(Part 2/3 - 6 Figure App Exit) Little Known App Growth Strategies for Indie Developers

next one all about UA now yeah use requisition for Indie developers I always see Google ads as as the simplest way to do it because you can use the search result as your ally because you only input text you don't need a creative part at that some at that stage and it's easy to drive traffic to your app right away and see people coming in and then you start so you need traffic first of all so once you complete your ASO screenshot blah blah blah so you will start getting traffic but if you need to push harder it's easier to pay Google to drive you some extra traffic first maybe $20 per day or something like that so you can start seeing people coming in smart look recording tracking is working or not push notification is working or not you need that traffic to validate all your features so maybe you assume that push notification is working but it's not in production it's not you're doing it with

Firebase then because you're doing Google ads for iOS right Firebase you're using Firebase to tie in the installs I like it gole ad ver like apple search ads it's Apple search ads is very expensive first of all you don't know your payall performance yet you don't know anything and then you jump into Apple search ads right away it's going to be expensive for you I would rather go with Google search at least it's the less expensive one Facebook ads we need a bit of creativity a video creative and stuff yeah yeah so Google ads only you're like hey it's already low competition said low but check the bit highest bit is seven six something so but still still you can survive with these numbers but as I said you can launch the search result thing first and then figure out how to add a bit of creatives if it's successful I love it it's about testing in small steps before jumping in the ocean I like it I'm going

to get into Facebook ads in uh at the end because I need to add more value to it Tik Tok ads is also big I used it my last my last exit was combination of Google ads with a lot of creatives and Tik Tok ads so it was to scale fast once you have everything in on point like your pay Walling is converting you know that retention is good you can start pushing more money to it and Tik Tok was big because the download button was opening the app store right away but now they have the preing page which is native to Tik Tok so the user can make a decision about going next or not which is a huge I don't like it anymore but I think it's the final way to do it uh in Tik Tok right now I'll add one more fure is Apple search ads like if you have a smaller budget try out BAS basic sometimes basic in the beginning was really bad but now we're finding and I I have a basic campaign running for my app right now and I have it as a dollar cost

per install I haven't looked at the numbers but I know one of our other clients he was doing really well on basic like he was spending four or 5,000 a month just like and I looked at the conversions now the conversions were a bit lower than advance but not much lower but the cost per installs were a lot better and the scale was a lot better on basic so don't ignore it if you got a small budget and you want to test it as well I only activate One Channel Once like nothing is running beside Google ads until I know that Google ads is working so mixing channels you won't have any feedback or data because of the late attribution and all that kind of issues you won't know unless you only running Google ads so that's why I start with Google ads at least first until I figure out the Google ads ecosystem it's working which campaign is sending me good traffic times I pose campaign and start others to see who's making better impact mixing

will will get you lost I don't mix stuff I start going slow which one testing because you are in the dark technically if you have only Google sending you traffic you will know we should not forget that we are talking always about in the context of Indie developer Indie developer doesn't have 20K per month for ads so we are talking about small really small budget so how to get free user Acquisitions through Partnerships maybe small micro influencers up advice Steve you already explained this before up Raven uh product hunt and Reddit so all these kind of communities can drive you free traffic and my tip is to reinvest all the revenue into growth so don't take any money out so all the money you get from Apple payout pushed back into ads you will run out of money before the next payout but that's the game there is a chart known for the payout growth payout growth it's like an escalator but that's the game you have to wait unless

you have growth financing what is the average CPI across each platform depends on the niche I know you can do start trial too but you just start with a CPI campaign I do up iny campaign and then the target is not only install but people potentially doing an action do you start with just a install campaign and then you move to a start trial or inapp event no I don't start with install let me give you the logic behind it because okay I assume that Google knows who's doing these kind of events already from his cluster of data so it's not about my app Google is collecting data from all around the world and already know which are the people that sign up for everything so they know which users are already signing up for anything they cross in the internet so they have the data so I trust them to know for particular keyword which who is more qualified to install and activate my app trial in my in my app so I don't

worry about it George says would you optimize on installs or conversion events start trial on Tik Tok yeah it's but what I don't like currently in Tik Tok is this pre uh landing page you have to add your screenshots again you have to add a little description again and the user after clicking download they will get another Tik Tok native screen before going to the App Store High maintainance you have to build this screen upload your screenshots this is turn off what would be an appropriate daily budget to initiate Google ads campaign you can start with $10 test the waters cost per install or Target cost set it to one and start increasing slowly 24 hours no Impressions nothing dead and you only included text for search result you didn't include any images you didn't include any YouTube videos your the distribution will be very low and it's hard to compete on the search result because in case your Niche

is very competitive in search result y so start with 10 increase your bid slowly and see where do you start getting Impressions from there you will have a feeling what is bringing you clicks and install you have to slowly increase but 10 10 per day doesn't hurt to start fies says which one is performing better in Google ads app install volume or in apppp action yeah it's two different goals that's why they are called goals so if you need to bring installs you do it if you need to bring up in up actions you do in up actions but as I said I believe that Google knows who are the people that do that so you would start with in app action right away one of the main competitive advantages I had before in my exit is localizing the app and the listing and the screenshots so my recommendation for everyone if you need to increase your downloads from across the world localize your listings and screenshots

specifically and the screenshots try to include famous people or loved people within a particular GE so it's more familiar you said time for free but we found a better way which is add free lifetime which doesn't mean that I'm offering a subscription lifetime there so I don't know when's the last time you did this but there start I did say that before they're starting to say app advice is starting to say no to that so I don't know if other websites will say yes to that but if you have a subscription and you have a remove ads app advice in particular starting to say no you have to do something with the so share P links instead of default stup store links so if you are going through forums around the world sharing your app share the localized CPP so make it more personaliz it CPP is custom product page you have to invest a bit of Graphics you can hire people from FIV you can do amazing stuff for $50 and they can offer

you customizable screenshots in figma you can change change them yourself later on localize your listing screenshots so this is the same thing here it's my Advanced tip no one is using this let's say you have a Fitness Wellness yoga app get in touch with yoga stores e-commerce stores offer them a onet toone partnership you you list them as partners in your app and they list you somewhere in their confirmation email because you get 65% oper rate in those emails and my smart tip is to test PL Tex versus banners near the shipping information section in the email because when you open order confirmation email you look there so try to squeeze something in a smart way don't make it spammy but formulate sentence or something to place yourself just where people are looking when they open that email hire VA to list you the store the stores emails there is a way to look in the internet the stores and what what

their emails are and hire same V VA to do cold Outreach emails include the Lo video which is my tip here you can do either do uh a general partnership loom video where you go through maybe some slides or something or you can include a feedback Loom where you scroll through that particular store hey I went through your store this is what I found out I have suggestion maybe we can partner so to increase the engagement instead of sending a general video offer to update the email template you can do it for $5 in fivr you can change their email template to include your ad and include a c c sorry C CPP link tracked using a branch link for each store so you know which stores are performing for you so I call this milking attention so if someone opens an email I'm there waiting for them for them where they look I can position my ad for my app and track everything and analyze it later on to see which store are performing better

for me and people answer if you offer them a win to- win situation they will answer your email store owners so it's a all you're doing is hey I'm going to promote your store e-commerce store and then in vice versa you're going to promote my app so you as I said you add this partner section where you scroll through the logos of the stores and you can even negotiate an affiliate promotion later on if you need to but you can do the win-win so visibility versus visibility for the ranking you need to combine the search download user and review so if someone is downloading your app from the search and doesn't use it that's a signal for app you are not relevant and they will look at you somehow not good it's similar phenomena to Google bounce rate so if someone clicks on something on Google search and close the window really fast Google know that that page W was not relevant same thing with apps try to add fake loading

time in your app buy some time some seconds if someone closes your app figure out a way to re-engage them immediately with push notification of for something based on your use case and my last step is personalize the pushes uh with their location you can do this pretty easily at the local city to the post notification do you need their location or you don't need them to enable location huh no you don't need it's IP based now reviews so which is the struggle of everyone ask them for review as early as possible I don't recommend using App native you are launching you can do it later on when you are more relaxed and you have money coming in bad reviews are okay no no reviews is not okay so if you are getting 1,000 review including 200 bed reviews it's fine but if you have zero reviews you are no one for in the App Store my goal is always to have that 1K in the search result you look good you're not uh someone new people like

that kind of stuff so bed reviews are usually about expensive pricing people complaining about the price and why you are asking aggressively for review so it's only picky people yeah no one is writing at the early stage no one is writing reviews about functionality so everyone is complaining you are very aggressive but you don't care you don't have to care ignore those kind of people and Report bad reviews containing any typo or spammy text for example last two weeks I spoke with a developer and he had this one star review this your app damaged my photo he he meant photo but the uh the autocomplete made it iPhone or of my phone your app damaged my phone so you report that to Apple hey this guy is claiming that we damaged his phone that's not true you play D and apple will remove letter revie you because only of a typo because he wrote phone you don't care you just report it Apple will REM will remove that that's within

App Store connect of course in the App Store connect retention and automation yeah it's upad I use them for automations next slide I will start explaining here it's the first automation which is sending a push after someone canceling his uh subscription or trial get lifetime pro access for free that's the headline tell us honestly why you caned and get life pro access for free and once they tap the notification they get this form they write what they want and in the right side you can see people start writing feedback and you can start learning from them hey why did they cancel the subscription but mainly let me tell you it's about the pricing and someone telling you app doesn't work okay but uh but you collect a lot of feedback and you learn a lot from these people automation number two is payment issue this is also out of the box from upad if a payment cancel payment failed this is automatically triggered a lot of

people fix their payment believe me which is H weird but they fix it next the win back automation secret offer unlocked you send them a push this is all cloud-based so you can do this even after publishing your app you can go to upad do it online and activate and send this notification and that's the screen is out of the box in upad but I updated the close button to I will watch ad ads instead make people not what so it's a mind game but it's working for me I like it I like this enable the same Automation in different channels if you have the power of the technology enable what we saw as automation everywhere multi Channel some people will disable notifications but if you have their emails email them if you have their phone number SMS them in up also is pretty good if someone is opted out for from everything you can chase them down in the app with the blocker screen