App Growth Hacking Strategies - Interview on The App Man Show

coming up coming up is an interview I did on the Jeremy Callaghan show YouTube channel podcast where we talk about ASO Apple features and a ton of app growth hacking strategies so watch this interview welcome to the app or not - app podcast with the app man Jeremy Callahan but we talk about why apps are not a luxury item and are essential to your business success I've been in the mobile industry for over 20 years and the question I always get is - app or not - app definitely you must app mobile apps can help your business reduce costs increase leads and reduce manpower that app is not a luxury item it's a necessity so let's get started making you money welcome to that app or not - a podcast I'm your host Jeremy Callahan where I talk about how apps are essential to your business success I love giving tips strategies and introducing you to interesting people with achieve success and this week

I'm bringing you Steve P young Steve's the creator of app masters and he has a plethora of content on his website he's got a podcast YouTube videos an online course and he does this thing called app masters connect where he brings together experts in the app development and out marketing field and he masterminds with and he's not just bringing experts together he's an expert himself he specializes in getting people featured in the app store we're going to talk about that App Store optimization and the thing I love about your podcast man and your videos is you get really good free information he's an absolutely natural teacher and look at that smile it's the lighting how you doing thanks Jeremy that was an awesome intro thank you so much like knowing a little bit more about connect like I love the way you put that together I'm gonna steal that yeah I mean here's the thing for my podcast I always want to

say welcome app nations yeah what's up nation thanks for having me on

you know what you're all about and what your business actually does sure so I started in the app space since 2011 decided I was doing this on the side doing I was at a start-up in San Francisco doing more of the growth marketing side of things 2013 I love podcasts I was like oh I love the app space I have this small little side business in the app space and I just kind of hit me one day I was like oh I should just interview people in the app space that have made it and learn from them so that maybe this side business can turn into a full blown business cuz I wanted to always be an entrepreneur I used to sold sell cassette tapes back when I was in elementary school Jeremie so did that six months after starting the podcast I interviewed the co-founder of Shazam Cross the creator of Crossy Road color switch all the big names in the space through that built up an audience who then started coming to

me for app marketing help and so after starting the podcast six months later enough started coming to end up leaving that's our job to pursue this full-time and so what I sort of focus on is helping out businesses and being there like chief marketing officer and figure out like what strategies work from an ASO Apple feature perspective different underpriced marketing campaigns is what I try to focus on yeah I mean everything's pretty much a lot of the stuff is free and I put the paid program together just to selfishly document everything that we do right so anything happens to me shoot it's all under at masters Academy this is my documentation for it so this kind of serves as an SOP for some of my employees too and at the same time I'm being able to just say hey guys look if you want the inside scoop on it and see like in a more structured manner then that is at masters Academy so it's a month it's a membership

program you can see with video courses that you can see everything that we do but a lot of this free stuff and a lot of the really good stuff is already on YouTube for free so if you're able to follow all that stuff it's pretty much I would say like 80 75% of it is already on YouTube and then it's just not structured right so unless you're like following along and kind of following all these little things then great but if you're not then you know it's more structured under the Academy cool what's that yeah whatever the new is yeah yeah crush it and now it's crushing my ass and basically the key he said that just that if you want to go and look for all the stuff that I'm talking about it's free I just put it into the book so it's nice in a nice digestible format right cool man by the way I'm in the bay area as I grew up but I was born in Burma Miramar came to the Bay Area when I was six years old and been here

ever since cool cool so you got a corporate job before right so we're you doing any like program so college life just because you brought programming I majored in business and minoring in computer science so I know a little bit of HTML and PHP so when I first got started the app space I made my own apps like I learned how to program I use Corona SDK and I learned how to program and launch my first apps but in my corporate life I've always done digital marketing so online marketing different growth hacking techniques I mean when I say growth hacker people I think when people talk about scraping that's when you talk to a real growth hacker it's like oh I get like you scraped like I love scraping you know like that stuff really fascinates me so I've been able to put like different scripts together using Google Docs to scrape different like websites and get email addresses and cold email and do these type of tactics

that you know like people might frown upon but I love like it's it's something different different me okay you want the

real honest truth so for the podcasts I loved listening to podcasts right and so I was like I can think I keep I think I can do this I've wanted to be secretly a game show host I'm gonna do that Jeremy I'm gonna turn 40 in like a couple of years and then in my 40s my goal is to become a game show host but that's why I wanted to do the podcast I was like I wanted to always do it I didn't know what I wanted to talk about because I didn't want to talk about general entrepreneurship then it hit me one day is like Oh stupid duh but you have an app business apps are growing yeah start a podcast on apps dummy then I finally did that now the YouTube side it was a very vain reason I actually saw a friend of mine and he was on YouTube and I was like holy cow he's doing a lot of YouTube content he's like yeah it's the best decision ever I'm like he's saying that great on YouTube I think I could we do a little bit better than on YouTube

than him so I was like forget it I'll do that I'm not just gonna sit here and be like do better that guy and not do it I said I think I can do better than him I'm gonna do it and so I just started doing more did you do it on a regular basis when you first started out that's the hardest part is to try to do it on a regular basis podcasts I've sort of systemized and so there's a good flow of guess there's everything structured right everything there's a process with YouTube I'm like what do I talk about what do I you know I don't wanna be boring this better be a good topic and so figuring out which topics to talk about or just recording that's been a little bit harder to systemize them so I just get that out - yeah same area cool man so I have a lot of like let's call them noobs new new people that are in kind of the game and I was to tell people when they come to me they always that's how much does it cost to develop

an app I say well whatever it's gonna cost it's gonna cost 100,000 you need another option for marketing so let's get into your background and expertise in marketing you know like what's just my level just tell people what ASO is and why it's one of storr SEO so if you're looking for a channel where you don't constantly have to pay for downloads ASO is a great channel for that so essentially just like what you would what you would do on Google with SEO you do this sort of the same tactics with ASO and it's and it's and what kind of volume can you see from that like I know a lot of people search actually search for apps in the App Store a lot of people don't know that that people actually are searching for keywords in the App Store I'm not gonna give you these random stats that these ASO tools because they obviously want you to do it but I like you know like 63% of downloads come through search but most

of those are branded terms and so it's kind of like duh yeah Facebook cat those are probably the most common search on keywords in the but I think in terms of how much you can get there are people doing millions of downloads a year and maybe maybe a month I gotta talk my friend but they're doing millions of downloads and millions of dollars in revenue purely on organic search just on search alone right I got a friend who runs a seven-figure business and he's gonna be at master's connect and she's on search alone right and so that is the leverage what we work with clients so like instead of one client that is a recent case study he's doing about 50 downloads a day organically and you can do that with an iTunes Connect you can pull the Downloads by search and we doubled that to a hundred plus downloads my bigger name clients were doing thousands a day you know we weren't like 10% so that was

like I put this little ASO calculator but that's like a hundred more downloads a day that we got for him that's about three thousand a month and so it's like you know you you start building it up and so as you get more downloads a month I think that percentage increase becomes smaller but if you're doing like 10 to 20 to 30 or 50 doubling those downloads is pretty easy with a as oh yeah and are you mainly just for the people out there listening when we talk about it so it's mainly the title of the app the description of the app and then D the keywords are you also talking about these flash screens and screenshots and stuff like that or is that separate yes so I I'll break it down for both right yeah I'll give you actionable tips so from Google Play you're gonna focus on the app name the app title the short description and then the long description the two biggest impact that we've seen is just by optimizing the name and the

short description from Google play's perspective on iOS you have the app name you have the subtitle and then you have the description what we've seen is we usually just optimize oh in the keywords field yeah right where you have a hundred characters so we optimize all three The Happening subtitle and key words and then we seem pretty good growth just using that we don't touch the description too much so you want to get those keywords right all right secondly after you've done that you've optimized your name for actual search and downloads then you definitely want to look at your app icon which is the first thing I look at and then your screenshots so one client I suggested screenshots but ugly dude we got to change that it looks like 2008 9 where there was boxy 3d screens were really cool and so I said you got to stop them and grow up it's flat now it's all about flat design so we we just

redesigned his app icon and then on Google Play you can a/b test live a/b test so he's doing pretty well in Google Play that was a day right okay let's say B test live on there and we increased his downloads by do nothing else germy nothing else Justin you want app icon by 50% I just want to make sure everybody out there hurting because you said it kind of fast was you mentioned a be testing and one of the things you you say and I've heard you say it in your other videos it said you have a listing in iTunes and you have a listing in Google Play so you can do different things in both and actually you see if one is having a bigger than that right on Google Play I'll slow down for you Google Play you can live a be test so it's part of the Google Play yeah yeah in the App Store it's a part of it you can live a B test your screenshots your app I think you even do your app name and your short all that stuff but

definitely your screenshots and your app icon are very important so the tests like conversion because you can get way you can increase your conversion so you don't have to optimize your downloads like I mean keywords all that is gonna say the same but if you a be test your app icon you actually will see a lift in downloads you might not but if your icon isn't up to part you you will see a good lift right to is it you do actually you're you're you're tracking it if something is actually going up or down whereas most people are just like they could kind of get a feel for it so yeah thanks cool let's switch gears a little bit so I know one of the things you get you get an app's featured in the App Store what do you it's 13 16 you've had now 15 15 yeah yeah that's awesome man so just tell people kind of at a high level of like what would it mean if you just had a featured app what would you sure

well darling you've been rolling around in money now I think from a downloads perspective anywhere if it's a game six figure downloads 100,007 so it might reach high five figures low six figures so non games are you know they don't do as well as games how long one day a week oh yeah good question so usually about a week yeah so you're seeing like what 50,000 installs in a week for a long yeah yeah exactly and then you know for a revenue perspective obviously everything goes up right I can compare it like one of my clients that I'm referring to right now we did a bunch of different things so we did product on we did the pay to free campaign we did a Twitter influencer campaign and then we did an apple feature we've gotten a fold feature so we're able to do about a thousand on products on two thousand using the Twitter campaign ten thousand no no twelve thousand yeah twelve thousand doing the page of free campaign

so this is for a meditation app and then about fifty thousand plus for an Apple feature and then pay too free and Apple feature you saw an immediate increase in subscription revenue like bone right and so that's the impact it's just not just the downloads impact just when you get featured by Apple people obviously believe that's a good app because apples featuring it their editorial and then they're obviously gonna subscribe a little bit more than usual yeah and obviously you've got a you got a pay him do the legwork to get featured in there but I mean the return on your dollar substantial yeah it's hard but once it I'd the way I feel about it is it's hard but if you put in the work it will happen and so if you're trying to do PR versus an Apple feature which both are very much editorial then go for the Apple feature because the PR might not get you the downloads that you're looking for whereas an apple feature

will they're very similar in that you have to tell a good story is the build a good product and then you have to hopefully get somebody on the editorial team to say yes right right and so if somebody comes to you and they want to start this process of trying to get featured when do they start there they're not going to start ones the apt to lie right you want ones the ideal time to start this process for games generally I say start it before you launch so Apple will ask for if you go to I'll give you two tactical tips here Apple Google has this too although you have to do some googling around but Apple has this website called App Store calm slash promote and it's just this huge forum it's a generic form actually does work people have watched my youtube videos and gotten featured by just filling out that form you want to fill out that form they on that form it says six to eight weeks so if you're a game

one of the games we got featured in November of 2017 it was game of the day we pitched them six weeks before we're about to launch now Jeremy the game was already it was already we could have made it live the next day already proven the App Store the developer was very patient with me I said look this is a new process they asking for six weeks so let's give them a six weeks he said all right cool boom six weeks later we're gonna launch so you gotta fill out that form for your a game you want to do it before you launch because I don't see too many games being featured that aren't brand new all right that's the only reason there's my gut saying it not anything else for non games I don't think it's as important right you can get featured any time you want that meditation app we he was out years years before we started working together we were able to get it featured so when there's a significant update or

something's new you're able to get that featured and our latest app that was featured this last month January 2018 it was a non game and got a featured it wasn't did pitching before we're about to launch but it's not necessary so obviously you work with clients you have you know ASO the App Store features are those kind of the two main things you tell the clients what do you know we stood on a team we started rebranding because I didn't want to be known as just these tactical things as we started to see success stories develop even when they didn't you uh use us so one client we said hey you know do you have a recommendation for for snapchat house like yeah go check out these guys and they've done phenomenally well on that so we've sort of rebranded to be more of a chief marketing officer role where we just help clients with what we do best but also consulting them to see what they're the right strategy is for them cool and

do you do anything like like before I launch in and out like maybe two months before do you help out with like social media and stuff like that can you do campaigns to get more followers or stuff tour or interest I should say no I don't execute on that I don't execute but I can tell you yeah that's why I feel like I'm good at Jeremy like I'll be like yeah you want to grow your Instagram following you should check out these guys because I've used something similar or I've heard from these other people I'll just be honest like I heard these guys were pretty good we might want to check about so it's like being the marketing space we have all this knowledge and then it's just being able to figure out which app and what marketing channel makes sense for the type of app that you have yeah I saw it was like it was like text basically sends you a positive text every day I forget the name of it right offhand and

I looked it up and like I actually looked at their Twitter and their Instagram about a year before they launched and like they were they were starting these challenges like hey a 10 day challenge you know send your a family member positive messages and the next day would be like send somebody that hates you a positive message it was like these challenges and they were getting like they had a couple hundred thousand users when they like on all the social channels when they launched geez pretty good idea I love that story because I say this sometimes to people who want to who don't have a nappy or they're making an app I'm like do you really need this to be an app because you probably don't write your you can't test that idea on social media right and if they did they're like hey let's try this maybe this will work maybe they were it wouldn't but I'm gonna easily test this okay let me put some

challenges together let me do this oh it's picking up steam okay this would work really well as an that because obviously it makes sense we get a text message or we see a little push notification and it's positive messaging is like all right there's something here there's ways to like sort of validate your idea without actually building an app first and foremost people coming at what's the first step in developing an athletic prototyping and they go Google how can I prototype I was like whoa back up there's a lot of ways you did what are you going to test for you actually assume like well that all the real estate agents will use this you're the expert jury useless all right right wanna take your money yeah I like that I like that okay so uh last thing I want to talk to you about is this networking man I think you're crushing it over there with the what is it masters connect your column mm-hmm yeah

so tell us about you know what was the nexus of that idea what you've seen kind of come out of that the nexus of the idea was so I got I left my startup job because I joined a mastermind I would say its prime the primary reason because what happened was i din 2013 july and i notice in that mastermind it was just a lot of people like me who've always wanted to be an entrepreneur but didn't just pull the trigger for some reason right and i started noticing people in that facebook group saying hey guys i just set a date to leave I said Dave I told my boss I'm gonna leave and that gave me the energy to be like I can do this like I think you can do this so I've met some really great people in there so I've always believed in the mastermind idea so I even launched my own mastermind because I loved it so much in the app space right when I was leaving I was like hey guys I'm just looking for 10 here's what we're gonna

do we're gonna really help each other grow so I've always been a big believer in this now I'm about 2015 I decided a few mastermind members were gonna be in town in San Francisco the Bay Area so I was like hey I got an idea got you know like we're all around here why don't we just set a day we'll go to somebody's house and then we'll do this format this match my format talk about our businesses and we'll help each other out so we had about six people there and we did it awesome dude this is go great like and I just remember like that day I was just thinking back and then we did it again 2016 I was like oh my god this is great I started thinking like this is so great like can I build this and can I build an event around this where this is the focal thing and so I said let's try it all right and I did it in 2016 did it was like horrible like really bad generally I had one of my speakers there who I asked

again 2070 she's like oh that party you shouldn't go that it was just a drunken party with a bunch of people and people getting into the pool like it was just a hot mess right and I did it with a partner we kind of rushed it but in 2017 I said f it I'm gonna try again I'm gonna do this all on my own I'm gonna do it the way I want to do it and so day one we have speakers and we're breaking the ice so every person that attends or even speaks gonna get up there talk about your businesses talk about your favorite failures these three questions that I throw up for everybody just so we can break the ice and get to know each other behind the business in a way right who's the man behind the business who's a woman behind the business so everybody does that Dave when I'm gonna break the ice I want to play games that's what's happening in LA it that's somebody who's gonna organize a little game for us to at the end of

the day the day two is all this mastermind format that I used to do with my friends in a more structured and formatted way because what I've learned from doing those small little things is people will talk on if you let them talk on forever so I have a time limit for every single person buys for this 15 minutes for that seven minutes for everybody so I want to make sure even the shy people have a chance to talk so it's all structured and then just goes boom boom boom and it's all there just and I called it connect because it is really so that everybody who comes there can make meaningful relationships and then help each other out and so we've seen some pretty good results people have been keeping in touch build real friendships out of it and I hope to continue this even though it's a pain in the butt to organize and get going yeah I was looking forward to seeing you man I was like dude I didn't

even need to be there during that launch and I know how it gave you a lesson regardless yes yeah man and for anybody out there listening right now just just pay attention to that part you may not be in that space or app development or marketing but if you're looking to expand your network that's a great idea man just you know start small with a little mastermind group and then expand it out you know it's a good way to get known to your peers as opposed to in like just the general population so why'd you start the podcaster me well basically to get get more information out there you know to help people out a lot of people were asking me about apps I had a couple years back I actually made a course like how it would turn your idea into an app I was teaching it at General Assembly oh yeah nice so it was for non-developers it was just like hey if you have an idea here's all the steps you need to do to hire develop or

get a style template all the different things and nothing really ever became a bit but it was always a good idea and you know I just had a lot of expertise that I want to share with people and then on top of that you know I'm I'm in business for myself like you it doesn't hurt I was telling my friends a painter because actually this is a reason I actually started he came to my house and I just got my house painted yes well why don't you call me and I said dude I haven't talked to you in four years and I think when I needed a painter I didn't even think of you and I said if you would have just called me every now every but if I would have still be talking to out my call mark okay house and I was like god I'm losing business that way but people just not know that's a great point once I started putting videos up just saying on an app developer like I was surprised how many people don't even

know but I did it like are close to me like any other job seemed successful hey man so I'm gonna wrap up today really pleasure having you on the show today tell people where they can find you and get a hold of you if they want gets more expertise yeah it's at masters dot Co and hopefully by the time we have the dot-com so you can do calm I'm Cheryl redirect to Co but it's at masters dot Co cool and if you search for you and Steve P don't forget for pointing that out yeah because I have a friend named Steven Young who sends me he's a real estate guy said if he's pH and Stephen but whenever I see these emails like we're gonna be area to right yeah okay cool man thanks for having happened come on podcast a I really appreciate it