This article includes the following:
- The reality for indie developers
- How to take advantage of all the details and get traffic
Note: This article will not cover the code level, but it will probably help you to magnify the value of the code you have written by a factor of 10, 100, 000.
I have been working as an independent developer for four years. At the beginning, I didn’t have any money to promote my App. Later, I was too rich to promote my App. I’ll tell you from my own experience how indie developers can survive in the wilderness and find a way to survive their products when they have no marketing resources at all.
As an indie, you have to survive in the wilderness
It’s 2018, 11 years after the iPhone and eight years after the 4S. Apple’s strategy for the App Store, valued at $1 trillion, has shifted from attracting developers by all means to cracking down on low-quality apps and trying to improve the quality of apps on the Store. App entrepreneurship has already become a red sea, and the price of a single customer promoted by App on the market has reached one knife.
In this fierce market competition, there are too many content and channels, all of which are dedicated to serving the giant companies with deep pockets and the entrepreneurial teams with huge investments. The vast majority of developers do not have the resources to spend ￥10,000 to find the network celebrity blogger to send a micro blog. And because the rate of return is uncertain, even if you can afford to advertise, there is no guarantee that it will be good enough to recoup your costs.
Survival in the wild is something that everyone who wants to become an indie developer needs to learn. This means that you will use every trick in the book to get traffic for yourself, timing, attention to detail, positive thinking, and getting people to come to you when you don’t have resources.
Look for traffic in details
time
This can be a good reference for your App push and App promotion
If you’re ready to do something, don’t send it out. Wait until 10:00 p.m.
There is a working day/weekend time, I have a filter App, for example, Saturday and Sunday the amount of active users is Monday to Friday and two or three times, what if I want to have a purchase discounts activities within the App, or weibo lucky draw, may start on Friday night and Sunday are better end of the night, Monday morning start and end on Wednesday morning, It’s embarrassing. But it’s a case by case, like this article I’m writing right now, it’s Thursday afternoon, and I can post it as soon as I’m done, because people will read it Thursday night and Friday morning. But if it’s 24 hours later than that, it’s Going to be Friday, and then I won’t be Posting this article. I’ll leave it there until Monday morning. This kind of article that encourages people to make money is the most motivated for readers to read on Mondays.
If you want to do indie development well, you need to think about the time dimension.
Change the quantity
There are still details here. For example, “Time Card” and “Flash” two apps, both paid for by a small audience, belong to life is not necessary, and the production of beautiful apps, their user orientation may be more similar, this mutual promotion effect is good. Although Nihon Cam in the middle is a free application, it is also a niche and exquisite application in the field of photography and video. Since it is free, the number of users is much larger than that of paid applications, so it will also have a good effect if it is promoted here.
One more detail, let’s say you have a bunch of apps that you want to feature, and you have partnerships with all of them, and you want to get traffic like crazy. But, afraid of a long list, no one to read, how to do? Here can do dynamic Settings, such as inside the App you write a list of length of 10, but before the show only a maximum of 5, by judging the user mobile phone is installed inside you want to recommend the application of the list from the inside out, they can make full use of space, I don’t recommend to users repeated content.
Price discrimination
Let’s say you create a free app that makes money by unlocking in-app purchases. How many people are paying? Even if you’re doing really, really well, 10% of people paying is still a good score. This raises the question, in order to encourage users to pay, you have to neuter the features of the free version, but for users who are never going to pay, do you just let them go? This is the traffic you worked so hard to earn!
The answer is price discrimination. Make a judgment call at the code level to determine which users are likely to be loyal to you based on usage, startup times, and so on. If a loyal user uses your product many times, even every day, but never pays, then I suggest you make another plan. Paying for these people is not going to work.
A good way to do this is to have these people advertise for you. For example, every time you download a file, force you to share a message to your moments saying “I successfully generated a XXX file in x seconds today”, and then share the name of your app. Or image processing software, forced to add your watermark on the picture, when users want to send pictures, naturally help you promote.
conclusion
Similarly rooted in detail, there are many, if not countless, ways to extract value from your existing code and product. How many you can find, and how much user growth, revenue growth, and practice. Of course, you can also read the following article:
read
Getting Started: How do indie developers solve backend problems
Getting started: I can write code, how to do indie development
Step up: How do developers use data analytics to achieve exponential revenue growth
Advanced: How indie Developers can Monetize In-app Purchases — Subscription