Position: Partner
Background: Phill Ryu is part of the leadership team at tap tap tap and MacHeist. He co-created the bestselling app Classics, and when he’s not cooking up cool app ideas, he’s cooking up ways to craftily get those apps into customers’ hands.
Links: http://taptaptap.com/; http://www.macheist.com/
Ken: The folks at tap tap tap have been in the Apple world for quite some time. Is familiarity with the Apple mindset and way of doing things a key part of making it on the App Store?
Phill: It may be the most important single part of making it in the App Store. Apple has worked extremely hard over the years to create a strong culture of high standards, in UI design, user experience, and marketing and launching products, and you can see how that culture affects every inch of their product line. It’s similar with iPhone app development—there are apps you can just take a glance at and realize, yeah, these developers have grown up adoring Apple culture and ideals, and these apps will tend to do very well. They have the “special sauce” down.
Ken: Having been on the App Store since the beginning, what are the major differences with it now compared to then, and how has that influenced how you approach building and releasing iPhone apps?
Phill: The major difference is it’s a much larger, more mature market, which means more customers to potentially reach, but also more intense competition, and more possibilities to just get lost in the crowd.
This is where some critical mass, whether it is through a powerful, growing brand or a fan base, can provide some level of insurance. We’ve accrued some of this over the years, so one thing we’re doing now that we weren’t doing then is working with some developers to help them hedge their app launches when we see an app that really deserves success.
Ken: You’ve had an incredible number of hits to this point, including WhereTo, Classics, Convert, and Voices. How have you been able to ensure that you weren’t a “one-hit wonder”? What do you consider the core elements for creating a successful app?
Phill: There’s just one very important question I like to ask myself before diving into a project: “How big is the vacuum?”
This will answer pretty much all your questions; the bigger the vacuum, the better. You can find vacuums of all sorts in the App Store if you look around. There might be a quality vacuum in a certain popular app genre, a vacuum of developers leveraging free for their paid app sales, or a vacuum of booby apps because Apple just removed a ton of them. There are always vacuums, and vacuums are the easiest things to fill in the world, because they inherently want to be filled. There’s huge pressure and demand for it. And when you fill large vacuums, releasing that potential energy and pressure for your own benefit, you will do well.
If you look at our apps so far, you’ll see a pattern of successful apps in fairly popular/crowded genres that then took those app categories a step or two forward, usually in the design and user experience department, filling those vacuums. For us, on a much smaller scale, we’re trying to replicate the magic of the iPhone launch: the release of a product that’s so much nicer to use than the status quo that it feels slightly magical. If you can nail that, you should do fine.
Ken: Once you release an app, what metrics and signs are you watching to gauge success and what tools do you use to view them? If an app starts off more slowly or seems “in trouble,” what sorts of steps would you take to get it back on track?
Phill: App launch month will involve fairly compulsive viewing of the App Store “top paid” and category charts for your app’s charting position—since Apple doesn’t provide real-time sales information, it’s the best we have in terms of gauging an app’s trajectory, and that means madly refreshing pages in iTunes and on your phone while cursing Akamai when things randomly get cached for hours and don’t update.
From our experience, if an app isn’t cut out to chart high, it’s not worth the trouble trying to prop it up. It’s best to learn your lesson and move on, with a slightly better idea of the App Store demographics’ tastes, than fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.
Ken: In your post “The Cookie Cutter Guide to Charting in the App Store” (http://www.taptaptap.com/blog/the-cookie-cutter-guide-to-charting-in-the-app-store/) you discuss how you pushed a completely unknown app to the top of the charts very quickly. You mention that this approach was experimental. Would you do it again? What are the right situations to take that approach versus teasing an app and building excitement for it before release?
Phill: Teasing an app and building excitement for it before release can fit right into the “shaken-up soda bottle” model of building up pressure for release at launch, but just be careful to implement a way to notify interested people instantly that your app is out. Interested people coming back to the page a week after your app launched after bookmarking it two weeks earlier won’t help you too much for your initial bid at the Top 100 chart.
You should always try to take at least some form of this kind of app launch if possible, even if it’s on a much smaller scale. If you take one thing away from that post, it should be this: a concentrated blast is much more powerful than longer sustained promotion, because higher charting (from the concentrated sales) starts bringing in more and more customers the higher you get in a feedback cycle of increased visibility/freshness.
Ken: In that same post, you write about MacHeist being a “rocket” to launch your apps. Although you mention that the rocket could be considerably smaller for other developers, many of those in that category don’t have any mailing lists at all. If they have no lists and can’t partner with someone, what should they do to get attention for their apps?
Phill: I’m going to start with the assumption that this is an app that the developer really cares about, and believes is great. If so, this is where I recommend the Classics style approach—get it pretty much totally ready or submitted with an adjustable release date set, then at least throw up a teaser page with an email sign-up on release notification for visitors and start promoting that page as much as you can. This is by far the best approach for collecting potential energy in the form of interested, probable customers signing up to hear about when the app is out, then releasing it at your cue when the app is out and you’re trying to chart.
Ken: What is your guidance and philosophy on pricing apps? How is pricing a strategy, and do you think about it per app or just have a general approach that you apply across any app you launch?
Phill: We believe in affordable software (you can see some of that belief shine through in our past history in the Mac community with MacHeist, our other business). With the App Store, we have an extremely efficient distribution and sales system set up on everyone’s iPhone and iPod touch, and if anything, this means if your app becomes a hit you can price your app at $0.99 and make a bundle. We see some niche apps where it makes sense to price higher and do low-volume, high-margin business off of people who really need your app and go out to find it, but ultimately at tap tap tap we do focus on producing mainstream-friendly apps, so as a rule of thumb we price low and aim for high volume.
It’s definitely situational, though; there are some apps where you’ll look at them and a “freemium” model makes perfect sense. Or just free with ads, or dirt cheap aiming for a chart blockbuster, or high for a more niche business. It’s just important for developers coming from other ecosystems to banish the idea that selling an app for $0.99 and making a living off of it is impossible. The App Store makes it possible now; it’s tough to make it happen, but it’s possible.
Ken: Do you consider apps to have a certain life span to them? For example, at some point do you stop worrying about tinkering with the price and no longer invest in adding features to them?
Phill: The App Store approval process is not very tuned for constant minor maintenance fixes and updates. We’re interested in shipping a really, really solid 1.0, updating it with any critical fixes if necessary, then rolling out major (usually free) upgrades on a slower cycle. I actually find super-frequent app updates really annoying personally as an iPhone user (they can really stack up when you have dozens of apps), so I can see why Apple subtly pressures toward less frequent updates, with minor provisions for pushing out emergency bug fixes quickly.
Sales-wise, apps do tend to have a certain life span to them. It’s pretty rare that an app will chart multiple times—you need something major like being featured in an Apple television ad, or a heavily promoted major upgrade, to boost you back into the top 100. This is another reason we’re interested in concentrating on less frequent, but really meaty updates. They’re something worth posting about from the perspective of media and bloggers, and for us, they’re worth promoting heavily for another good shot at charting and a “second life” of sales, so to speak.
Position: User interface designer
Background: Jeremy Olson is a UI designer and app developer. As part of the creation of his first application, Grades, Jeremy chronicled his marketing strategies on his personal blog, Tapity.com (http://Tapity.com). Grades went on to be featured by Apple on the App Store. It quickly climbed the charts, becoming the second ranked app in the Education category a week after launch.
Links: http://skookum.com/; http://gradesapp.com/
Ken: You began talking very early about your app, Grades, probably even before it was built. Describe why you did that and how it plays a part in building a successful app.
Jeremy: Taking the time to journal my design, development, and marketing of Grades on my Tapity blog was one of the best “marketing” decisions I ever made. I started the blog after reading Tribes [Portfolio], Seth Godin’s inspiring book on leadership. The back cover of that book says, “If you think leadership is only for other people, you’re wrong. We need YOU to lead us.” At that time, I didn’t really believe him, but it did inspire me to try to learn how to build successful iPhone applications and to see if anyone would want to follow along. Keep in mind, at this point I hadn’t the slightest knowledge of how to design, develop, or market for the iPhone. I was a nobody in the iPhone development community, armed only with a passion for user interface design, a web development background, and an inspiration to lead.
I was astonished to see it actually work. After a few months of painstakingly blogging into the air (hey, I did get a few comments), tap tap tap—one of the most successful iPhone development shops out there—noticed the blog because I had been discussing some of the strategies they used. They blogged about it. Since then, Tapity has grown in influence and has given me the opportunity to learn from and engage with some of the most successful developers out there.
But so what? Why should you care about gaining respect in the iPhone developer community? I wondered the same thing. After all, my target market is college students, not iPhone developers. The answer to that question, I found, is twofold.
First, Apple does a decent job at documenting the basics of the App Store process, but much of the way the App Store works remains a mystery. Luckily, the iPhone development community is tremendous. By earning their respect by sharing my own experiences, I have gained access to a wealth of anecdotes, data points, and seasoned advice that fill a good number of the gaps Apple neglects to talk about.
Second, iPhone app marketing is largely about connections. Maybe I didn’t get too many college students interested in Grades directly by writing a blog, but I certainly got the eyeballs of some influential people in the press, and, more importantly, the attention of the customer every iPhone developer should do anything to woo: Apple. Apple employees—the people who decide what gets featured on the App Store—are real people; they read these kinds of blogs. I bet that doing the blog played a big role in being prominently featured by Apple the week after Grades launched.
Ken: While you are an actual student in college, you are also a student of the App Store. How did you first begin learning about the inner details of the App Store, and how have you discovered many of the tips and tricks that are now in your toolkit?
Jeremy: Apple doesn’t like to talk about the mechanics of the App Store, but there is definitely a wealth of information available; you just have to dig for it. I started by absorbing all the information developers have posted on their blogs: sales, diagrams, ups and downs, lessons learned.
I also did a lot of “primary research.” It’s simpler than it sounds. A lot of data and insight can be found by simply observing the App Store and the apps that do and don’t make it. Look through the Top 100 chart and think about why those apps appealed to people. Starting with their website, try to see what kind of marketing they did. You can also use Google and Twitter search to see what kind of buzz they’ve been getting (and through what venues).
Read reviews—what do people appreciate in an app and what do they tend to complain about? You’ll notice that people will often leave bad reviews simply because the app doesn’t include a feature they imagined it should. Based on this, I realized that my app had to be extremely focused on the task at hand: calculating the grades you need. I could have included all kinds of neat class management features like assignment due dates and scheduling features (the more features the better, right?). Doing that, however, would cause users to desire infinitely more features in a category I really couldn’t compete in (class management). The result would either be unsatisfied users or a cluttered mess. So, definitely read reviews, especially of apps in your niche.
In the end, though, the iPhone developer community is far and away the most valuable resource for figuring out how the App Store works. This goes back to the importance of developing a network of iPhone developers you respect and who respect you—and who are willing to share their experiences and insights.
Ken: Expound on the importance of the iPhone developer community. Provide an example where you have seen that interacting with them helped you learn something you didn’t know.
Jeremy: I’ll share how I came upon a trick that made Grades stay at the top of the Education category’s front page for an entire day. A few days before I launched Grades I wanted to know what I should set as the release date, so I asked my developer friends on Twitter. I learned from another developer that you can set the release date to some time in the future and then on the day you plan to launch, set it back to that particular day.
With that information, I discovered an amazingly valuable trick. The front page of any given category (in my case, Education) on the iPhone App Store, by default, is sorted by Release Date. By looking at several category pages, however, I realized that it is sorted not only by date, but by time as well (with the most recent apps showing up first). Since most developers don’t tinker with their release dates, most new apps show up around midnight. Knowing this, I set my release date to some arbitrary date in the future, then at 6:00 a.m. on launch day (Monday) I set the release date back to Monday. Since the other new apps came out at midnight and mine came out at 6:00 a.m., mine was technically more recent and, thus, remained at the top of the new apps list for almost an entire day!
Moral of the story: tapping into the experiences of other developers can help you come up with strategies and tricks of your own. Note that the App Store is constantly changing, so I cannot promise that this technique (or any, for that matter) will always work.
Ken: Grades had a very specific marketing plan, and when it launched, you began getting buzz even before anyone really wrote about it. What did that marketing plan include and how did you ensure that you successfully executed it?
Jeremy: I would make a distinction between my marketing plan and my launch plan. I started “marketing” Grades a year before it launched by simply writing about the ups and downs of development on my blog and getting noticed in the development community. My general marketing plan also included the following:
Build a following on Twitter by tweeting about iPhone design and marketing strategies.
Set up a beta program months before launching—by launch time I had an “army” of beta testers who loved the app. This was crucial in establishing a solid base of glowing reviews on launch day.
Design a good-looking pre-launch website where people could sign up to be notified on launch day.
So, my marketing really started many months before launch, but a few weeks before my planned launch date, I started putting my launch plan into action, which included the following:
Engaged a lot of the top bloggers, influential techies, and Apple employees on Twitter. I never mentioned Grades explicitly, but in some cases the mere act of “following” them on Twitter was enough to spark their interest in Grades since I mentioned it on my Twitter profile.
Allowed MacStories, a large Mac blog, to post a preview and promo code giveaway.
Submitted review requests to all the major review websites prior to launch. It is best for reviews to be concentrated around launch day, so send your requests a week or more before launch in order to give them time to write their reviews.
Engaged with local press and scored a video interview as well as a Facebook post to the unofficial North Carolina Facebook page (48,000 fans) and a post to the official Facebook page for my university, UNC Charlotte (7,000 fans). As you noted, this generated quite a bit of launch buzz (especially on Twitter) and that buzz alone pushed the app into the Top 100 list in Education even before it received any press coverage.
Ken: What is the most important element when launching an app? Once launched, what are some ways to keep an app charting high in the rankings?
Jeremy: Two words: Apple (oh, wait, that’s one word). This applies especially to hit-based apps (mentioned earlier), but any kind of promotion you get pales in comparison to being featured by Apple. This isn’t all about luck, though. I was fairly certain my app would be featured by Apple (and was delighted when it was featured just a week after launch). It starts with the app itself: your app must meet or exceed Apple’s standards of quality and polish, and the idea behind it must be solid. As I mentioned earlier, I think gaining the respect of the iPhone developer community also greatly increases your chances of being noticed by Apple. Finally, you’ve got to make your own splash if you want Apple to make you a bigger one. I built up a bunch of pre-launch buzz and then launched with quite a bit of fanfare, scoring some decent press along the way. If you don’t bother to do great marketing yourself, don’t expect Apple to do it for you.
It’s tough to stay high on the rankings. Even most of the top apps fall out of the Top 100 eventually. If you are doing the hit-based approach, you want the initial spike to be as high as possible and the fall to be as gradual as possible. Major updates can help; including Facebook, Twitter, and email sharing features within the app can help; being featured by Apple in staff picks can really help. If you’ve priced your app high enough you can experiment with advertising within other apps or online. I haven’t tried this since it would be difficult to have a great ROI for a $0.99 app. These things may help your app have a soft landing somewhere on the Top 100 chart of your category, which will also help with sustained sales.
Websites: MacRumors; TouchArcade
Position: Owner
Background: Arnold Kim (often referred to as “Arn” online) is the owner of MacRumors, a popular Apple rumors website. Seeing the importance of the iPhone platform, Arnold opened TouchArcade in 2008, dedicating it to game reviews. It is extremely popular, with more than 40,000 active members.
Links: http://www.macrumors.com; http://toucharcade.com
Ken: Touch Arcade is one of the most popular iPhone gaming review sites on the Web, and as such, you probably receive a very large number of review requests. What makes a request stand out? What are the biggest mistakes developers make when they submit review requests? What almost automatically prevents them from being considered?
Arnold: Yes, we do get a large number of requests for reviews and we try to examine each one. Even so, the volume can be overwhelming at times. Given the number of apps coming out for the iPhone, TouchArcade is about game discovery as much as it is about reviews. While I can’t say there’s any one thing that a developer could do to automatically prevent them from being considered, there are many seemingly obvious things that developers should be doing.
When submitting a game for review to TouchArcade or any review site, I recommend that developers include their game information (name and description), screenshots, iTunes URL, and a link to a video. While each of these items may seem incredibly basic, a great many requests we receive don’t include all these items. Anything a developer can do in their review submission to give us a sense of what the game is about is going to be incredibly helpful and will help them stand out from the pack.
Basic information like the iTunes URL is often omitted and can make it harder for us to even find the game in the App Store. Screenshots are eye-catching, and in our case, a video can easily convey the game play both to us as well as potential players. At that point, an app has a much better chance of standing on its own merits rather than potentially being lost in the crowd.
TouchArcade also hosts a very active player community that is always on the lookout for great new games. Preparing a game play video for launch serves the additional purpose of advertising to your customers. Due to the unpredictability of Apple’s approval process, I’ve seen many developers’ games launch without videos in place, and I think that’s a huge opportunity lost. An app’s launch in the App Store is a critical time and frequently results in a large spike in sales. Everything you can do to build buzz, sales, and interest at that time will build momentum for long-term success.
Ken: If someone submits a request to you (or to other sites) and gets no response back and never receives a review, how persistent should this person be in trying again? When should the person give up trying? Is there anything that can be done that would change your mind and make you want to review the app? Similarly, if a developer who has had a review in the past submits a review request to you, what types of changes in the app would you look for to find it worth writing about again?
Arnold: Unfortunately, we have trouble replying to each review request. I know this can be frustrating for developers not to get some acknowledgment back. Unfortunately, due to the pace of the App Store, if we’ve already evaluated an app and decided we aren’t going to review it, it’s unlikely we’ll return to it in the future. Sending in a couple of requests is fine, as things can get lost in the mix. Major updates to games, however, will have us reconsider games for review, so it’s always worth keeping us updated with those changes.
If we pass or miss your game, we might change our minds if we see a lot of interest and reaction to a game in our forums. As we said, our forum community is very active and developers have had a lot of luck generating interest in their games there. There have been occasions that we might have skipped a game, only to return to it due to the popularity in our community.
Ken: From all the games you’ve played and reviewed since the App Store opened, what do you consider the elements for a long-term successful app? What do you think developers need to do to keep apps thriving once the buzz of a review is over?
Arnold: That’s a bit of a tricky question. Long-term success with a single game or app is such a rare thing in the App Store. There are probably a handful of apps that can really be considered long-term successes. I think what is a much more reasonable goal is trying to attain long-term success as a developer potentially across multiple titles. The TouchArcade community has brought developers and players together, and I’ve found that many of the successful developers have been able to build up a fan base for their games. So, building your own personal brand and community of customers will help you establish long-term success, and also helps you get noticed by review sites.
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