

Traction, how did you get it? - marklit

It feels like being an indie developer is 20% coding and 80% marketing. I've throw my credit card at every social network's advertising system, hit reddit and posted in the appropreate subreddits. Most of my friends are users of my service. The only complaint I have is that if I stop buying ads and running around telling everyone about my service, there will be no new users. Any tips to get organic growth kicking in? Will I be spending more time advertising my services instead of making them better?
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erangalp
Traction is 100% about persistence. Nobody cares about your code. You need to
constantly approach bloggers to write about you, post in forums, online
communities and link sharing sites such as this, generate content and optimize
your visibility on search engines, and mainly just keep plugging at it until
something sticks.

Also, not every service can have organic traction. Some services are just not
social / sharable (I would even say most services), and must rely on tried-
and-true user acquisition techniques - ads, affiliates and so forth. It's also
possible that your service is not of enough interest or use to people who are
not friends and family (just putting it out there).

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marklit
Cool, that's what I suspected. Maybe CTO should stand for Chief Traction
Officer.

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tstegart
Are you a mobile app? Android? iOS?

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marklit
Neither, I've built a Django-based website that helps mobile developers pick
better keywords for the iTunes store.

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AznHisoka
Couple of points:

1) Are you just providing keyword tracking? While this is useful in the SEO-
world, I'm not sure how useful this is in the app store. Mostly because there
is very few actions they can take if they did drop their rankings. Do you
provide actionable advice on getting higher rankings rather than objective
advice like "You rank #5 for cars in the App Store"?

2) If your product isn't popular enough, you should consider pairing it with
consulting service as well. Provide consulting for those that want to rank
high on the App Store. That is.. IF you have the expertise in that arena.

3) SearchRank.is -> not a big deal for now, but you might want to consider
rebranding it so that it caters more to App Store Optimization rather than
SEO.

Overall, I'm probably in your target audience. But I don't care for knowing
how I rank for keywords in the App Store. I want actionable advice. Tell me
HOW to rank high for a keyword. Rather than a ranking tool, give me a GRADING
tool. What changes should I make to my title? What keywords to add to my
description? Is there a correlation between # of reviews and rank? keywords in
those reviews vs rank?

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drudru11
I just checked your profile.

You work on a search ranking tool for IOS.

This line of questioning seems a bit odd given your experience. You should be
giving us advice :-)

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tstegart
That's what I thought too. Not to mention oddly requiring a Facebook or
Twitter log-in when so many people here complain about it (and all the stories
about being hacked lately).

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marklit
The main reason I choice it was because I only have to hold an integer id of
your account id on twitter or facebook. If my database was ever compromised,
there is only that piece of info about you that would disappear. It's
basically leaving all the security problems (not to mention lost passwords,
etc...) as a problem for Twitter and Facebook to deal with.

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tstegart
Do you need a log-in? Can't people use it without logging in? I would think
you might want to go long-in free for a while and see how you do. Are you sure
its not holding you back? What's your bounce rate? Do people show up and then
disappear when they get to the log-in page?

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kuasha
I am also trying to understand this- I wrote one loooong blog where you may
find some information important-

<http://www.starternotes.com/>

It is mostly a compile from many resources and still working on it-

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AznHisoka
Options: 1) Charge more (or at least make it not free) for your product,
making advertising viable forever. 2) Focus primarily on search engines,
making organic growth sustainable.

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tstegart
Do any of your advertising efforts meet with success? Most app developers I
know try advertising but never seem to get it to work.

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marklit
Mine have been a mixed bag. At my current ROI I'm paying something like $7 for
each person who creates an account. I've done marketing for big companies in
the past and they paid like $2 per new customer via various means of online
advertising.

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tstegart
I would guess PR would be more successful. Have you tried asking for people to
try you out in the forums devoted to developers? iphonesdk; MacRumors has a
new one for business and marketing; 148Apps has a business page with developer
news. Just sending emails to noted indie developers asking them to try you
(and taking out you twitter facebook requirement) might get you better
traction.

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bazookaBen
you seem to be adopting Zynga's model of ad spending. Is it sustainable in
your case? i.e is the revenue always more than the ad spend

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breathesalt
Make more friends :)

