Your mommy will download your app, but will total strangers?

A few years ago, I was one of those dumbasses that thought that if I built it, people would rush out from everywhere and start using my amazing app simply by announcing the app’s availability over a few social media channels and telling all my friends about it.What a goober.I know better now.I learned the hard way that online discoverability of a web or native app is at least 10 times harder to do than building the app in the first place. With over 3 million apps in the app stores, and countless more web apps that do everything imaginable — even ridiculously stupid apps — this is especially true nowadays.

A lot of people are making this same mistake that I made

A couple of weeks ago I attended a short course about SEO hosted by theDigital Marketing Foundry, an online marketing educational clinic located in the American Underground in Durham NC. Including me, there were 4 people that attended the class. That’s not a typo. 3 dudes and 1 girl were in attendance that day.Across the hallway was The Iron Yard, a software development code school. It was packed, with over 50 young people in that room taking Ruby on Rails classes. Most everyone in there had their shiny new MacBook Pro’s open to a Sublime 2 text editor screen.It’s one thing to write code for someone who is paying you to write code. It’s a whole different thing if you are writing code to build a software product that you think people will use. And herein lies the problem: there is a reality about building software products that a lot of these young eager folks don’t seem to get often enough:

If you build it, they won’t come

You can spend a crapload of money and time building what you think is an unbelievable native or web app that will change the world as we know it, but unless it is discoverable within all the noise that is the internet, good luck getting your app noticed by total strangers. This begs the question:

Can you get total strangers to download your app and actually use it for more than 7 days?

More than 3 million native apps are competing for attention

Take a look at the bar chart below. As of July 2015, there were more than 1.6 million applications in the Google Play store alone and 1.5 million in Apple App Store. Add in yours to that pile, and it is very likely that it will simply be buried and never even noticed, unless you can get your app discovered somehow.

80% of the apps downloaded are deleted after 7 days

Now take a look at this chart. It’s depressing. This graph below shows the retention of an app on an Android phone. Notice the green line. This line shows that if your app is not within the top 200 popular apps on Google Play, 80% of the people that downloaded your app will delete it after 7 days.Andrew Chen wrote up a great article about this that you should read.

So how do you get noticed?

I’m still trying to figure this out myself. It ain’t easy, and if you think all you need to do is create some Google AdWords, a press release on PRWeb, and some announcements on Twitter and Facebook, you are fooling yourself. All of that might work for Day 1, but that’s about it. This stuff is an ongoing problem to solve. Not a one time thing. Ongoing.all.the.time.You will need to immerse yourself into learning everything you can about digital marketing strategies, or hire someone that will. OnPage SEO, external link building, content strategies, search engine marketing strategies,keyword research, and the like. Things that the Digital Marketing Foundry and clinics like it teach and that code schools simply don’t. And you will need to get really good at understanding your site’s metrics. SpyFu is a great tool for this. I think it’s much better than Alexa because it lets you see what keywords your competitors are ranking organically for, among other things.As for retention, you basically need to do a great job of onboarding your new users, otherwise your app will be deleted, just like 80% of the apps out there. More about this on a future post.

Discoverability should not be an afterthought

The bottom line is that if you just focus on the technical aspects of your app, and not on discoverability, you will have a rude awakening when you start looking at your app statistics in iTunes Connect, Google Play’s Developer Console, and Google Analytics or other metrics tracking tool. You will wonder why your app store views, downloads, and signups are dismal, flat, and dropping, and will be embarrassed to talk about it to those same beer-drinking friends that said they downloaded your app…but never really did.