How to Soft Launch iOS Games

What is up AppNation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.co. And what I want to talk to you about today is soft launch. Very, very very important. Now, the big companies, they can soft launch for a year, for 6 months, really take their time with it. So, big companies, I'm not talking about you. I'm not talking to you. You already have your strategies, you got a team of people who are just dedicated to the soft launch. I'm talking to the startup founder, the entrepreneur, the indie out there really trying to live out their dream. And what's the best way to soft launch? Okay? I feel like it's very, very important to do a soft launch. No matter if it's a casual game, a productivity app, whatever type of app you're building, it's always important to do that soft launch. Now, it's important to do a beta release, too, and try to get some of your friends to really look at it and play with it.

So, that's important, but I also think getting strangers to really go through your app who don't have a connection with you and to really tell you the truth, that's even more important. So, you can hire somebody like us, you know, as a marketing agency to kind of look through your app, kind of say, "Hey, here's what I would change." And I've done that for you. But, it's very, very important. And I'll give you a story real quick.

One of our past clients, and a good friend of mine now, but he came to us with an app. It's called Ballified. And it was a great app. I was like, "Holy cow, this is well designed. The gameplay is phenomenal." And he's already made it in the app space. He's doing pretty well already. And so, he wanted our help with the launch of Ballified. And I said, and I told him, and so, here are the few things that I'm going to go into a little bit. I said, "Look, there's some things that we should change. And I think you should definitely soft launch.

Because this is like a Words With Friends meets Solitaire. It's a very social game. So, you need multiple players at at all times. I said, "Dude, you have to soft launch this. You got to make sure the mechanics, the server, the back end, all that is in place." And he finally said, "Okay." So, he came to me, he said, "No, no, no, I want to launch. I want to launch soon." Which most of us entrepreneurs, because we're not a big company, we can't wait 6 months to launch our dream, right? We can't do it. But, he took my advice, we soft launched in smaller countries in Europe, and we got some really good feedback. Single player mode, other things that he needed change. So, 3 months later, he fixed all that, and we launched it successfully. We got it featured in Canada as a new game, hot new games category, Australia, 12 other countries, and then we got a word cat we got a feature a banner feature under the

word category under games. So, really phenomenal launch, like I was super proud of it because, you know, here's somebody that came to us I felt like already made it in the app space, took some of the things that are suggestions, we changed the icon, we did some little things here and there, and that I'm going to about to share with you, but really, really successful launch, and it's one of our really proud success stories. And so, I'm going to talk about the soft launch strategy, and first off, I want to talk about three things that you should focus on before you even get to use your users touching it, okay?

Here are the three things that I see people make critical mistakes all the time. Number one, app icon. Really ugly app icons. They make a huge difference. That's the first thing I see about your app. Like, forget about the design of the app when I get into it, but the first thing I'm going to notice is the app icon. So, what I would suggest, and I always suggest people when I'm on calls, is go on a site called Dribbble.

That's three B's, dribbble.com, okay? And look for app icons on there. So, whatever game or space icon, whatever app you have, there's going to be some phenomenal app icons on there. So, just search for category icon and just look through some of them and you can even buy the icons on there. You can prob- you probably get it for pretty cheap if you buy it through through the designer there. So, do that first and foremost. Number two is really fuck- I had to write this down. Focus on the onboarding. And that's what the soft launch is going to help you decide.

Because especially for games, if I don't know how to work your app or your game, I'm gone. Really, you can get it featured, you can spend some acquisition dollars on it, but if I don't understand how to play or actually move around your app, then I'm gone. And so, onboarding is so stinking important, all right? And the last thing, and it's a little bit harder to measure and it's not one of my strengths, but I'm going to talk about it anyways because it's really important, is retention. You got to be able to retain your users. It's one of the things I remember most about my interview with the Crossy Road founder, creator Matthew Hall. He said, "Look, I said I was asking him a question about monetization. How are you going to monetize?" Blah blah blah. And he said, "I didn't care about that. I cared about retention cuz I can always figure out how to monetize people if I retain them.

You think about all the biggest sites out there, Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, they they can figure out how to monetize because they have our eyeballs. You got to make sure you have the person's eyeballs first and foremost, and then you can figure out all the monetization. A lot of time we talk about monetization, we get a little too ahead of ourselves, all right? So, let's talk about how. Those are the three things. I'm going to just recap real quick. App icon, onboarding, and retention. Okay? Now, how do you do a soft launch?

Here's what I believe, especially if you're a game, even if you're not actually. Let me rephrase. Whatever you're launching, here's what I would suggest. Soft launch in the Philippines, soft launch in smaller European countries. Stay away from UK, stay away from even Spain or Italy, any of the bigger European countries, stay away from. Go after Norway, Netherlands, maybe even Denmark, Southeast Asia, right? Go after those markets first and foremost when you're doing your soft launch. Now, here if you have a game, I'm going to point you to this. Let's go to the screen.

Here it is. This is my TouchArcade. I'm going to put it into the show notes so that you guys can see it, but I'm giving away $25 on TouchArcade with feedback. So, we've soft launched this game that we're working on into the Philippines. And I And because it's quote unquote available, but not available in any other countries except the Philippines, I can generate promo codes within iTunes Connect. So, I generate these promo codes and I say, "Hey guys, I'm soft launching this game.

It's in the Philippines right now. Would love your feedback. And here's what I want you to do. Please reply to this thread with the promo code you took." And I love TouchArcade because it's all about games, right? These guys are all gamers. Two, the one thing you like about the app. And three, the one thing you would improve about the app. We're going to reward one random person a $25 PayPal award. Winner will be announced January 31st.

So, look, man. I'm executing the day, you know, I'm This is like recent stuff, okay? I'm not telling you stuff that I used to do a year ago. Here's what people have said. And this is why I love TouchArcade, especially for games. Here's what I redeemed. I enjoyed the click game play. It's unique. Haven't played any match-three games till now that implemented the genre like the way you guys did. One thing I would suggest that please add a tutorial on the first start. Ads are fine, but please remove them from the gameplay screen as they break the design there, at least for me.

Again, tutorial onboarding. That's what And if you read through this, cuz it it's in the link, you're going to see a lot of people talking about the onboarding, the tutorial, how do I actually play it? It's actually the feedback I gave to the developer. I said, "Look, man, this onboarding needs a lot of work. I don't know how to play it." Something simple as if you know, if you teach people how to play like Angry Birds. If you think Angry Birds back in the days, they really taught you how to play first and foremost before they started adding different birds and different elements into it. You got the hang of it first and foremost. And that's what you really have to focus on is that initial first few minutes of the gameplay of the app.

And really hone in on that and make sure the user understands that. So, that I would suggest TouchArcade. Go into the forums. The forums are under promo codes and contests. And you have the link that I used. So, you can literally copy and paste and make it into your own forms. The other site, if you're not doing a game, I would suggest going after usertesting.com. Here, let me put it into Let me go to it right now. But, it's a great site and just for like I think it's $40. But, really for a couple of, you know, under $100, you can get real people using your app and talking about your app and giving you real feedback on it. And I loved it. We used to do that for websites, new websites we're launching back in the startup days.

And doing it now is just the same thing. But, you get somebody really talking over. So, if you have a non-game, I would use User Testing. Or something I haven't tried out is go even going to Amazon mTurk and doing the same thing that you did with the TouchArcade and asking people for the feedback, too. And with Amazon mTurk, you can say, "Here's your code. Here's the question that you got to fill out." It's more of like a structured than TouchArcade. And here's the form you got to fill out and here's the other form you got to fill out. So, here's the Give me one thing you like about the app. Give me one thing that you would improve about the app. And here's your code to download the the app and let me know. And you probably can pay anywhere from a dollar to two dollar per review to just get some of the feedback from there. And you can limit it on MTurk to just US or certain countries right there. So, that's how I would do

the soft launch. It's really, really important. The game that we launched on TouchArcade was a very casual game. We ended up not launching it and that's a long story, but really good feedback that we got through that TouchArcade for just $25. And a lot of people, as you can see, I'm going to go to to it real quick. I think it was like here. Four pages deep. So, a lot of people are interacting. And the one thing I like about it and the little hack is reply. You know, when people reply to a forum thread, it just bumps it up. So, keeps you top of mind and that's what I like about TouchArcade.

All right. That's how you do the soft launch. Really, really important. It's an a strategy I'm adopting from the big guys cuz the big guys do it for a very long time. Us smaller guys, we don't have that much time to invest because we actually want to launch it and we need to make this work because you really rely on a small team, right? And so, I would suggest just a few weeks. Make sure you've got that nailed down and then get ready for your full launch. And I avoid the bigger countries because I want to get them featured. Just like we got Ballify featured in those other countries, I told them to stay away from it. Everybody wants to go to Australia.

Everybody wants to go to Canada. I say save it for your full launch because you're going to blow your feature potential if you blow if you launch it in Canada or Australia. So, that's why I say don't launch in those countries because we want to try to get you featured in those countries. All right. And it's a lot easier to get a new app featured than an existing app. And unless you have big update, it's even harder to get it featured.

That is the app launch soft strategy. If you like this video, I'm going to ask for you to thumbs up. Leave a comment. Let me know what you think. And if you want to check out the podcast, I know a lot of people just look at the videos. Check out I do have a podcast. If you go to appmasters.co/itunes, you can check out the podcast. Over 500 episodes. I would say I'm the number one podcast. Nobody's done done it longer.

No one has more episodes. No one has higher caliber guests than my stinking podcast. So, it is atmasters.co/iTunes. And I'll see you on the next video. Bye.