
Tell HN: How 2 devs got 1 million monthly actives with no social/viral tools - philippb
KeepSafe lets you take control of who sees what on your phone. Privacy is our main feature so we're an inherently non-social service. 12 months ago, we started at 0, today we have more than a million daily active users.<p>This is how we did it:
* Start with something the user cares about. 
Instead of solving a big thing like "Privacy", we decided to start close to a specific user problem: keeping pictures private on the phone. By reducing it, we quickly realized that this was a crowded space with tons of apps that simply hide pictures. Bad, because of competition but a good indicator for what users care about.<p>* Throw out features
The fewer things your app can do, the more you can focus on making the user flows for the remaining features simple and easy to understand.<p>* Focus on retention
Growth is nice but we want users to come back. We were slow to build new features but always fast to release bug fixes and improvements to the core experience. In our case it was improving the speed for adding pictures to KeepSafe and the user flows for doing it. If you continuously improve, your userbase will notice and keep using your app.<p>* Speak a language your users understand
We have a large userbase in the US and other English speaking countries. But we invested in translating the app from the get-go. The smartphone penetration in countries like South Korea is really high and we see lots of users from Europe too. It's easy and it's fast if you use services like MyGengo.<p>* Ask your users for their opinion
When someone started to be a frequent user we simply asked them to rate us in the Android market. It has helped our ranking.<p>What is your experience and insights on growing your app?<p>KeepSafe has a fun and ambitious roadmap. If you want to join a mobile startup and have huge impact, take a look http://www.getkeepsafe.com/about.php#jobs
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yefim323
Your site (<http://www.getkeepsafe.com/>) should link to download links so
that I can download your app straight off the bat.

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philippb
Rock solid point :) It's in there now.

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sftueni
Thx for sharing, great numbers. Some questions: \- Via which channel did you
communicate with your early users / get feedback? \- Did you collect your
user's email addresses from the beginning, upon installing the app - or at a
later time?

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zmb
At the very beginning we got feedback from the comments on the Android Market
but we were always very open with our support email address (it's in our store
description), so we could talk with our users directly.

Right now, users register with their email the first time they open the app.

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dmix
Being on the App store / Android market is a social/viral marketing tool.

Getting positive reviews and more downloads creates a viral effect as you get
more prominence in the market.

But I'm just being pedantic. Congrats on the growth.

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philippb
I'm not sure if I agree on that. when we think about viral we think about one
existing user is inviting another one. This is not the case just because you
are on the store if your app does not add more value to the user then they
invite a friend. Facebook is one of these examples. Your Facebook is better
when your friends are in there. For this reason you invite them. An app that
you use to hide some of your pictures is not getting any better just because
your friends are using it.

Still good reviews and a good placement in the market makes finding and
trusting you easier for the user. But if you don't get up in the ranks or
search results there is nothing that gets you anywhere. Where as if you have a
viral loop in your app, you can still grow even if you don't rank in the
store.

~~~
bertomartin
I agree. Just like dropbox gets more useful when your friends are using it.
This is possibly why a google social network doesn't seem to work: all your
contacts are already in gmail, there's no added benefit, no viral effect when
they add a 'social' network like facebook is. If I want to talk to someone,
I'll just gchat.

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amorphid
I like your philosophy. It turns out giving people something to care about is
a pretty good strategy :) Keep up the good work!

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hu_me
I noticed that the app is free. And the upgrade doesnt unlock any core
functionality. Would love to know how well has the monetization strategy
worked so far? And if you plan to change it?

congrats on the success.

~~~
philippb
Yes, the app is free. As you can see we have on the android market a gold
version.

We started with the gold version to see how many people are willing to pay for
the app even if they can get it for free. The only difference is a new icon
and a pin screen that says Gold. We advertise the app clear in the app store
as "Buy this app if you love KeepSafe and want to give the developers money".

We will be adding additional features to the app over time that will then also
be premium. The typical freemium business model.

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bira
Are users loving and giving developers enough money to keep them, the devs,
satisfied?

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philippb
As I remember there is an interesting information out there from Evernote.
they can tell a little more about that at scale. Apparently 20% of all
Evernote subscribers have never hit the paywall, meaning getting to the point
where there are limitations in the product. Those 20% signed up because they
use the app a lot and love it. They feel that it's worth the money even
without limitations.

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tszming
Well, another reason why app name is important: Hide pictures with KeepSafe
instead of KeepSafe.

Btw, why the name of the iOS app is "Hide Pictures and Photos with KeepSafe",
but the Android version is just "Hide pictures with KeepSafe"?

In my iPhone, when I search "hide photo" I can't find your app, so the keyword
"Photos" is therefore useless?

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zmb
That's interesting! It shows up for me for that search (that's why we included
it). Are you also using the US app store?

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gbog
For completeness:

In Android if you prefix a directory name with a dot, its content will not
appear on Galleries and other common apps (some will let you choose to do so
in settings). You can also create a .nomedia empty file in a directory to hide
it.

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thisisgreat
Hey Guys, great work there. Congratulations! I noticed that your logo does not
link to your index page / home. Might not be that important, but I spent at
least 2-3 additional clicks while looking through your appealing web pages.

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bertomartin
Thanks for this. I'm launching an app soon, and these ideas really help, as
well as the comments.

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raheemm
How did you find the problem to solve?

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zmb
The particular picture problem? I used to work as a PM and constantly took
pictures of whiteboards and would show them to co-workers later. When I would
swipe through these, there would always be pictures from my private life. I
needed more control over this...

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Fando
Amen brother!

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natarius
In what timeframe did you get to those numbers?

Can you share a graph...would be interesting to see the growth velocity curve.

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zmb
It took us about 10 months to get there. I don't have a graph handy but it was
pretty linear from month 4 onwards. Before that, we had an accelerating curve
because we started at 0 and slowly improved our ratings as more users started
liking us.

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wilfra
What about marketing? How did you get your users?

I mean I got that you have a great product and keep improving it and people
will stay - but you have to get your users from somewhere.

Was it all just people who found the app organically in the app store? No PR
or marketing of any kind?

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philippb
The growth come all from organic search traffic in the android market. We
haben't done any PR. We got picked up from some android blogs, but this will
only give you a little extra traffic for a certain amount of time.

We believe that search is a valid model for a utility app where people
actually have a need/problem and can describe it in a search term. Multi
language takes a big part to the success of a search strategy. We also
translated the app store description to all possible languages, even if we
don't have the app available in these languages. The user will then get the
english version as default.

For games and social apps growth has to come from within the app as search
wont work.

~~~
wilfra
Wow. Well done.

Android developers take note of this answer. Particularly the part about
targeting search results in non-English languages!

