# How one bootstrapped founder got 4.5 million app store downloads

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV-QG4W2yxs
Duration: 17 min
Language: English
Words: 3450
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/cV-QG4W2yxs

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[0:00] [Music]

[0:07] [Music] it's an honor to be speaking in front of you today I'm going to talk about my four years in an app business I've been doing this for four years full time except for one two month gig where I did some consulting and was miserable I'm gonna find get through a lot of topic so I'll just move on firstly a credibility slide I've I have 14 apps on the App Store I've had over a four and a half million downloads 500 thousand unique users a month one metric I'm proud of is I have over 1.1 million people I could do a push notification to so I could

[0:43] open up my laptop right now and send a message to over a million people and tell them about the new great app I have coming out so I started in a 2009 I just left a job and I I didn't want another job I want to do a startup but the main thing is I didn't want a boss so I searched around for some ideas I had a bigger idea that I thought I'd start with but it would have required me getting funding and spending six months walking around asking people for money and and I felt was tantamount to getting a boss so I decided to scale back and

[1:11] the App Store had about 50,000 apps at the time and I thought you know maybe there's an opportunity there so I decided to to go for that and I I decided just to go all the way and I I put $50,000 in the bank and decided okay when some money runs out I have to get a job I have to get a boss and that that's that was the the fear that I was operating under so did just a few words about a bootstrapping and you know I see so many people they they're waiting for the perfect idea and once they get the perfect idea they're going to start I

[1:43] say just start if you if you don't start if you're not in movement serendipity is not going to happen in serendipity will happen if you're if you're moving and it will happen if you're out connecting with people and talking to people and I love a Evan pagan I he attributes to this to somebody else but he says recognize when you're getting lucky in business and follow that you will get lucky in business but if you don't recognize it it's not going to do your do you any good and I've kind of likened my business to climbing hills I I have this first app I to do i didn't know what i do beyond

[2:14] that but i climb that hill and once i got that done i got to the top of that hill the next thing became obvious and I climbed the next hill and then the next thing became obvious and it it's just gone like that the whole time I treat my business I'm a developer so I treat my business like a like a development project I I do what I call incremental business development so like I develop software I start with something small you know hello world get that working and then add on to that add on to that and incrementally build out my software that's the same way I've built out my

[2:45] business and same thing with marking you can think of it like a system it it will react in certain ways if you poke it something will happen and you you see did something good happen or something bad happen if something good happen you do that again and for me I know people have had success working the job and starting their business on the side I think as a personality thing for me I had to go oh and I had to burn the boats and either make this work or not I'm a product person I do two months of contracting and I always felt like I wish I was

[3:15] working on my own product so I decided after that okay no more either this is going to work or not and if you can't do that if you don't have money in the bank I'd say work really hard for a year build up a war chest and then go all-in and I love this quote from from Seth Godin from his startup school I think that when people are dancing on the edge of failure and they're growing and there's a void over there but they keep moving forward that's when we feel alive as people and that's what it's been for me it's been invigorating and that's why I like

[3:46] coming to micro comps because I get to be around all of you awesome alive people so I decided to do an app and I looked at the App Store and I had used a speed reading program on a PC like 15 years ago and is terrible and there weren't very many good speed reading apps on the App Store so I decided to start with that I created quick reader which I call a speed reading ebook reader it's a you've probably seen people at the at the airport you know with their finger using their finger as a guide the Evelyn wood reading dynamics method so this is basically a computer

[4:21] mobile version of that you can set the speed from 10 to 4,000 words per minute and different kinds of configurations so I created that app with about ten books and I created a lite version with a couple books but I wanted a lot of books the idea was I wanted a lot of books and I wanted you to build import content that you're interested in reading so I added ePub support and then I went to the guys at feed books add some really nicely formatted public domain books and said can I use some of your books and they said sure use whatever you want just keep the the attribution so I took

[4:50] full advantage of that I added about 50 books to quick reader and I created a French German Spanish traditions of the app a young reader edition with a about 130 books and when I was talking to feed books they said we're involved in the standard called OPDs it's an open book catalog standard why don't you add support for that in your app and then you'll get access to all of our books plus all of the other OPDs catalogs out there with over to 2 million books and all you can get access to and I thought that's great see see what's happening here things are just happening I'm talking to people and

[5:22] things are opening up for me so I created by that time so I added the OPDs support by that time had grown into a general ebook reader so I stripped out all the speed-reading functionality and created mega Reader which is just a straight a book reader with access to those 202 million books a highly customizable ebook reader and that did really well then I created a lite version of that and then I stripped out the reader altogether it was kind of interesting I built up all this functionality and then I started stripping stuff out so I created a book search which is an app that allows you

[5:52] to find all those 2 million books but then to open them in iBooks or the Kindle app or whatever reader you want and that's that's not awesome that's a that's a free app it gets about 7,000 downloads a day and overall it's had its at over three and a half million downloads in a year and a half and then I created a paid version of that so I I stripped out the advertising and I added a couple more catalogs and I charged $0.99 for that and cross promoted it from the e-book search app and then well I got involved in this OPDs committee and we were

[6:21] talking about extending OPDs to other media types like audiobooks and they said we know that guys that at LibriVox if we could get them to create an OPDs catalog would you create an audiobook app I said sure it was something I was thinking about doing anyway I'm in the end I ended up creating the OPDs catalog myself but that was actually unfortunate because I found a bunch of other content and allowed me to create other types of apps so a lot of what i do is i content into different types of apps so i created the first step which was ebook search or sorry audiobooks Pro and it's

[6:52] basically the same app all of these apps are out of the same the same codebase so instead of a reader I added in an audio player okay so I created the green one is a free version I just came out with I had about um I found 1,300 French audiobook apps so I created a French audiobook app that's been number one or two in the the French books category since it launched I created an audio Bible app and I have plans for an audio poetry app and a kids audio book app as well I have two I have a free concert app I'm going to do in a Grateful Dead

[7:26] app and a PDF ebooks app so in the end they're gonna be out about 20 apps that came out of come out of the same codebase so this is the journey so far so this is a quick reader the blue and then I added mega reader and that the light green here is ebook search Pro and then the red is audiobooks and there are some other multi colors here some of the apps is have a little incremental income I've got four or five major apps and then the other ones that add maybe fifteen or twenty percent to my my revenue so it's definitely worth it a few words about product management how

[8:00] I decide to you know what to build and a lot of people like in the app store they say it's a hit based business and I would tend to agree but the implication is usually that it's a homerun based business and I don't agree with that I think you can play a perfectly good game baseball with singles and doubles as well you can do pretty well on the app store with singles and and doubles as as I have done and when you create your app of course it has to work well it has to satisfy a need it has to look nice and and for God's sake developers please

[8:30] don't do your own graphics I'm aim for the masses on the app store look the the prices are you know free to $5 maybe at the max you niches don't work very well or they seldom we work so I'd say aim for the masses you have to sell a lot of these so create something that a lot of people might a lot of people read books a lot of people listen to audiobooks those are those are perfect international appeal that the international you know app stores in aggregate are larger than the US App Store two-thirds of my revenue is international based I've localized my apps in 16 different languages 80% of my

[9:10] downloads are international interestingly my number-two paid revenue countries Russia my number two free download country is China China doesn't even register on the the revenue Express create a portfolio so is a is a bootstrap entrepreneur you know I only have so much time than the day reuse and retarget your codebase as much as you can look for adjacent opportunities I can't eat the whole animal you know be as efficient as possible look for different ways to reuse your code base diversify to vice versa file your app portfolio diversify your revenue sources and use your portfolio to cross-promote some thoughts about marketing on the app store visibilities everything right

[9:59] there 800,000 apps in the in the iOS App Store and if you're not in the top 100 of a category list and hopefully in the top 25 you're virtually invisible so that's like one percent of the apps can be in the top one percent so how do you get visibility if you're not in one of those lists what I've done is I've created my own user base and I use that user base is to to promote my new apps too so I have a subset of all those users that I can go to and say hey I have a new app available or hey look at

[10:28] this this app you might be interested in that and this is how I can get in in front of users traditional methods you you should be doing these but they're not sufficient so have good keywords advertise sometimes I have found it doesn't always work but sometimes it does get featured easier said than done press blog social media web but what's really worked for me is a portfolio strategy create levers so I've created back-end infrastructure to send message Trane's localized messages to to my users I use in-app ads and my free apps I use nag messages and my free apps the more screens push notifications and I

[11:15] can control this all from from my back end so devote some development time to that free is really important but you have to offer you have to offer value in your free app you can't just create a light disabled version I found that doesn't work you have to is eben pagan says move the free line you have to offer quite a bit of functionality so or content so that you can get a large number of downloads and then you can use that basically as a cornerstone for your portfolio strategy I'm going to walk through some marketing of vignettes some different things I've tried in and how

[11:50] they've played out first off when I first released a quick reader about two weeks later there were there's one of these Apple tech talk tours up in Seattle I'm in Portland so I drove up to Seattle and I was able to show my app to one of the UI evangelist and he really liked it and he said go show this to one of the the marketing people there from Apple I showed it to her she really liked it the next week I was featured on on the app store which was awesome I've been featured twice one for that that first app in the second time when I

[12:16] released 2.0 of quick reader with iPad support and as you can see you get this great spike and then it comes down kind of levels out I was at a conference last year and one of the former dev Angeles from Apple said if you get featured on the App Store it will change your life I'm thinking yeah for two weeks maybe but you know nothing I don't recommend it I mean it's really awesome and you know when his first happening I thought well I've got it made you know I've arrived but well you can see what happened then the next thing I did was when I released a mega reader I did a

[12:50] deal so I do cross promotion both within my own apps but in this case I cross mode with another developer in the books category and he already had a large installed base you know tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of users and we made an agreement where he he had a book cataloging app so a lots of people like to catalog their books so in his app if you went to the book detail page there was a read button and if you press the read button and they had mega reader installed they would take you to mega reader if he didn't then it would prompt you to buy it and likewise in my

[13:15] app I a button to add your book to the I bookshelf app and if he didn't have it I'll prompt you and this was this was great the very first day within hours I went to number 5 and in the books category and I maintained that for a long time cross promotion is is huge and probably the key marketing strategy on on the app store for independent developers nag messages have worked really well for me so this is in my ebook search might my free app and here is a nag message to go pro to upgrade to the e-book search pro and it says upgrade to ebook search pro and apply

[13:51] and enjoy to more catalogs with no advertising so you can see your here's an ad message image to learn more but 9 uses a service called absol r that allows me to do cross a panel it ixiaro 45,000 people saw that message and then sorry 24 percent actually clicked on the learn more button and seven percent of those actually bought the app for for a an end-to-end conversion rate of 1.5 percent which is really good and this is a this is the impact so when I release a book search pro this is your typical app launch right you know you hopefully have a great launch and then it comes down

[14:33] and you hope it kind of levels out you know around here but it typically keeps going down down down until you're you know making three dollars a day what I did here is I did an AG message in my ebook search app and immediately brought it up and then I did another one here and another one here another one here you can see I was able to use this to maintain the the ranking and the revenue from that app icon your icon super important you know it has to pop on the this is on the phone it has a pup it has to stand out against the other icons I

[15:07] found read works really well once I click on your icon they're going to go to this app detail page they're going to see your icon again and then your your full title here they just see a few letters of your title here they see the whole thing plus your tagline so that's important that's the second thing third they're going to see your first screenshot and this is you can put anything there typically people put shots of their there but you can put a regular advertisement here so you can put ad copy here which is what I've done it's been super effective and then if they scroll down

[15:36] then they might see the first paragraph of your description of your of your actual copy and these screenshot advertisements have been very effective for me you can see here this is eBook search and for the longest time it was around 30 in the free ebooks category and this was around the time that I introduced that that screenshot advertisement and it put me into the the top 20 and I've been able to stay there consistently this is a promotion I did I added a feature to the app where it had a video background to to the book reader and I did a campaign where I played up

[16:13] the dangers of walking and reading and highlighted you know that the padding they put on that Street in the in the UK and the girl who fell into a manhole cover and I did a humorous video which if we have a minute at the end I'd like to show you but just looking at the results from that it was kind of like a Apple feature a great spike and then it came down and kind of leveled out so it was a lot of fun to do I really enjoyed it I'd do it again but it didn't really have a lasting impact on sales so just to recap bootstrapping just

[16:45] start burn the boats go all-in aim for the masses international appeal be exceptional with with your app use the portfolio strategy and cross promote

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