After launching Keepsafe in late 2011, we grew to over 1 million users in the span of 6 months. 18 months after that we were at 10 million. We have been growing leaps and bounds ever since.
We have never spent any money on marketing, and we have never been featured in either the Apple or Google stores. To become successful, however, we have experimented, tested, and tried all the things app developers can try to grow their business. If you’re short on marketing dollars and can’t get featured, don’t despair. Get to work, you can do all of this without those things.
Here are a couple of things you should pay attention to if you aim to grow your app:
- Retention — get users to keep using your product
- Internationalize — translate your app
- Intent chain — get in prospective users’ heads
- Provide support — help customers from within the app
- App Store — own your storefront
- Reviews — get happy users to share their love
Retention
User growth is worthless if you don’t retain your users. If your product is like a leaky bucket, then all your download numbers are not amounting to anything.
It’s also worth noting that only retained loyal users will be able to tell their friends about your product. Any virality you may have depends on users using your app to even trigger that mechanism. Any word-of-mouth recommendation will simply never happen if the users are not using your product when the opportunity for recommendation arises.
Retention is key to everything. Focus on retention before you think about virality or anything else.
Internationalize
Every language added increases your total addressable market. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter if your app uses words sparingly (until recently KeepSafe’s main screen had only one word: “Folders”). If the experience is in a foreign language, it will feel more foreign. If you cannot translate your app, at least translate your app store description.
Every time we translated either the app store page or the app we saw an immediate and material increase in new users.
In the beginning, internationalization can be done fairly manually and cheaply. It will pay off immediately. That is when you just translate content monolithically.
If you have large amounts of emails that you need to translate frequently, do customer support, etc, then internationalization may start impacting your operations. At that point, you will need to build some tooling around it. My co-founder Philipp gave a great talk on this a while back.
Intent chain
The most important moment in capturing a new user, especially for mobile apps, is right before the user sees your app store page. Intent is driving the user to look for your app.
Essentially, apps are little problem-solving buttons for your smartphone. There are two ways that make users think about getting a new app:
- They have a problem, and they’re looking for a solution. Optimize for how they would describe that solution. Cater to that sentiment, keyword, search phrase.
- They’ve been told (by a friend, a news item, an app store recommendation) that they should get a specific solution. Cater to how people would describe you and make sure you are at the top of the search results for your name on the app store, so… pick a unique name!
Provide support in-app
This is a no-brainer — happy customers are retained customers. Make it easy for people to reach out and ask questions in the app. You will answer their questions and keep them happy. At the same time, you learn what is bothering people, and you can improve the product quality. Good support and an improved product lead to higher retention, which will lead to more word-of-mouth virality and, ultimately, free marketing for you.
It is still not common to see apps offer in-app support. Even at scale, it does not have to be that much of a cost or effort issue. When we had one million customers, I handled all the support myself. As long as the product just works, it neither breaks the bank, nor your back. So offer an easy way for people to get in touch with you.
Own your storefront
First impressions matter. That’s why even if your product is the best one out there, you need to communicate as much as possible on your store page. Of course you will start with the best guess that you have and that you can be proud of. Just don’t stop there. Treat your App Store page like your shop window and iterate and work on that decoration until traffic starts pouring in.
Test your app title, test the logo, and vary them. Google now offers A/B testing on Google Play. They didn’t do that in the beginning, so we had to test version A on one day and then version B the next. It still worked because you’ll see the effect of things that really make a difference.
Google Play is a fantastically flexible platform to learn about your storefront. It is much easier to see where you can gain traction. If you’re iOS only, consider launching an Android version. It makes testing faster, and it also increases your total addressable market.
Reviews
Part of your storefront are the user reviews, which you cannot directly control. However, you can encourage your happiest users to contribute to that section of your app store page.
Find a way to identify your happy users and then just ask them nicely to leave a good review if they like the app. Find a way to identify your unhappy users and don’t ask them to review you. Instead, make them happy.
It’s a no-brainer, yet I don’t see this well-executed that often.
Millions of Users Gained, $0 Spent
We figured out all of the above by trial and error, some of which took a lot of work to implement or administer. During the three years that we have been on the market, a lot of tools have been developed that will make your life much easier.
If you don’t get featured by the app store owner and don’t have a marketing budget, there are still many things you can do to influence the growth of your app. It needs a lot of elbow grease, but it’s worth it.
