

Ask HN: Is it a big deal if my app was on lifehacker+published newspaper - samrad

Also got tweeted out to like a million feeds.  Where do I go next?  I want more people to find out about the app.
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DenisM
Publicity jolt is only meaningfully useful for companies whose per-user value
growth with userbase, such as social networks. For all other products it's a
flash in the pan.

You don't provide specifics, so let's just talk about a stereotypical
subscription-model business. Each user generates you on average $1/mo in
revenue. Each month 1% of users abandon your service and leave. Each month you
bring in 100 new users through your marketing efforts. Once you reach 10,000
users, the inflow and outflow will equate, your user base will stop changing.
If you lose too many users to some freak accident, say, going down to 8000
users, your natural outflow will shrink to 80/mo and you will gain 100-80 = 20
net new users that month. Similarly, if a publicity jolt brings you extra 2000
users, your outflow will increase to 100-120 = - 20 net new users, and you
will keep bleeding them for a few month. The system will naturally stabilize
around 10k users. Hence there is a "natural size" for most such businesses.

Now if you can increase your monthly inflow from 100 to 200 users by being
mentioned on Lifehacker every single week, your "natural size" doubles to 20k.
But a single mention won't do you a whole lot of good.

The story is different for social network - the more people are there, the
more people are likely to join. The key difference is that the inflow is a
factor of the user base size, not of your own marketing effort.

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dukekarthik
The first and foremost thing to do is to understand your target audience. Once
that is done, you have to figure out the competition and where does your app
fit into the whole scheme of things.

Once that is done, have a good marketing strategy to pitch your app for the
appropriate audience. For this process, blogs such as LH come into picture (if
you know that your potential users "do" follow those blogs). Investing a
little in SEO and promoting on FB is also not bad option.

Also, the success of the most apps depend on the first impressions, usability
and word of mouth from peers :)

