mobile-apps, salesI’m the founder of an app development firm and I’m just 16 years old, thus very new to the business. My app is called “Pulse - fall asleep in 60 seconds”, it was on producthunt.com and has been upvoted over 850 times. In the first two weeks the app was free and reached 5000 downloads, it was about 200 downloads a day; now it’s paid,, it costs 1$ and the download rates are sinking, I went from 60 a day to just 12. How can I increase this? If I make the app free again and monetarist it through Google Ads, do you think I could make more money with it on the long term?
Or generally: what do big companies do to keep people download their paid apps (with not much of a budget)?
A few options come to mind.
Send free promotional codes to medical professionals, especially those specializing in sleep issues (like practitioners at sleep clinics). Include a scientific write up of the methods your app uses to help people fall asleep, or at least some data regarding how quickly people fall asleep with your app. If the practitioners find that the app works, then a percentage of them will recommend it to their patients. (Make sure the free promotional code only works for a certain number or downloads, or a certain period of time.)
Send press releases to journals, publications, and blogs that have featured articles on sleep in the last few months. Make sure your press release is informational, not just hype. Include scientific information (“this uses an alpha-wave soundform known to induce sleep”), statistical information (“in a small group of 20 participants, 19 of them fell asleep within 60 seconds while using the Pulse app”), or endorsements (“I downloaded the Pulse app yesterday, and I fell asleep instantly when I used it last night! - Mary Smith”).
Offer the app for free. After 30 days, or 15 uses, have the app pop up a message that says, “Thanks for using my app! If it has helped you fall asleep, and improved the quality of your life, please consider giving me a small donation. I appreciate it!” Since you’re only 16, you may want to include a picture of yourself to play on the sympathy of customers. Follow the message and the picture with buttons for $1 donation, $3 donation and $5 donation. Each button is an “in-app purchase” for that device.
Figure out a way to encourage satisfied customers to post on their social media accounts. It could simply be a button when they launch the app: “Share on Twitter / Facebook?” To make it relatively painless, the app could have a preplanned message like, “I’m about to fall asleep using my Pulse app. Good night everybody! #PulseApp”
My advice is go freemium, focus on raw downloads and daily average users, and don’t worry about money for now. (Monetization is not always necessary for early stage tech startups to build value. I might rephrase this as: “are you trying to a few hundred bucks next week, or a few million in a year or two?” imo, you want to be in the long game.)
After you hit a number representing “critical mass” (that is for you to determine, but it should be high enough to impress, say, the tech guys on Shark Tank, which is the only time you see decent valuations on that show;)
Then I suggest:
This works for Lumosity, which has revenues of about $23M, and no scientific evidence the service yields any benefit.
The reason I say subscription is that, there may be a subset of your users for which your app really works well. These are the people who will be willing to pay for it, and likely on an ongoing basis.
I pay Microsoft a few bucks every months to use the Office suite, despite other, free tools, for convenience.
The other problem comes with how easy you app probably is to clone. When you reach critical mass, it’s likely other developers will try to gobble up your market share. That’s another situation where you’d have to stay free as a defensive measure, until you could raise the funds to out-market the competition.
Building a recognizable trademark is a powerful tool against competition. You want people thinking of this functionality in terms of your trademark. (Think “google”). Paid marketing is very expensive. It’s expensive just to figure out what works, and advertising rates are dictated by what the deep pocket players are willing to spend for premium visibility. But if you can establish strong name recognition and a big market share, your cost to market will be cheaper than that of your competitors, which can be a critical advantage.
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