{"id":45226,"date":"2023-10-20T15:42:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/how-i-got-2-3-million-app-downloads-without-spending-a-cent-on-marketing-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:42:00","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:42:00","slug":"how-i-got-2-3-million-app-downloads-without-spending-a-cent-on-marketing-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/how-i-got-2-3-million-app-downloads-without-spending-a-cent-on-marketing-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"How I got 2.3 million app downloads (without spending a cent on marketing) – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
This was originally a 5 part series on my blog at stuartkhall.com titled An App Store Experiment, but here is a summary of the entire story.<\/em><\/p>\n Rewind back to May 2013 and I was co-founder of a music app startup called Discovr. We had managed to achieve over 4 million downloads, raised over $1m and were perceived as \u2018successful\u2019 (unfortunately things didn\u2019t end up that way) in our home town of Perth, Australia.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It was very common for people to come up to me and ask what the magic was to make a successful app. We\u2019d fudged our way through and somehow made something people wanted to download, but could I recreate it?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I was lucky enough to be reading an advance copy of the amazing book The Fortune Cookie Principle which really opened my eyes to storytelling and products.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I was also inspired by reading this advice from the One More Thing conference about how to write a press release. Surely it\u2019s impossible to stand out with a press release like that?<\/p>\n I wanted to build an app in one night, not tell a single person about it and run some experiments on it to see if I could get it to some level of success. I thought maybe I could get a few thousand downloads and make a couple of hundred bucks.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I wanted an idea that I had no domain advantage in at all, so what better for a chair-bound developer than a fitness app. The 7 Minute Workout was getting a lot of press (and buzz) at the time on sites like the New York Times and Hacker News, so I already had some customer validation around the idea.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There were a couple of key goals for the app:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Many other ideas and features ran through my head, including:<\/p>\n Given a short time frame all this had to be cut (for now).<\/p>\n Five hours later I emerged with a couple of screens (dynamically filled with different data) and some text to speech. I\u2019m no designer so there were no graphics, all flat views.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nCreating A Story<\/h2>\n
Hatching An Idea<\/h2>\n
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The Build<\/h2>\n