Authors: Allen Wong
15
The Big Break
It’s very hard to narrow down the events of my life to exactly one big break. There was never just one big break for me. There were several points in my life that changed things forever.
If I took a step all the way back, my big break could have been when I started selling online game hacks and items for several hundreds of dollars a day. At the rate that I was earning money, I was earning more than my father was earning even though I was only 18.
Fast forward a bit, and my big break could have been when I got the job at Columbia University. Without the job, I would never have gotten the MacBook that I needed to start coding apps.
Fast forward a bit further, and it could have been when my “News Feed Elite” app became the #1 news app in 2009 (the app was later combined with my browser app and is now called “Start Up! Browser”). Using the technologies I developed from my browser app, I made an app that made it easy to view various news sites. It was successful, because it allowed you to scroll through websites by tilting your phone, save news articles to be read at a later time (even offline), block ads, share sites to Twitter/Facebook, and do other things. It basically paved the way for the other popular news apps you see today.
But if you want to look at my most successful app to date as my big break, then it would be my 5-0 Radio app. It is currently and has been the #1 police scanner app for the iPhone since it was created in 2009. To date, it has been downloaded by at least 10 million people. It has stayed in the top 10 utilities and news categories for years now, and at its peak, it was in the top 10 paid apps in various countries. People had many uses for this app from monitoring crime in their neighborhood to getting live alerts about hazards in the region to keeping in touch with family members who were in the force. People have used this app to get early tornado warnings, hurricane warnings, flood warnings, and other news before the radio and TV broadcast them. Other copycat apps have since popped up and saturated the market. However, my 5-0 Radio app is still a top seller and is among the top 100 most downloaded app in 2010 and 2011 according to Apple’s end-of-the-year report.
So how did it happen? What was the big marketing secret that made it so successful?
There was no one thing that made the app super successful. It was a combination of all the tips and lifehacks that I talked about that propelled the app to the top. On one side, we have a quality product that presents itself very well. The icon was very well thought out. It was colorful, and didn’t use the default icon gloss that poorly designed apps used. I spent a little bit more time on my packaging, and it made a whole lot of difference. The screenshots also showed exactly what the app did, and people got exactly what they saw and expected (and sometimes more than what they expected). On the other side, we have an app that has been marketed very well.
App development tip #8: User reviews are extremely important.
Back then, I would rely on friends and family to rate my apps to give it that extra boost in reviews and ratings. Apple has since frowned upon rigging the ratings system and has even started banning apps that do so. So instead, I created a system that now simply suggests users to rate the app. All of the popular apps do this. If the app is opened after five days and the number of uses is over fifteen, then the app automatically asks the user to review the app. The user can decline if they want to, or have the app remind them the next day.
The reason why this is important is that people tend to not review a product until they have something important to say about it. If they’re satisfied with the product, then they will not make the extra effort to find your app in the App Store again just to leave a review. On the flip side, if the users are annoyed by something, then they will make the effort to make it known to the world that your app has scorned them. You would be surprised at how pissed someone can be over one dollar wasted. And these are the same people who pay five dollars for coffee.
After I implemented this system in my 5-0 Radio app, I saw my five-star ratings almost double, while my one-star ratings remained the same. The five-day waiting period and fifteen-usage threshold have effectively weeded out all those users who did not like the app. Most users delete an app after a day or two if they do not like it. They probably will also not open the app more than fifteen times. Thus, my app is only asking a subset of its users to rate the app. It is asking the users who like the app enough to keep it for more than a few days and to use it on a regular basis.
Now that 5-0 Radio is enjoying a four and a half star average rating, it basically sells itself. When people see that thousands of people are rating this app highly while only a few people are rating it poorly, they will naturally want to get the app themselves. Whenever one of my apps drops in rating, even by just half a star in the average rating, I can see the sales drop dramatically. Thus, it is always ideal to keep the rating high no matter what the cost.
If people are rating your app poorly because of a small bug, then fix that bug immediately. Reply to your customers’ emails, and they will reward you with a good review of your app. Ignore them, and they will leave you with bad reviews. Give them an incentive to rate your app if they aren’t rating your app. I’ve seen popular apps give users free levels or free virtual currency in exchange for ratings. I think this is against the terms of service from Apple, but I still see apps get away with it.
App development tip #9: Make it easy to market the app.
What I’ve been seeing often are apps pushing their users to “liking” their Facebook page or following their Twitter feeds. As I mentioned earlier, those are the standard procedures to growing your user base. But you should also think of clever ways to get users to help market the app for you.
For example, in my 5-0 Radio app, I implemented a chat system so that users could interact with one another while listening to the stations. But in order to use the chat system, the users had to log into their Twitter accounts. Then whenever they made a message in the chat room, it would also tweet the message on their Twitter accounts to their followers along with a #50radio hash tag. I used that hash tag as a way to track all the conversations and create a real-time chat room. I also added an “I’m listening to” button that posted the station that they were listening to along with an ad for 5-0 Radio on their Twitter feed. This type of free Twitter advertising by the users helped propel 5-0 Radio to the top. The other reason why I did this was because it saved me bandwidth by not having to implement an actual chat room on my website that would potentially be used by millions of users.
In my Police Scanner+ app, I tried a different approach. I had all the users chat by converging them to a Facebook fan page created for the Police Scanner+ app. This caused a lot of users to “like” my Facebook fan page, and now that fan page reaches thousands of Facebook users per week. All of these methods made it seamless for the user to advertise my apps for me. Some of them probably don’t know that they’re helping me advertise my app.
And there’s no real adverse effect for making it easier for users to market the app for you. Nobody’s going to leave your app a bad review for having a link to your app’s Facebook page in the app. I’ve seen some games even unlock three extra levels if you visit their app’s Facebook page. Any marketer would notice these marketing ploys, but the average user would not bat an eyelid.
App development tip #10: Use the keywords field the right way.
Some of you may already know the importance of SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is the process of raising the search-engine ranking of your website, so that it would appear at the beginning of the search engine results when certain keywords are entered. The theory is that users tend to visit the first few results first, thus increasing the visitor count for the websites that are ranked higher in the search engine results. There are entire companies dedicated to helping other companies with SEO. By the way, I would suggest avoiding these companies, because they are using strategies that you can look up yourself, or they could be involved in shady tactics. The other reason is that search engine traffic does not make up the majority of your visitors. Instead, having links on other websites to your website generates more traffic.
There are many SEO amateurs and scammers out there who only pretend that they know what they’re doing, but in reality, have no idea how to really optimize your website. These people fall under the “fake it till you make it” category. They will even offer many guarantees that are basically scams that prey on people who don’t know better. They may guarantee top ten rankings, but they will usually use keywords that nobody searches on. For example, let’s say that your company was called Rego Apps. This is a very uncommon keyword. So, if you search “Rego Apps” on a search engine, then it will almost always be the #1 result in the search engine rankings. Thus, having guaranteed top ten rankings is meaningless unless the keyword is a frequently searched keyword. Plus, you can guarantee to have your website in the first page of results for keywords if you just pay Google a certain amount of money. For years now, companies have been outbidding each other to get their website on the top results for certain keywords. If you had the money, you could just do this yourself and save yourself from having to pay a middle man.
These SEO scammers will also try to impress you by saying that they’ll submit your website to thousands of search engines. This would be impressive if people actually used those thousands of search engines equally. However, as of May 2011, over 98% of the people in this world use only the top 4 search engines (82.8% of the people use Google, 6.42% of the people use Yahoo, 4.89% of the people use Baidu, and 3.91% of the people use Bing®). Thus, you only need to submit your website to those four search engines to get results. In most cases, the major search engines will already index your website for you within a week’s time (usually, within 48 hours).
There are many other scams and lies they’ll tell you to get you to use to their services. Some will say that they have an inside man working at Google. Some will say that they know secret techniques that nobody else is doing. Some will say that they cracked the algorithm. These are all lies to get you to pay for their services. Only a handful of Google engineers know the algorithm, and the algorithm is changing all of the time anyway.
In general, your search engine rankings are determined by how many reputable websites link to your website and whether or not the keyword appears in your domain name, title of your website, description of your website, or in the content of your website. Every time a company figures out how to rig the system so that the website’s ranking would be higher than it should be, search engine companies change their algorithm to combat the rigging. At worst, the search engines would even ban the website from their results. Thus, it is better to employ SEO methods that last longer rather than to go for the dirty techniques that some bad SEO companies offer. Such techniques, such as spamming your link on a ton of different websites, would likely get your website’s ranking higher temporarily, but lower in the long run.
There are many websites out there that offer free SEO tips. It is not worth repeating them in this book, because the strategies can change at any moment anyway.
Once you have your website optimized, you must focus on iTunes’ keyword search. This is how a lot of users are going to find your app, especially if your app is not in any of the top charts. Apple’s algorithm is also tricky in that it changes often. However, after carefully studying it for three years now, I think I figured out how they determine the rankings in the search results.
There are two important factors to take your app to the top of the keyword search results. If your app contains the name of the keyword in your app’s name, then it will be higher in the results. This is especially true if the keyword is at the beginning of the name, and even more true if it’s the only word in your app’s name. The second most important factor is how popular your app is. If your app is downloaded and used by many people, then it will get a higher ranking in the search results.
One of the tips that I tell people is to not waste keywords by using another popular app’s name. Usually this gets your app rejected. But even if your app doesn’t get rejected, it is very likely that your app will not appear near the top of the search results or in the search results at all (especially if the keyword is really popular). For example, if you use the keywords “5-0 Radio” in your keywords field, you will most likely not even see your app’s results in the search results. Thus, you’ve wasted a keyword, and Apple only gives you a limited number of keywords to use. I tested this theory by putting those keywords in my “Police Scanner+” app. That app does not appear when you search for “5-0 Radio” at the time of this writing. Strangely, I’ve seen it appear occasionally when Police Scanner+ gets popular. So perhaps there’s a popularity cut-off point.
Another trick I learned is that you can sneak extra characters in their keywords field. Apple normally only allows you 100 characters for keywords, and a lot of people mistakenly use spaces after a comma to separate their keywords. Those spaces count towards your 100 character limit. You can squeeze an extra keyword or two into your keywords search if you just separate your keywords with only a comma and no spaces.
16
Final Fight
There was a reason why I had to employ so many marketing tactics to promote my 5-0 Radio app. A few days before my app was released, someone else had released a similar app. We had both been developing a police scanner app at the same time while unaware of each other’s work. His app quickly shot to the top while my app followed right behind his.
It became a heated battle for months as my app slowly trailed his by a few positions. However, as the months went on, the gap became larger. What had happened was that people saw that the rival app was higher ranked than 5-0 Radio and just went for the more popular one. That sucked for me, because his app was only higher ranked because he beat my release date by only a few days, and thus had an early lead.
As the gap grew larger, I feared that my app would get buried and it would have been a failed project. At that point, his app was probably making a grand or so per day, while mine was only making a few hundred. Making a few hundreds of dollars a day was still impressive, but I worked too hard on the app to let it be beaten by another person just because I didn’t release it earlier. And the reason why I didn’t release it earlier was because I had too many things going on in my life as well as because I wanted the app to be perfect. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so there have been many nights when I’d stay up until 10 A.M. the next morning while still coding and tweaking the app. And my anti-procrastinator attitude also prevents me from sleeping and waiting until the next day to finish the app. Even as I write the final chapters of this book, it is all happening in the wee hours of the morning.
Finally, I decided to pull the greatest marketing tactic that I would ever attempt on an app. It was an untested marketing tactic and could have backfired on me if it didn’t work. I stood a chance at losing everything if it failed, because I would lose my app’s rankings and thus lose a big portion of my marketing by not being on the top charts anymore.
App development tip #11: The Hail Mary Pass.
What I’m about to teach you is something that I kept secret for about three years now. It is what I call the “Hail Mary Pass” for apps. In American football, the “Hail Mary Pass” refers to any long forward pass made usually with little success towards the end of a half. It is a desperation move used to try to score a final touchdown before the half is over or before the game is over.
This move is very similar. If it works, you could end up a multi-millionaire. And if it doesn’t, then you may have shot yourself in the foot. This was a move that I made out of desperation, because I either had to beat the rival app or I’d stay behind forever.
What I did was create an identical app to 5-0 Radio with slightly less features. I removed the abilities to record and to set a sleep timer or alarm. I then started selling that app for a dollar while selling the older version for two dollars. The older version was called “5-0 Radio Pro”. This was marketed as an upgrade to the regular 5-0 Radio app.
The reason why this move is dangerous is that you are splitting the download numbers between the two apps and thus lowering the individual rank per app. By having a lower rank in the App Store charts, you are losing good free marketing from Apple.
For the final step, I turned that regular one-dollar 5-0 Radio app into a free app temporarily. This was ground-breaking at the time, because no other police scanner apps were available for free. This meant that if you wanted a free police scanner app, you’d have to get my 5-0 Radio app. This became a huge hit among everyone. I tried to spread the word about the free app to as many people as possible, and those people in turn helped spread the word to other people.
The app became viral, and soon I was getting over 80,000 new users per day in just North America alone. The app quickly became the #1 app in Australia and was in the top 10 charts around the world. The way I reached #1 in Australia was that I put the words “Australian Police Scanner” after my app name. This resonated with the Australian users and they felt that they were getting an app especially designed for their country. This might serve as an anecdotal story for you to localize your app to the different regions of the world. If you app is good enough, it is worth your time to have the app translated so that you open up your business to non-English speaking customers as well.
To cash in on the popularity of the app, I also changed the 5-0 Radio Pro app to include music stations as well as railroad and airport stations. I decreased the price to one dollar and advertised the sale on the free version of 5-0 Radio. To cash in further on it, the link to the 5-0 Radio Pro app on my free version is actually an affiliate link to the App Store. Thus, I was also enjoying an extra 5% commission for every sale that I got after the customer clicked on the “Upgrade” button. This commission also included sales to other apps and songs on iTunes, as long as the user bought those things within a few minutes after using my affiliate link. So for the past few years, I’ve been helping Apple sell millions of dollars worth of apps and songs. An Apple employee even personally called me to congratulate me for being one of their top affiliates. At first, it didn’t start off as congratulations. Instead, they called to see why I was able to sell so many apps and songs. They thought that I was cheating or spamming. When I explained to them what I was doing, they changed their tone, and now I’m one of their top salesmen. Just from the 5% commission alone, I was making way more money than what I was making at Columbia University.
The boost in recognition and sales was enough to propel my 5-0 Radio Pro app to beat popular apps such as Angry Birds and others. The marketing tactic had worked way better than expected, and I had blown way past my rival apps. Those rival apps have never recovered for the past three years, and 5-0 Radio Pro has been the #1 police scanner app for all of those years. Because of this “Hail Mary Pass”, my app was making millions while my rival apps were only making hundreds of thousands.
Soon, all the rival apps tried to copy my style. They tried mimicking my icon. They tried imitating my interface and my extra features. They even tried to create their own free app to boost their sales. The problem was that they were all just imitations, and the lack of innovation did not get the users to want to switch apps. 5-0 Radio quickly became a brand name. Now when people think of police scanner apps on the iPhone, they think of 5-0 Radio.
A few years later, I decided to create a police scanner app to rival my own app. I figured that I could be both the #1 and #2 police scanner apps at the same time. There was really nothing stopping me from doing so as long as my new app looked nothing like my old one. Thus, I set out to create my Police Scanner+ app. The new app looked much sleeker and more futuristic than the 5-0 Radio app. If you compared screenshots between Police Scanner+ and 5-0 Radio, you wouldn’t be able to tell that they were created by the same developer. Even my rival apps looked more similar to my 5-0 Radio app than my Police Scanner+ app did. My goal was to prove to my rivals that one could create an app that doesn’t mimic 5-0 Radio’s look and still become successful. I also wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t just a one-hit wonder.
The Police Scanner+ app became a success, and it could even be deemed as too successful. It started stealing users away from 5-0 Radio as well as the rival apps. But that was okay, because the two apps combined made up the majority of police scanner app users and increased my overall profits. Police Scanner+ is now among the top three police scanner apps and earns a healthy amount of money per day. And 5-0 Radio still tops the charts and still makes thousands of dollars per day.