

Ask HN: What's the most effective growth hack you used to promote your app? - kozkozkoz


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kachhalimbu
I don't know if it was most effective because it was the only thing I tried
and it worked beautifully. Earlier this year there was Cricket World Cup and
most of the world cup schedules I checked were in the form of a long table,
nothing interactive. It was a pain to find matches happening on particular
day/team/venue in one glance.

So me and another friend set out to create a schedule viewer that will give us
match info within 1~2 secs and wrote a simple but interactive schedule
viewer[1] with AngularJS over a weekend. We posted it to r/cricket subreddit
but didn't get more than couple hundred views. I also tried tweeting other
former cricketers,cricket writers but my tweet got buried in no time because
these people had fans ranging from 100k to 2mil.

Then I noticed espencricinfo.com website had a twitter section that listed
tweets from all these prominent cricket figures in real-time as they were
tweeted.

So during the match when everybody was watching and tweeting, I started
tweeting these folks link to our interactive dashboard. This increased chance
of them seeing my tweet and we got RTs from a lot of them this way. Of course
for that our dashboard had to be the best out there and it was (it worked on
mobile browser too).

With just few tweet to celebrity cricketers/sports writers we went from
hundreds to over 30k page view and 7k recurring viewers over the course of
world cup. The key I think was to get noticed when they were most active and
also have a nice app/content to convince them to RT.

[1] [http://www.itinora.com/worldcup2015](http://www.itinora.com/worldcup2015)

~~~
zhte415
Quite amazing that was overlooked in CMS the first place.

Kudos for pushing it during the match.

I've also seen that in the middle of an event people often get social,
especially if it is a bit slower moving (cricket game to military parade) and
sociability is a major part of being there in the first place. To talk
cricket.

~~~
kachhalimbu
"in the middle of an event people often get social" absolutely. This was the
case. A lot of them were tweeting about how the matches were progressing,
predicting, analyzing match situations and having good old banter with the
opposing team fans :D

------
thomasmeagher
At Startup School NY, Chase Adam talked about winning a contest with Watsi by
paying bar bouncers to not let people in if they didn't vote for them first.

This could probably be abstracted to app promotion.

