Meet the Indie Developer with 7M Downloads & Apple Design Award

What is up at nation? It is Steve P young founder of Appmasters.com. The most action packed content from the top mobile experts. This is the app masters podcast wit

What is up app nation? It is Steve P. Young founder of Appmasters.com. In this video, you're going to get a snippet from one of my favorite interviews from our previous virtual summit, which you can access for free by going to masters.com/summit. You'll get all the interviews instantly. So go sign up there at masters.com/summit. This is the place you go when you want action packed content related to growing the app downloads and your revenues.

And today I've got a phenomenal guest, took us so long to finally put this together, heard about this game. So long ago, and I reached out to him on Twitter. I was like, right, let's do this interview. And a year later we finally hit record and are doing this interview. But if you don't know the guest, his name is Ryan McLeod. He is the designer, the creator of the award-winning Apple reward award winning. App and game, you got to check out.

It is called black box, super excited to have him on Ryan. Welcome to the summit. Thanks. Ma'am and then the, the launch. So you're like, Hey, you know, it's kind of like, it would be nice if it takes off. So you had no expectations, kind of like I'll reach out to Apple if it gets featured. Great. But then you get featured back then, man, that feature hit these days. I feel like a feature, you know? Okay. Not like back then.

It was. Yeah, it's a fraction now of what it was then that stuff was crazy. Um, yeah, I think that plan was, I wanted to try to make this work, but I knew if it didn't like I'm privileged enough to know that I could move to the Bay area and like find a job or do something, but I really wanted to try and make this work, even if it wasn't that sort of salary or something. Um, and I could, I could see the path to that from the beginning, but I kind of, I didn't realize how much constant work.

Uh, being an indie developer was, I thought you kind of launch it and have like a gold rush. Uh, and then you watch that graph just like really plummet. So there were there wasn't a complete game plan, but I think like I had built things to make money in the app. It wasn't a free app and I was hoping that it would kind of could go viral in little ways, but friends would ask me like how many people are expected to play it.

And I would tell them 10,000, maybe it would be like really awesome. And in my head, I was thinking like a hundred thousand would be really cool, but who knows if that's possible. Right, but, uh, just hit 7 million the other day. So that's awesome. The numbers feel very different. Congrats, man. I think you should be extremely proud. I hope you are because not very few people ever hit a million and to hit 7 million. Like I always feel like with Indies, you know, you hear all these numbers and I want to be like their biggest cheerleader.

Be like, dude, that's freaking amazing. It's it's, it's, it's really hard to remember, like how the numbers change, where now I look at something and it's like, Oh, you know, only a few thousand people from that feature or whatever. And it's like that used to blow my mind. There's all these individual people everywhere. And it's like, it's important to keep it human and like read the reviews and get like fan emails and fan art and stuff like that.

And it's just awesome. It's really, really, really, it's been rewarding. Yeah. All right. Well, you know, Ryan said we can go like three hours, so let's see if we can go there. What are the things that you implemented later that you wish you had implemented during that launch? I feel like a lot of things I wish I implemented now are probably obvious to people starting out, but maybe they're not. Um, the, the biggest one was like, at the time I thought I'll have 80% of the content be free.

Cause I really want people to like share this and get really hooked on it. Like, and then the diehard people that get that far, it will be a clear purchase for them. Um, that's not, not the case. So it took me forever to sort of realize it's like most of the purchases are happening in the first like day or two or three. And I have tons of friends. I would watch. Where they would get really far and show me their, the grid of the game.

And they wouldn't have had bought the paid stuff and I would ask, um, and they would say, well, I haven't gotten there yet. Like, I don't deserve it or something. The game is set up that you can kind of solve in random order, whatever you want to, but moving that purchase up like way earlier. And making it lock thing more of the game, uh, helps a lot. And just making that less confusing for people. I used to have free packs and paid packs and people thought because the free ones looked the same, that the paid one would unlock just after if they solved all the puzzles, they didn't understand it was only paid.

So there's people like trying to complete the entire game before they bought that end part. And the game is really hard. So a lot of people. You get frustrated and stop at some point. Um, even though they've gotten a lot of value out of it already, what are, you know, I'm so glad you say that you didn't, and I don't think it's obvious because I talked to a lot of game developers and, you know, doing our Friday YouTube live streams.

I've been looking at a lot of apps giving them feedback and just live on the stream. And I say, look, I think you have a very short window and I'm glad you said it because it's sort of like. Confirms, what I've been saying is you have very short window of like a seven day window where I think people want to buy. But after that, it becomes so much harder. People are happy, super exciting. You know, we're all human, right.

When I'm positive in a way. And so you need to sort of capitalize on this like excitement level. When it, when they're there, you can do that. What are some of the things that you started implementing? You know, we talked about this before we hit record. I said, okay. Right after I finished that first puzzle, you do ask for that in a purchase where I didn't make that purchase, mainly because I was like, I'm going to be talking to you, like I should support, but like one of the why, why did you, what did you start implementing to get people to buy sooner?

Yeah, so the, the, one of the main things is I remember reading all these reviews. People saying that they didn't think it was worth four or five bucks or whatever it was at the time. Um, for 12 puzzles or 20 puzzles or something. And of course in my head, I'm just like, you played like the entire game for like 80 puzzles or whatever it is. Um, but it's just like, well, if I can get this for free and it's like, ah, so I think one of the biggest things was just like locking more of the puzzles, which kind of breaks my heart.

Cause I just want more people to play and knowing like you're never going to break that 5% conversion. So you're just going to all these people that never get to play. This is a bummer, but it helps people see the value in it. Um, and then just making it like really damn clear. Uh, what you're getting with it. So I used to call it like you had the push pack and the erudite pack and it had descriptions of them. And it's, I think basically now it's like, you get like 30 or 40 puzzles.

Like you get this bonus stuff, you get this other thing, it supports me. Um, it's good for you. Like try it out. And it's not like an instant paywall or anything. It can be dismissed like for a long time you can solve, I think, half the game, 30 or 40 puzzles for free, but. Yeah, I experimented with asking earlier and it, it definitely helped, although I did see that asking just earlier and earlier didn't necessarily help.

So there was some sort of sweet spot in there and I really don't want to put it at like app launch. Um, yeah. Interesting. You must've seen it after another puzzle after the tutorial? I think. Cause like I allow it to happen that early I had played it already and then I played it, replayed it again, and I finished that up. Like the puzzle where there's like a couple of different lights up top and then like, there's some diagonal.

So I finished that puzzle and then it asks me for, I want to talk about that he's using there where you're like, Hey, you get these, all these new puzzles, but you get to support the developer to, did you AB test at all? Do you have you always just said, cause I want to get to talk, ask you about like support the developer, which I love, but like, I want to know if you AB tested it and if did it perform better than, you know, like just free packs and stuff.

That's a good question. I haven't tested that. I wanted to sometimes, you know, as an Indian, it's just like, yeah, I'm not a data scientist and it's not always worth typing into this, but since launching the game, I always tried to make my name, uh, like very prominent and clear, not as like an ego thing, but just to avoid like angry support emails and bad reviews. I think it's really easy to get mad at the company.

Not mad at a person. Um, I have no need to have some fake Royal. We, and talk about me as a corporation. It's just like, it's, it's Ryan, if you're emailing support, it's like Ryan at grow pixel, you know? So by making that really clear throughout the app, I hopes that it would get some, uh, sympathy from people when like things don't go well. And then just help people, like, I hate to say psychologically manage or something, but I just, there's so much weird stuff with how people value digital content still.

And I think I've seen that in other industries with artists or just like making personal appeals and just asking, it's like the way to go with that. As long as you're not being super scuzzy and lying about it, it's like, I think it's worth $5 and you know, here's my emoji asking you. Totally. I had another indie developer where they had a picture of him and his wife and just be like, Hey, you know, support us. It's only this much less than a couple of times.

I was like, that looks cool. The ad-blocker guy, I think is the famous example. A lot of us think of, if you remember that when you installed like blocker. And Chrome, it would ask like the guy and his girlfriend, and it was like, Oh, you want to support us? Yeah. Yeah. But I saw it in a world time. It was, uh, a world time clock app. Cause you know, I talked to everybody at all worldwide. I love that app, but then it was like using it using, just ask, Hey, you want it to support us?

It's only $5 and here's a picture of him and his wife. Yeah. I think I also realize there's like a, this. I'll save this phrasing, but like micro celebrity status or people like having that connection sort of. And I realized that on social media, so I kind of, I keep the voice clear. And when I design like the voice and the copy in black box, I was having so much trouble coming up with copy and voice. It all felt really inauthentic and overly happy to me or something.

And then I decided just to let my. Voice, like, sort of be the voice, the voice of the app. So it's very like dark and sarcastic. And, um, I've been, I've been shifting that to be a little bit more encouraging as it's or mainstream, but, uh, so that, that also helps with like the continuity of who's making it and, uh, donating a burrito to me or a coffee. And that's all it cause people asked if they could give more money somehow, which I thought was crazy, but.

Yeah. Out of that. Yeah, that is cool, man. It's really, really cool. And I think it speaks volumes to how we have sort of transitioned from being too professional and, you know, saying we and blah, blah, blah. And to be like, this is how I doc right. Like I'll write emails the way I talk. And sometimes it's trying to be a little bit funny and trying to be a little bit humorous rather than be so professional too. Yeah.

All right guys. I hope you enjoyed. Just that little preview of the interview. Now, if you want the full interview, which I highly recommend you check out along with some of the experts in the mobile gaming space. We have five videos in total. We decided to do five instead of our usual 10. We've got. Five in total great guests, where we talk about indie success stories with Ryan McCloud. We've got, how do you really scale your game so much?

Great content retention, monetization growth, the pillars of a successful app business. All that. Is in the app, masters virtual summit, our latest one that you can access for free, and it's going to be free until we decided to do our next one. So frankly, it'll be free for a while. Long time at masters.com/summit to get your free access to our latest one that happened in November, 2020, once again at masters.com/summit.

All right guys, until next time, I'll see you on the next video. Thanks for listening to the app masters podcast for show notes and amazing app marketing content. Check out appmasters.com