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Category: App Development
Tags: AppASOLaunchMarketingStrategy
Entities: App StoreCloudflareFacebookJack FrickSwipe the Cat
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You've built your app. You did all the market research.
You validated the idea. And now it's time to release it.
But how do you actually get people using it, especially when you're starting from scratch? In this video, I'll show you my exact process for launching a new app,
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how I get my first users, and how I rank my apps on the app store to generate an endless supply of downloads on a tight budget. This is part three of a threepart series where I documented my entire process while building my Swipe the Cat game.
In part one, I showed you
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how to come up with ideas and validate them. In part two, I showed you how to actually build the app, the strategic decisions made at every step of the way, and how to go from idea to product.
If you haven't watched them yet, I recommend doing so. This video is best viewed as part of an entire series.
My
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app portfolio has generated $1.1 million in app store sales from over 1.7 million downloads. If you told me just a few years ago that was even possible, I probably just wouldn't believe you.
To be honest, I thought you needed to have a big team, lots of funds, and a massive
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marketing budget to generate any meaningful revenue. But that's just not true.
And I set out to prove that by building a simple app on a tight budget within 2 weeks. Because as it turns out, it is possible to build profitable apps on your own without a team and without a
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huge marketing budget. Best of all, I believe everyone can do it.
You just need to know how. In an age where apps can be generated with AI from a single prompt, the limitation is no longer technical.
You don't even need to write a single line of code to run a
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successful software business. And think about that just for a moment.
create a software product, you would have had to spend weeks, months, maybe even years developing it. You needed a massive team and you needed experience and expertise.
Now, the problem isn't how do I create
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the app. The problem is how do I actually get people using the app?
And the simple answer is simple. Be seen.
Get your app in front of as many users as you possibly can. That's kind of easier said than done.
Firstly, marketing can be expensive, especially
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when you're just starting out on your own without a huge budget. And secondly, where do you actually find these elusive users anyway?
And the long answer is kind of a little bit backwards. It starts before you even launch your app.
It starts before you've even opened up
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your IDE. It started at the first step when you did your first bit of market research.
In video one, I showed you how my game started as a technical demo and then how I pivoted it into a game about cats. This was entirely based on market
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research and purely strategic. It's important to validate whether your app even has a target market in the first place.
How many people are searching for it and how much competition it even has. Too many app developers have an idea, build it, release it onto the app store,
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and then try to reverse engineer keywords to fit their target market, only to find out nobody's even searching for it. Nobody's even looking for that app.
This is the fastest way to fail. A solid app store optimization strategy starts from the beginning of the
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project. Then no matter what type of marketing plan you have, whether it's paid ads, social media influencing, or user generated content, you can always fall back on strong positioning on the app store.
To rank well on the app store, you need these three ingredients:
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good keyword optimization, plenty of reviews, and download velocity. More on that in just a bit.
For keyword optimization, my game, Swipe the Cat, is targeting three main keywords: cat game with a popularity of 45. cute game with a popularity of 28 and offline game with
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a popularity of 39. Whenever I launch a new app, I always focus 90% of my app store optimization on a single keyword.
In this case, my primary keyword, my main keyword is cat game. This is the keyword I want to rank for the most.
It
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will be the keyword that converts the best and has a pretty decent popularity score as well. Plus, this is a cat game after all.
So, I find a way to put it nicely into the app title. Swipe the cat game.
It's important to add your primary
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keyword to the title of your app. That means the keyword cat game needs to be displayed one word after the other.
No additional characters, no hyphens separating them. I'm going to show you why in just a bit.
Then, use the subtitle to include any secondary
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keywords you want to be targeting. In this case, it's cute game and offline game.
The wording needs to make sense. Don't just add keywords for the sake of adding keywords.
And remember that a human, an actual user will be reading this, too. So, it needs to make sense.
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For Swipe the Cat, the subtitle is cute, offline, fun. It's descriptive.
It's emotive, and it tells the user exactly what to expect. And it has the added benefit of including the words cute, and offline.
Because the keyword game is already listed in the title, we have the
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added benefit of targeting the keywords cute game and offline game. Notice that I never actually repeat a keyword twice in the title and subtitle.
I didn't put cute offline game. I put cute offline fun.
Including a word in the title and
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subtitle can sometimes devalue its effectiveness in the app store rankings. If I repeated the word game in both the title and the subtitle, I may not rank as well for my primary keyword, cat game.
And here's the important part. Remember how earlier we put the exact
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match keyword in the title? Well, that's not by accident.
Firstly, that's my primary keyword. That's the keyword I want to rank for the most.
Secondly, something interesting happens on the app store with recommended searches. When someone searches in the app store, the
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recommended search list will show a few suggestions matching the users's search term. Typing in a brand name like Facebook would show you exactly what you would expect.
Facebook, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Light. It shows products within the app store that have the title
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matching the users search query. By placing your exact match keyword into the app title, you can get your app listed in this recommended search list.
And then when you first launch your app, when it first goes live on the app store, your app is prioritized for a few
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days on the recommended search list. Searching for cat game a day after launch shows Swipe the Cat listed number two in the recommended search list underneath the recommended search term cat games.
This real estate is gold. This exposes my little game title to
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every search made within the app store for the search cat game. And it's free.
I didn't have to pay for it. didn't have to promote it.
And because it's a keyword with a popularity of 45, I can expect a nice boost in free traffic. But there is a problem.
These recommended
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search listings are updated quickly within a few hours of your app going live, but organic search results have a slight delay. My Swipe the Cat game didn't rank organically for the first few days, and I've seen other apps not rank for weeks, even months, depending
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on the app category and niche. So although your app will appear in the recommended search list, you can't guarantee users will actually find it within actual search results.
And the solution is simple. Run an app store ads campaign the moment your app is approved on the app store.
Create a new campaign
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called visibility and make sure you target exact match keywords for your app title and brand name. Make sure search match is off and set a stupidly high CPT bid and a stupidly high daily budget.
bid too low or have too low a budget and
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you run the risk of App Store not showing your ads for a few days or even a few weeks, you will miss out on the search recommendation boost and your competitors will get your downloads. Setting a daily limit of $1,000 and a maximum CPT bid of $10 seems to trigger
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ad impressions every time I've run this visibility campaign for a new app launch. For my app, I targeted the exact match keywords, swipe the cat, and swipe the cat game.
It's worth noting if your campaign is chewing through too much money. It may mean you're either not
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targeting exact match keywords or you accidentally left the search match feature off. Targeting broad match keywords or leaving search match on will signal to the app store to try to find an audience for your keywords.
You just you don't want to do that. Trust me.
You
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just want to target your exact keyword title. This campaign has been running for seven days and has cost me a total of $66.3.
Then once my app was indexed and ranked for the terms, I switched it off. So remember, when you launch your app, you
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get access to the app store boost, but you kind of need to pay for it. Don't pay and you miss out on those crucial first downloads.
And those crucial first downloads are actually more important than you realize. They impact the entire future trajectory of your app store
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rankings. And it seems the first few weeks of the app launch informs the app store of everything it needs to know about your app, its target market, popularity, and where it will rank you in the next 6 months.
So, it's important to get your launch right. Plan your
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launch. The more downloads you get for your app in those first few days, those first few weeks, the better.
Don't limit yourself to the app store optimization path. Start promoting your app everywhere you can.
For the Swipe the Cat launch, I didn't just limit myself to the App Store. I took to X to promote
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my app the moment it was available. The moment I set up the visibility ad campaign, I tweeted, "New app is live." I made the viral swipe trend into a real game.
We'll attempt to grow this to 10,000 downloads by Christmas. This
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strategy follows Jack Frick's launch strategy. He announced his new app with a goal of $5,000 per month, got $5.4 million views, thousands of downloads, and created an entirely new revenue stream for his business.
So, why did it
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work? Jack's post actually has two hooks.
A hook specifically targeted to his audience, other indie builders, where he announces his app is live and sets a goal of $5,000 per month. There are a lot of solo builders who want to see others succeed and they want to be
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part of the journey. And when someone sets a goal, it activates something in your brain.
When I see this sort of tweet, I immediately think, "Oh, I want to help this guy reach his goal." And this builds early momentum for the post. The second hook is a bit more subtle.
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It's aimed for users outside of his audience, normal everyday users. And if you're lucky enough, you break out of the builder bubble and reach a wider audience, likely showing your post to nearly every single person using X that day.
But to make this work, you need to
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invest in being part of a community, and you need to build a following of your own. Alternatively, you'll just have to pay for that type of exposure.
Building an audience and being part of a community on social media sites like X is your single biggest asset as a solo
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developer. It's your cheapest and single most powerful distribution channel outside of app store optimization.
And here's the secret. Nobody is going to build it for you.
You need to be building it for yourself. You need to be putting in the hard work now.
For the
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Swipe the Cat launch, I treated X like Product Hunt. I spent the entire day promoting the launch with the aim of taking over the entire timeline for a day.
But here's the catch. You can't just like spam your app across the timeline.
you need to find interesting
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or insightful things to actually post and talk about. It just so happened that I launched the app while I was on a road trip to Sydney.
I was literally in the car on the highway and that's kind of interesting. That's different and it makes people stop for a moment.
So, I
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took a photo and I posted it. Shipping on the road, 8,000 views, 155 likes.
The post is actually a repost of my launch announcement and this gives users more context. The app is live, showing a demonstration of it in action and how to
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actually download it. I use the same technique multiple times, running a competition, providing a tutorial on how I built the graphic elements, and even link back to this tutorial.
This isn't just a vanity metric. This resulted in real downloads.
And those downloads are
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seen by the app store and help with your launch. In app store optimization terms, this is called download velocity.
the number of downloads that occur off the app store from external sites and every download counts, especially in launch
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week. Unfortunately for my launch, this was the day Cloudflare went offline and people just couldn't access X, destroying the momentum I was building and crashing my launch in its tracks.
But just another lesson here on how unpredictable launches and marketing can
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actually be. You can't rely on a single tweet, a single post, or a single viral reel.
We've covered how to successfully launch your app, why it matters to be seen in the first week of launch, and why you should be investing your time into the launch of your app. Now, how to
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sustain that growth over time without spending huge amounts on ads. And this is by far my favorite lowcost hack ever.
Word of mouth. turning your existing users into little marketing machines that spread the word to friends, promote
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your app on social media, and on private messages. The key is to create moments within your app that are sharable.
And I call these sharable moments. It could be an interesting stat, something you've created, or even something interesting within the app that's worthy of being
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shared with friends. The more sharable moments you can create, the better.
Then start to think how you can brand the sharable moments. When someone takes a screenshot from your app or they tap the share button, it should serve as a promotion to your app.
This is free
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marketing. And you don't even need to go all out with this.
In Swipe the Cat, I identified the most shared screen will most likely be the game over screen. The screen where they get a top score and they can share their reward with a friend.
So I made this screen as
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screenshot worthy as possible. adding an award graphic, a top score, the app branding, and the app logo to the top.
Swipe the cat. This is the only part of the entire game loop.
The only part of the entire game where it stops the user
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in their tracks and waits for their interaction to move forward. And this was entirely intentional.
I want users to take a screenshot here before they proceed. I want them to feel an emotional connection to their score.
and I want to share that score with their
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friends. In a future version, I'll also add a share button here to encourage even more word of mouth growth.
And this little feature really makes a big impact on the growth of your app. And think about it for just one moment.
If for every five people who downloaded your app shared it with a friend, that would
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give you an extra 20% more downloads just for adding a simple sharable moment. Over this three-part series, I walked you through my entire app building process from start to finish.
And I hope you can now see that building a profitable app isn't this huge,
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mysterious thing reserved for big companies with giant teams and giant budgets. I hope that you can see that it's more accessible.
In part one, we started where every good app actually starts with ideas, validation, and market research. We looked at how I find
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opportunities, how I measure demand, how I check competition, and how I make sure people are actually searching for the thing I want to build. In part two, we took that validated idea and turned it into a real product.
I showed you exactly how I build the apps, the
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strategic decisions I make every step of the way, and how I go from blank screen to a live app as efficiently as possible. And in this video, part three, we covered the part most solo developers struggle with the most, marketing and distribution.
How to actually get people
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using your app, how to get your first few downloads, and how to rank on the app store even with a tiny budget. We talked about building your app store optimization strategy before you write even a single line of code, about choosing keywords using exact matches,
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structuring your title and subtitle, and how the recommended search list actually works. I showed you my exact launch strategy, why the first week is everything, why you need download velocity, and how to use simple app store ads campaigns to trigger
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visibility when it matters most. We talked about launching on X, building a community, and why your social media presence is one of the strongest assets as a solo developer.
And then we covered long-term growth. how sharable moments inside your app can create word of mouth
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loops that keep your downloads growing long after that launch week is over. If there's one big takeaway from this whole series, it's this.
Anyone can build a profitable app today. You don't need a team.
You don't need a huge budget. You
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don't even need to know how to write code anymore. What you need is strategy.
You need to validate. You need to build efficiently.
and you need to know how to get your app in front of people. That's the process that has generated me over $1.19 million from the app store and 1.7
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million downloads and is exact same process you can use to build your first or maybe even your next successful app. Thank you for watching this series and I hope that you build something amazing.