Shipping

How to market an app

None of this is clever. All of it is cheaper than advertising and most of it takes an evening.

1. Use one link that sends people to the right store.

   A single smart link that routes iOS to the App Store and Android to Play means one URL on every poster, bio, business card and email signature. Handing people a choice of two links loses some of them every time.

2. Put a QR code on your phone’s lock screen.

   When you meet someone and the app comes up, you show them your screen and they scan it. No typing, no spelling your app name, no “I’ll send it on later” that never happens. Set it as the wallpaper and it is always one press away.

3. Make a little merch and give it away.

   Stickers cost almost nothing and end up on laptops. It is marketing that people volunteer to carry, and it is genuinely enjoyable to make, which matters when you are doing this around a job.

4. Ask for the review at the moment of delight.

   Straight after a win, a completed streak or a personal best. The platform limits how often you can prompt, so spend those prompts on the users having the best time.

5. Give people a result worth screenshotting.

   The share artefact is the marketing. Make the end-of-game screen something a person would actually post -- readable, specific, spoiler-free and obviously from your app.

6. Go to the room where your users already are.

   One club WhatsApp group, one subreddit, one Discord. Being a real participant in one small community beats broadcasting to a large indifferent one.

7. Write the guide your user searched for on the way to you.

   A page that answers the question people type keeps working for years, while a post is worth a day. It is slower than advertising and it does not stop when you stop paying.

8. Localise the store listing, not the app.

   Translating the metadata is a couple of hours and often produces installs from countries you never targeted. The app can stay in English much longer than the listing can.

9. Relaunch on every legitimate excuse.

   A major feature, a new platform, a redesign, a round number of users. Each is a real reason to make noise again, and launching once wastes an asset that still works.

10. Do the unscalable thing personally.

    Answer every message, onboard people by hand, thank the first hundred individually. It does not scale, which is exactly why it works while you are small -- and it is where you find out what to build next.