tech-company, marketing, mobile-apps, advertising, market-researchI am an indie app developer with little budget and I am about to launch an application. I think my app is really useful and I think it meets a market need. I need to know how I can advertise my app with little or no budget. To be more specific, my question is:
Are there agencies willing to “sell” my app for a percentage of my gains once the app is published? I’m looking specifically for something with preferably with little or no up-front cost.
I wrote the application on my own and my knowledge is centered on coding, so I’m looking for an agency that can perform market research, advertise, and handle those types of administrative tasks in exchange of a percentage of my revenues.
I feel that my app has a lot of potential, and I need to focus on development, so I don´t want to unnecessarily divert my energy into learning about the marketing side.
I live in Argentina, if that’s relevant.
Not knowing anything about your app, it's a bit hard to make a recommendation; meaning there are a number of ways to monetize apps, and some of those approaches are better suited for outsourcing the monetization of the apps; for example, AD platforms just require inserting the code into the app and making sure the interface works with the AD format.
So, here's what I can say, you should expect to give up 5-25% of the revenue per dollar earned; meaning these percentage are based on the gross amount earned.
As a starting point, you could ask your friends to join Apple's Affiliate Program and market your app; they'll get 7% of each sale.
You’ve met what’s called the discoverability problem. If the world knew about your app, a percentage would love it and buy it, and you’d be happy. But they don’t.
There are two viable solutions (I’m assuming you don’t want to throw lots of money at advertising), or there’s luck.
The first solution is to find someone who already has lots of attention and trust from potential users, and get them to promote you. In this situation, you need to recognise that they have the whip hand: it’s way harder to build an audience than to build an app.
If this appeals, then you want to divide your attention between large and small user bases. As you can guess, the bigger the audience, the harder you’ll have to work.
The second solution is to focus your attention on building virality into your app. If your app makes it super-easy to share with others, and if the value in use goes up the more friends you have using it, then you can start small, knowing that even modest marketing success will pay long-term dividends.
Acquire 100-1000 users through different Growth Hacking Techniques (or even direct advertisement)
Usually Growth Hacking works this way : Do something you can do for someone bigger than you in exchange for exposure.
One that worked really well for me is to organize a free lottery for a salon. 2000 people signed up.
Another one would be to do Guest Blogging or even just program a mobile app for a famous website that doesn’t already have one (and is willing to help you in return)
Then, when you have this initial base of users, slowly tailor your product to suit their needs (the “Lean Startup” way, if you haven’t read this book, do it right away ! ).
Gather a lot of metrics during this process.
Once your metrics looks good (e.g. that your test user, no matter how few really love your app and uses it a lot) you’ll be able to raise seed money (then you can burn it in advertising if you want).
Having a product loved by your users takes a lot of time and efforts, don’t spend more than a month before the initial release of your product (your Minimal Viable Product) because the real tough job will be to adapt it to their need, not to build it.
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