2011, but it wasn’t always that easy.

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