Sensor Tower is my favorite App Store Optimization tool. Discover and identify the most worthwhile keywords to include in your app, guide based on keyword suggestions, search traffic estimates, and competitiveness difficulty ratings.
Are you developing a mobile app? Get anything from icons and buttons to your entire mobile app designed at 99designs! You can start your next graphic design project for as low as $199. Visit 99designs.com/Chat and get a $99 Power Pack of services for free.
What’s the number 1 mistake that app publishers make with user experience? Well today’s guest answers that very question and provides insights on common user experience mistakes. Also, listen to why he transitioned out of building apps and into building a platform for app developers and how you can get started if you wanted to do the same thing.
The first step in fixing a problem is always the awareness that such problem exists. Companies nowadays lack the visibility of the problems they need to address in their products and processes. Whether it is a technical, usability, or a performance issue, it can be fixed but most important first step is gaining that visibility.
Common user experience issues to watch out
In their experience, Zahi shares that some of the functionalities that users commonly have issues on are:
Swiping– as detected through heat maps, most users swipe left to get to the next screen. Your apps may not be programmed to respond to these swipes which may be the reason why they cannot get to the next step.
Entering coupon codes – there may be bugs in the component servers which prevents your users to enter them.
Log in functionalities – logging in to Facebook cannot be completed due to issues with specific IOS versions and can be the bottleneck that users cannot move forward.
Complete user instructions – ensure that you place complete and specific instructions to avoid confusion. For example, if you are asking the user to go to Settings to share their location, you need to explicitly place that they have to go to the Settings for their phone, as they may misunderstand and go to the Settings of the game/app instead.
The transition from building apps to building a platform for app developers
Their team had started out developing their own apps but had transitioned over to building platform after noticing that a lot of app developers were having the same challenges as they had. For Zahi, building a service that helps app developers is 10x easier than building a successful app so he is happy that they took this road. So many apps, so many good ideas, so many companies but the average user only uses 25 apps in total so it’s a very brutal market.
How to build a platform for app developers
Zahi’s team started by publishing public data for their product but their first launch was not a successful because they needed more preparation. They didn’t have pricing plans, their product wasn’t good enough yetand they went with the MVP approach, which didn’t work so much for them as they lost a lot of potential customers. After they released the beta though, they came prepared this time around armed with the things they learned from the initial launch. They released something that people are interested in and they were ready – pricing and product-wise.
Tips for indie app developers
Zahi shares that if you are developing an app or game, spend a lot of time in testing the app before release. Provide super easy onboarding experience and ensure you provide the right guidance during first time use. If you have an app that provides value, make sure your users will be engaged from the moment they open the app.
What is the #1 thing you’d like the listener to walk away with from this interview?
Take the lesson we learned from our first failure. We could’ve continued doing the app for six more months just to understand that we could’ve cut our losses after three. It’s very hard to put down your hardwork and say ‘this isn’t going anywhere,we have to cut our losses, lets forward to the next thing’ but you should see things realistically.
Sensor Tower is my favorite App Store Optimization tool. Discover and identify the most worthwhile keywords to include in your app, guide based on keyword suggestions, search traffic estimates, and competitiveness difficulty ratings.
Are you developing a mobile app? Get anything from icons and buttons to your entire mobile app designed at 99designs! You can start your next graphic design project for as low as $199. Visit 99designs.com/Chat and get a $99 Power Pack of services for free.
You have created a great app which you were so sure will become a hit once you put it in the app store..but months down the road, nothing is still happening despite shelling out thousands for advertising. This is where Sensor Tower can help developers propel their businesses through market intelligenceto give you insights on how to grow your user base and get the exposure you need.
Our guest for this show is the co-founder of this favorite optimization software in the app industry. With us today is Alex Malafeev, who is set to share to us how Sensor Tower can turn things around for you. He shares to us the following in this session:
A peek at what the life of a professional gamer and caster is all about,
How he met his co-founder, what made them decide to settle in the for app store businessand the brains behind their effective UI,
Fixing bugs on the spot, talking to users and the things they consider as the strength of their products and their company,
The things you can do with the tool, from having a view of the fastest rising apps, the trends in the market, review summaries, app marketing checklists up to sorting ratings by stars,
Their financial beginnings with incubators such as Angel Pad and how they expanded their reach towards a more comprehensive marketing platform
Join us in this great discussion including discovering apps with the highest traffic but with low competition to give you a different perspective on how to approach and start your app business.
App store optimization, competitor analysis, reviews analysis and app intelligence – a battery of offerings from Sensor Tower than you cannot miss to learn about.
Sensor Tower is my favorite App Store Optimization tool. Discover and identify the most worthwhile keywords to include in your app, guide based on keyword suggestions, search traffic estimates, and competitiveness difficulty ratings.
Are you developing a mobile app? Get anything from icons and buttons to your entire mobile app designed at 99designs! You can start your next graphic design project for as low as $199. Visit 99designs.com/Chat and get a $99 Power Pack of services for free.
Chris Barton, the co-founder and original CEO of Shazam, returns in a live interview at the first ever Mobile App Chat meetup and we talk about how you persevere when investors and industry/academic experts tell you that your idea is technically impossible to create and what it feels like when the idea actually comes to fruition. Also there are some great audience questions that you’ll definitely want to hear.
The idea for Shazam came eight years before the launch of the iOS AppStore and inventing the music recognition technology seemed insurmountable at the time. Even the technical co-founder tasked with inventing the technology at times thought it was impossible to develop and the VC investors they had presented the idea to were doubtful of significant consumer demand. After seeing the demo, one VC investor said “I don’t see why anyone would ever use this.”.
Despite all of this, Chris and his co-founders persisted and kept on believing that his idea was worth pursuing. Chris’s “genius” technical co-founder was able to invent the technology after 4-5 months tireless efforts (including almost giving up). After 12 months of persistently wooing mobile networks, they have landed partnerships that got the ball of success rolling for Shazam for its initial launch in the UK in 2002.
The secret is just to choose what you are passionate about because that fuels the persistence that you are going to need.
Some questions from our audience:
When was the moment of breakthrough for Shazam?
While he was in Croatia on vacation, he received a voice mail from his technical co-founder telling him that he had finally “cracked the code” (invented the foundational algorithm). That was the moment he finally knew that that Shazam had a chance to become a real product.
How did you choose your co-founders?
They were people who had competencies needed for the product, had the highest level of integrity, and whom he shared camaraderie with…always great to have fun along the way.
How does Shazam selects its database?
Shazam has relationships with record companies and has music experts researching music.
What is the #1 thing you’d like the listener to walk away with from this interview?
Make something simple that is incredibly difficult to“make simple”. When you conquer that problem, you may have something unique that delights users.
Sensor Tower is my favorite App Store Optimization tool. Discover and identify the most worthwhile keywords to include in your app, guide based on keyword suggestions, search traffic estimates, and competitiveness difficulty ratings.
Are you developing a mobile app? Get anything from icons and buttons to your entire mobile app designed at 99designs! You can start your next graphic design project for as low as $199. Visit 99designs.com/Chat and get a $99 Power Pack of services for free.
Coming up today’s was the first teenager to hit 1 million downloads in the App Store and then later sold his company at the age of 19 and he tells us what he would do to launch his app in today’s crowded ecosystem. Also, listen to his 80/20 rule about developing versus marketing your app and why we maybe doing it all wrong.
Ted ventured into the internet industry at 12 years old when he built the web portal, Red Eye, which earned him about £2k a month. Fast forward to a few more years, he created Fit or Fugly, the app that placed him in the map. The app, which uses facial recognition technology, generated about six million downloads and also got the attention of a big news company, which later on bought his technology along with the app.
Launching apps in today’s crowded ecosystem
Lowering your expectations is a mindset that you have to develop at the rate of how fast the App Store is growing. Understand that failures will happen and you have to brace yourself so you will not be disappointed. But, capture data that you can action on so you can naturally your users and increase their engagement and in turn, your monetization strategy will increase.
Ted’s 80/20 rule about developing versus marketing
In earlier times, you can spend all your cash developing your apps not really paying attention about marketing it. What you only care about is simply putting it live and just cross your fingers if it will be a hit or if it will sink. Ted shares that we have a different the reality in the App Store now. You should spend20% of your cash, your time and your energy developing your apps but you hold 80% back for marketing, promotion and iteration. This doesn’t mean you don’t execute you apps well butit’s important for you to iterate because if you don’t listen to your users, the chances of your app being successful will be remote.
Ted mentioned that they had a very disjointed strategy when it came to execution and marketing overlap which cost them when their application launched prematurely. Along with ensuring communication channels are working properly, these are one of the mistakes you should look out for.
What is the #1 thing you’d like the listener to walk away with from this interview?
Put 20% of effort into developing it but 80% you should leave for iteration. If developers adapt this mindset, then they will have much more success than they do today.
Sensor Tower is my favorite App Store Optimization tool. Discover and identify the most worthwhile keywords to include in your app, guide based on keyword suggestions, search traffic estimates, and competitiveness difficulty ratings.
Are you developing a mobile app? Get anything from icons and buttons to your entire mobile app designed at 99designs! You can start your next graphic design project for as low as $199. Visit 99designs.com/Chat and get a $99 Power Pack of services for free.
Are you losing interest or passion in your app idea? Well today’s guest is a 13-year-old who is changing the way kids view fitness and she talks about a time that she wanted to give up on her app and how she managed to pick herself up again. Also, listen to the part of the show where she talks about the importance of community and you should surround yourself with like-minded individuals.
Our special guest for today is 13-year old Estrella Hernandez, the Chief Inspiration Officer of We Walk games.We Walk is a mobile app which brings gaming, walking and local culture altogether.
Here are the highlights of my discussion with Estrella:
The documentary about obesity where the inspiration for We Walk came from,
The steps she took after the forming of the initial idea and how she turned it into a feasible project to work on,
The role of her parents played in the development of the project,
The doubts that crept inover the years and how she got over it,
About the We Walk app and how Steve Jobs inspired her during the time when she lost interest in the app,
How her dad, Marcos, motivated her to be passionate again, and
How she views the community and what motivated her to build and develop something for her own.
Estrella has an Indiegogo campaign running and I urge all our listeners to support this cause by checking it out. Let’s help this community grow!
