

Review our startup: AppStoreHQ -- Mobile app search/discovery - iseff
http://www.appstorehq.com

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iseff
Hey all,

Hoping to get some feedback on our new site. We've been launched for a bit
now, and are finally ready to start showing off to the world. Hopefully you'll
have some comments, especially if you're an app developer.

We're working on mobile app search and discovery, since we believe the app
store is far too hit driven. We want to make finding the perfect app easy.
And, as a developer, we want you to be able to market and distribute your app
more effectively.

We've done some things that I think are pretty interesting. Here's a quick
run-down:

1) "Hottest Apps" -- We index many different blogs that review apps and any
review they write gets linked to from our site. Then we use that as an input
to create a list of what apps are currently the hottest. We also publish the
most talked about apps to our Twitter account
(<http://twitter.com/appstorehq>).

2) Sponsored Results -- App developers can purchase sponsored results for any
category. Right now they're $10/week or $35/month.

3) Saving Apps to your Amazon Universal Wish List -- If you want to remember
an app, but don't want to buy it yet, you can save it to your Amazon Wish List
and come back to buy it later.

4) App badges for your site -- You can embed a badge on any site and write a
review of an app. We'll find that review (because you embedded the badge) and
we'll link to it from the app's detail page. It gives your visitors up-to-date
information about the app, and gives you more traffic. A win-win, we think.

5) Search filters -- we think we have the best all around mobile app search on
the web now. You can drill down by any combination of Search Query, Category,
Price Range, and Rating. Soon we'll be adding Release Date to that as well.

Overall, we're really trying to help app developers with app distribution (and
other problems) and help app consumers find the right apps. So, if you have
any suggestions, please let us know!

We're also testing the waters with white-label search. For example, if you run
a blog which talks about mobile apps, we'd provide a white-label version of
our index and share any revenue you provide... If you'd be interested in
something like this, let us know.

~~~
mrbgty
Doesn't #1 contribute to making it even more hit driven?

~~~
crashdev
Good point. AppStoreHQ's 'Hottest' list is built on streaming blog post
discovery, and the stream is what's on the home page (kind of like Hype
Machine does for music) - so any app that gets a mention from any of 70+
"canonical" blogs, or _any_ blog that drops an AppStoreHQ review widget into
its review - will show up in the stream.

So yeah, you have to at least have gotten _some_ traction somewhere to get
into the stream, but the bar is pretty low. (That said, about half the apps in
the App Store have never even received a user rating - they're still in
AppStoreHQ's search results, but they'll need a little love to get out of the
basement).

~~~
mrbgty
Still, I'm not sure this solves the underlying problem. People will still only
see the top X apps on your site. Unless there's a higher churn rate with top
apps falling off after a shorter period of time, how will buyers get to see
more apps than the app store?

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pchristensen
Even without all the extra features, having an app store browser that doesn't
live in iTunes is fantastic. I think this has a lot of potential.

If you can get people to enter which apps they have, you could do some sort of
recommendation engine. IE People who used this app also liked this one...

~~~
iseff
Thanks! We definitely have personalization features that we want to build,
right now there's just so much to do. :) Promise we'll get to it soon, though!

------
MotorMouths
Nice site. I've been hunting for good executions of this idea. Thus far these
have impressed me most:

<http://www.freshapps.com> <http://www.apptism.com>
<http://iphone.iusethis.com>

But yours is right in there in the mix. Add a recommendation engine, and
you're really on to something. Good luck!

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raptrex
On the image hoverovers, can you position them to the right of the thumbnails,
right now it covers the thumbnails and i want to just move my mouse to the
right instead of moving away and moving it to the next picture

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oppegard
I want to sort apps by highest reviewed followed by descending sort of number
of reviews. E.g., I'm more interested in apps that have 200 5-star reviews
than apps with 2 5-star reviews.

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nc
The site looks interesting. Do you have any page view figures related to
advertising?

Found one issue: our app (Movies Now!) is indicated as being released on May
13th. However it was actually released on the 27th May.

<http://www.appstorehq.com/moviesnow-free-iphone-34716/app>

