How to increase the number of APP downloads from 0 to 3 million?

In April of this year, I was looking for product requirements online and wanted to develop a product myself. I think this may also be the dream of many programmers .

I have been developing Android for 2 years and have some technical skills. But I always feel that there are many interesting ways to play in the Internet industry. If you want to break through the limitations of your own technology, you have to discover and access more new information.

From then on, I started developing an app similar to the Instagram video downloader on Google Play . After several months of hard work, the number of downloads increased from 0 to 3 million, and the daily active users increased to more than 100,000.

Because I just started using Google Play this year, I violated Google's developer policies many times during the version update process, which resulted in my account being blocked a few days ago.

I have just come out of sadness recently, and I organized this experience to share with you, haha.

This article mainly shares how I went from 0 to 1, including the early promotion and continuous optimization process after going online.

Demand Mining

The first question I considered during the initial research phase was:

What needs will my app meet and what functions will my app provide?

I downloaded the top-ranked and highly rated apps on Google Play and tried them all. I found that there are three main ways to download Instagram videos or pictures:

The first method: Open Instagram, copy the URL of the image or video you want to download, and then return to the downloader with the link.

Software with better user experience will directly monitor the links in the clipboard and pop up a window to guide users to download immediately.

The second method: Do not open Instagram, but directly open the Instagram webpage in your own application and then download the videos in it.

The third one: In addition to the above two, there is another way to experience better. These apps will be deeply connected with Instagram's API to help users operate more conveniently, such as uploading videos directly to Instagram.

These download software have at least millions of downloads, and some, such as instasave, have tens of millions of downloads. Some are even named video downloader for instagram for easy searching.

After the above research, I realized that I could not make a better product either in terms of differentiated needs or product experience optimization. In addition to Instagram, there are also many related download software for other major social platforms such as Facebook .

I thought that if I made a software that could download videos from all platforms and websites, I would be more competitive.

I searched related keywords again and found that there are also some that do this. Some are called All video downloader, some are called video downloader hd, and some are called tube video downloader.

Because Google does not allow downloading YouTube, the above naming can increase new additions, but in fact these apps do not provide downloading of YouTube videos. So although the number of downloads seems to be high, the retention rate is very low and the ratings are also low. The software ratings generally do not exceed 4.0.

After the entire research process above, I roughly knew what I wanted to do. After a period of development, the first version of MVP was launched: it supports searching Instagram for downloads and supports copying links to download inside the software.

Cold Start

After the product was launched, I conducted cold start promotion through the following methods and brought in the first batch of seed users :

1. Record a tutorial and upload it to YouTube

Because Google Play supports video display, and many users don’t know how to use this type of download software, it is very necessary to record a video. Currently, this video has more than 200,000 views on Youtube.

Later, I recorded several tutorials on "How to download Instagram videos" and "How to download Facebook videos" and uploaded them to YouTube.

1. Publish English articles to WordPress blog

Later, I used it to publish some articles to promote my APP. The article titles were "how to download videos from Instagram", etc., and then I shared the articles to my social accounts.

1. APP multi-language coverage

When developing software on Google Play, because users come from all over the world, I found that good software has translations for each country, and screenshots and videos of different countries, etc.

But I didn't have money to hire someone to translate, so I used Google Translate to translate it into about 70 languages ​​myself, including app screenshots , descriptions, titles, etc.

During the process, I found that after translation, I could actually cover more keywords. In English, it is called video downloader, and users in other languages ​​would search for something else. So when I have nothing to do, I go to Google to search, and then keep changing the keywords.

1. App store search term optimization

I have tried all the methods of app store search optimization mentioned by others on the Internet.

For example, increase the density of keywords. That is to say, if my app is called "video downloader", then "video downloader" must appear at least five times in my app description, but it must be connected in sentences, otherwise it will violate the metadata policy.

For example, good-looking application screenshots are particularly important. I used applan uc hpad to make the screenshots, which look better.

For example, some people said that the name of the application package also has a search ranking, and gave examples. I also tried this, and it really works. I was surprised.

The above are some of the methods I use to obtain the initial user cold start.

Small steps and fast iteration

With some initial user feedback, I began to continuously improve the product.

At that time, I would update a version no more than 2 days (the company happened to be not busy at that time). During this process, I discovered a powerful product, snaptube, which claimed to have 100 million downloads and 10 million daily active users. Damn, isn’t this my dream!

Snaptube had just been removed from Google Play at that time. Later, some people in the circle shared videoder, including vidmate and tubemate that I discovered later. These independent software that were not launched on the application not only had a good experience, but also had a lot of website videos that could be downloaded.

The experience of software in the Google Play app store is really hard to compare with those independent software, because Google does not allow downloading videos from YouTube, which is an infringement.

But most users have the need to download YouTube videos. I think this is the reason why they don’t do it on Google Play. Now almost all of them have started video communities.

After I experienced these software, my positioning and ideas became clearer:

I want to make the "Snaptube" on Google Play. It has the best downloads, so I will learn from it.

Snaptube is not available on the Google Play Store, but it also has a large number of users. But I needed Google and a platform in the early stages. If I could do as well as it did, I could also acquire a large number of users independently.

Of course, in order to avoid being punished by Google, I cannot support downloading Youtube videos. Even so, the number of users will not decrease much.

Traffic explosion

During that time, I played snaptube every day, and I also wanted to support the websites it supported. After a period of optimization, the number of new users also increased at an accelerated rate. I think the continuous increase in websites that support downloads is a key stage in the growth of users.

Another key growth point was also discovered on snaptube. Snaptube is really powerful. It customizes a Google search. I think this feature is explosive. After using your own defined search, you can know what users search for every day. Once you know this, it will be easy to handle the following.

When I got to this point, I felt that it was already more powerful than any other downloadable software on Google Play. From a few thousand new applications per day at the beginning to tens of thousands, it was becoming more and more like Snaptube. In fact, I was imitating it, so much so that when searching for Snaptube on Google Play, my software could be found.

After several rounds of product optimization, adding new users was no longer a problem, but I felt that greater dissemination was needed.

At that time, I tried many software in the market and found that they sometimes popped up windows to guide users to share, so I also began to prompt users to share my applications in necessary places in the software. User self-sharing is naturally the most effective way of dissemination. At this time, what I needed to do was to support more websites.

Secondly, I collected some user email addresses. I added an obvious button on the homepage of the app to let users send the website they want to download. In this way, I collected about 30,000 user email addresses. Because sometimes I receive emails from others promoting apps to my email, I also collected some so that I wouldn’t have to go through so much trouble to acquire initial users.

Monetization attempt

After a series of optimizations, the app has entered a virtuous cycle, with ratings and rankings rising.

So in the end I made a simplified version of the download software, so that the big one can bring the small Lite version with it. Because I found that many software with large download volumes either have a streamlined version or a paid version to squeeze out the user's surplus value.

After promoting for about a month, the app had been downloaded more than 100,000 times, and I could make some money every day.

Here comes the problem

During an update, Google sent an email saying that Lite was removed from the App Store again because it encouraged users to download copyrighted videos.

At this time, I discovered another interesting thing. Can't the browser download videos?

And their homepages also recommend various websites. I downloaded uc, cm browser and other software and found that they supported downloading more websites than mine, and I also found them when searching for video downloads. At this time, I understood a little bit that maybe I have to make a browser in the future.

But so far, 4 of my apps have been removed from the shelves. I feel so tired and there are more and more restrictions.

However, the good times did not last long. They lasted for about a week. A few days ago, Google sent me an email saying that my account had been blocked due to multiple violations (four apps had been removed from the shelves) and I fell back to the starting point.

If anyone in the circle has had their account blocked, I would love some advice, as registering a new account may result in it being blocked due to association.

Summarize

To sum up my experience over the past six months or so, although my account was eventually blocked, I gained a lot.

When I first started making apps, I started to feel proud of the money I could make. During that time, I thought about quitting my job to focus on software development, but I always felt that I didn’t have any products that I could show off.

Also, my technical level needs to be improved, so I haven't made up my mind. So far, I have gone through the process of building a product from zero to one and then back to zero, and gained some experience. In addition, my girlfriend has learned a little design and helps me draw.

Seeing all kinds of ideas and thoughts every day is really eye-opening. I also found an area that I am most interested in and dug deeper into it. Through this experience, I also have some thoughts on what I will do in the future:

1. The export of tools is still a bonus period

I have found that users in many developing countries still have a great demand for new applications. It can be said that it is still a bonus period. Although it may be difficult to create a company as successful as Cheetah, the market is still relatively large for some small teams, not to mention for me personally.

1. Products should be refined

In the future, I will strive to position myself as accurately as possible, work less on products, and focus on quality and reputation. I think the gap in quality can no longer be made up by quantity.

1. Analyzing competitors and differentiating products is extremely important

For example, Cheetah Clean Master performs so well and has a huge number of users. I think it is possible to increase the volume of cleaning software. One reason is that cleaning tool software has always been in demand. There are many large-scale apps at the same time, which shows that the demand has always been huge.

1. Many new ideas are generated from practice.

The ideas I gained through my own practice are really impressive and will benefit me for the rest of my life. In the process of practice, I discovered a lot of new things, so I suggest that friends who have not taken action yet should take action immediately. In the process, you will continue to encounter difficulties, constantly solve them, and refresh your ideas and cognition.