I Have no Fame and I Must Launch

© Steve Rhodes

People used to believe that building a great app is enough for success. This ”just launch and hope for the best” approach is not working anymore. The cruel reality is that nobody cares about your app, it's just one of many others like it.

The App Store has more then 500000 apps. And the flood continues with many new apps launched every day. Countless apps, great or bad, linger in total anonymity. It is virtually impossible for new developers and their apps to be noticed.

The question is then : what can we do to make our apps stand out?

1. Make a great app

Do whatever you can to make your app great.
It must be

• fast
• useful
• beautiful
• fun

If is just another crappy app than it deserve to die deep down in the darkest corners of the App Store.

2. Make the app/launch newsworthy

With a little luck, this might be the most accessible way. It can become newsworthy in multiple ways:

• Associate the app/launch with a celebrity, a famous product, something newsworthy
• Sync the app launch with an important event
• Create a viral video, photo, infographic, or anything else that can spread like fire.

3. Have a great community

This is in my opinion the most fair and honest way but also the slowest :

• Create a community around your blog or site
• Give valuable contributions to other communities, help those communities rise and evolve. You will rise and evolve with them.
• Contribute with valuables to popular communities like guest posts on popular blogs, artwork on creative sites, code or bug fixes or documentation on open source projects you use.
• Share freebies, byproducts, even open source parts of your code.

4. Spend lots of money

If you have the money, the quickest way to fame (besides doing incredible stoopid things) is to buy stuff :

• Buy ads, banners, radio, TV commercials
• Marketing campaigns on Google and/or Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Interviews, coverage, etc in popular magazines and sites or blogs.

5. Launch the app on multiple platforms

Most prefer to create multiple native apps instead of a single app that runs on multiple platforms.

In practice this means they will first create the iOS app then either the Mac app or Android app. And only then, if the app is successful enough, is ported on other platforms.

A few prefer to go the way of a single application, the ”One app to rule them all” way. This means HTML5. This means the same app (the same code) runs on all smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops.

Launching the app on multiple platforms can be extremely helpful even if your main target is iOS. Even if you give the entire app for free or make lite versions on the other platforms, more people will know about your app and will use the iOS app.

An anonymous app does not matter so make sure make the world knows about it.

6. Wait for the right day

There are developers that finish their apps but don't launch them. They wait for a better day. Instead of launching they try to find a way to change the situation.

Launching an app with success is very hard today, almost impossible. Crafting the app is only part of the story. Don't let your app die before is even born.