I didn’t spend a penny on promotion and achieved 23 million app downloads!

Written in front

Let’s go back to 2013. At that time, as the co-founder of a music startup called Discovr, I had led the team to achieve 40 million app downloads, raised more than 10 million in financing, and the company was running smoothly (although it didn't keep up with the rapid development afterwards, but that's another story).

A lot of people I meet ask me about the secret to creating a successful app. Every time this happens, I ask myself: We have indeed overcome many difficulties to get to where we are today, but if I were to do it all over again, could I replicate my success?

"Then let's do an experiment."

I decided to build an app in one evening, tell no one about my plan, and see how far I could take it on my own. I expected that this unfinished app would eventually get a few thousand downloads and make a small profit.

What kind of app should I develop? I hope to find a good idea in an area where I don't have any decisive advantage, which will make this attempt more meaningful. Which area is most likely to attract attention? --fitness! There is no better entry point than fitness. The "Seven-Minute Exercise" was very popular at the time, and media outlets such as The New York Times reported on it. In this way, my entrepreneurial logic was immediately supported by facts and was trustworthy.

First, I listed the key goals of the app:

Introducing the 12 exercises in the seven-minute training method

Add a voice timer. Remind you when to switch exercises and what to do next

I also thought of some issues that need to be considered

Tablet support

Adjustable repeat

Support random exercises

Login Page

Social Sharing

With a clear goal, start working

I spent five hours doing some graphic introductions and writing some text descriptions. Since I am not a design major, I only work on plan views. Then I spent another hour making an icon, which was just a simple coloring of the number seven because my design skills are really limited. Then I saved some screenshots and wrote a simple app description.

I was surprised to find that 7 Minute Workout hadn't been registered yet. I guess there are other similar apps waiting to be reviewed. It turned out that my expectations were correct. It took a total of 6 hours to make the app and submit it for review, and then there was a long wait.

Version 1.0 — Accepted

Six days later, the app was approved. At this time, no one knew that I made this app, and I didn’t even tell my wife.

There were other similar products on the market like the 7 Minute Workout app, so my goal for the first week was to simply put the app out there for people to find and download, without doing any marketing or telling anyone.

My expectations were low, but I was surprised to see how many times the 7 Minute Workout was downloaded and purchased.

It's not a huge deal, but it's all people finding it on the app store, so I guess it's not a bad thing.

Version 1.1 — Start promotion

I started promoting it from version 1.1. I added a sharing feature so people can share their workout to social sites like Twitter or Facebook after they complete it. And I also added a feature where people can review their previous workouts when they complete their third workout.

Then, with great expectations, I sent the email to 10 large app review websites and attached four promotional codes. As a result, there was not a single reply, and no website posted my promotional code on Twitter . The fact that I only had these four promo codes in my app was enough to prove that no website had installed my app. Sales were also unusually slow the following week.

This was a complete waste of three hours, and it also confirmed my previous assumption. I needed to come up with a story to sell my app to some of the clients I already had a relationship with, otherwise no one would even notice it.

Version 1.2 - Extensions

In the next round of experiments, I hope to expand market share by adding iPad support.

I wanted to keep the app's interface simple, so I didn't do much to update the interface. It took me about 2.5 hours in total to submit the updated version.

But the result is that sales did not increase at all, and in fact it was good that they did not fall.

Free

I think it's time to go free. I've tried using price as a lever before and know that it's a very useful tool.

I made my app free late one night (I was in Australia) when Americans were waking up, and then I went to bed. Then things get a lot more interesting.

The data speaks for itself.

A huge success. Within three days, there were 216,718 downloads, an average of 72,000 downloads per day, which is more than 2,500 times the average of 28 downloads per day when it was not free.

It is the number one sports and fitness app in 68 countries and the number one Apple fitness app in 49 countries.

It also ranked in the top ten in 12 other countries. It even ranked in the top five in countries like the Netherlands and made headlines.

In the United States, the app made it into the top 25.

I also received some encouraging comments.

I get thousands of emails from free app sites, and dozens more from companies that want to partner with me to install paid apps.

I must admit that at this point I could no longer remain silent. There were already four people who knew about this experiment and they had promised to keep it a secret for me.

Of course, I was a little confused. I didn’t know why the app became so popular after it became free. I didn’t do much promotion myself, and the media didn’t do any coverage.

Blog Posts

The next step is to write blogs and articles to tell readers what happened before (this is why the article you are seeing now is here. Storytelling is an important thing). The blog received great feedback, with almost 20,000 page views, over 220 Tweets, 50 Facebook shares, and even made it to the front page of Hacker News.

Everyone knows that being on Hacker News means a product is a huge success, right?

But everything has its limits. Downloads started to drop, and they kept dropping, straight down. So you see, the front page of Hacker News doesn't seem to have a very significant impact.

In-app purchases

I have a love-hate relationship with in-app purchases, they are by far the best way to offer trials, but I feel they are abused by many developers (especially those making games for kids).

I've been getting a lot of requests to make the app more flexible with timings and settings, so I thought this was the perfect time to do an update.

It's very simple, just add a few extra features, but these extra features require extra money.

So what is the outcome of in-app purchases versus paid downloads? For my app, the revenue increased from $22 a day to $65 a day, almost three times. The conversion rate for in-app purchases is 2% to 3% of daily downloads.

Translate app description

More than half of app downloads come from the United States, while other countries such as Canada, the Netherlands, the Philippines and the United Kingdom are only one-tenth of the United States.

I had good experiences with local app description translations before, so based on some recommendations, I translated my app description into Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, German, French, and Simplified Chinese. I used the service from https://www.icanlocalize.com and it cost me about $100.

All in all, this experiment was a huge failure, and the translation service did not increase downloads in these countries at all.

Listen to user opinions

Many supporters' emails and comments about Appbot often mention the desire to add a workout log feature. So I added this function to allow users to purchase from within the app.

App Price

I tried pricing the app at 99 cents, $1.99, and $2.99. And each pricing lasts for a week, and you can see that the profits are basically the same. Because any increase in price will be offset by a decrease in purchases, and vice versa.

Christmas and New Year's Resolutions

Christmas Day saw millions of downloads, with both sales and download numbers significantly up. It reached a new height on New Year's Day. In November and December, profits remained basically stable at $50 a day. Throughout the first half of January, profits quadrupled, remaining at $200 a day. Therefore, the lofty resolutions that everyone sets during the New Year obviously have a positive impact on fitness apps.

More in-app downloads

I updated some of the in-app purchases to include an extra 7 minute Pilates workout.

By March, most people's New Year's resolutions have died (I'm embarrassed to say that mine died on January 1st).

Downloads have returned to normal (although there was a small spike in downloads that I will explain below), at around 2,000 to 2,500 downloads per day.

The added in-app purchases had almost zero impact on the Pro update (profits remained at $50-$60 a day), but they did increase profits to $70-$80 a day. Compared with the same number of downloads last year, the profit margin has increased by 40%.

If we look at it case by case, we can see that the Pro Update is still the main revenue generator, supplemented by the additional 7-minute Pilates workout.

Reviews & Feedback

One problem I ran into was that every time the app was updated the reviews were reset, like going back to the beginning.

I recently created an AppbotX app to help developers get more app reviews and help them communicate with their customers.

I provide instant services like FAQs, feedback, notifications, and reviews.

The FAQ feature improves support.

I put the comments feature after a positive interaction, usually when people complete a workout and give good feedback.

If the response is positive, the review page will appear

Otherwise, I hope to provide feedback

I received a lot of great feedback, and 80% of it can be summed up in two points:

First, many people want to increase their abdominal muscle training;

Second, people hope to have a simple way to help them do each exercise.

Bundle Purchase

To increase revenue I added a “bundle purchase” option where people could buy the pro version plus the other workouts for one price.

After the launch of “bundled purchases”, the overall revenue has increased compared to before and has become the main revenue channel. This experiment was a success, and I highly recommend adding a bundled purchase for all your apps.

HealthKit

Apple describes HealthKit like this: "HealthKit provides services that enable apps to share health and fitness data with each other. The user's health information is stored in a secure central place, and the user decides to share that data with a specific app." These are exactly the resources that 7 Minute Workout can use.

I wanted my app to be available when Apple released HealthKit, so I made sure my app was compatible with HealthKit, iOS 8, and iPhone 6 and 6s.

iOS was released one night while I was living in Australia, and I woke up to this: a missed call from the US on my phone.

Then I frantically Googled and found headlines like “Apple rejects HealthKit-compatible apps from App Store, report says.” and “Apple and HealthKit in last-minute talks on important matters.” Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one affected.

Apple did a great job of constantly calling me with updates and approved my non-HealthKit compatible app within 36 hours without affecting the app's ranking and search status.

Some confused users updated the app to a HealthKit version and then uninstalled the app. Luckily I quickly added a remote FAQ feature via a (shameless) plugin, and AppbotX was immediately flooded with support requests.

App Preview

Even though HealthKit wasn’t approved for the iOS 8 release, I got my app previewed and was lucky enough to get it approved by Apple in Australia.

Healthkit Round 2

With the release of iOS 8.0.2, HealthKit was also released. I was giving a speech at a conference in Melbourne at the time, and then my app was approved by Apple in the US App Store and was placed in the health app recommendation.

Then I had a buying spree

Pass verification

My experience with HealthKit and App Previews is that you have to give Apple every chance to get your app approved. Believe it or not Apple is always looking for apps to get through.

So what better way to stand out than to be the first to back an app that Apple is about to launch?

So, how is your iwatch adaptation?

Acquired by Wahoo Fitness

Wahoo Fitness made a great app for connecting sensors, which was demonstrated at the 2014 WWDC Keynote. Their latest TICKR X sensor is a heart rate monitor that also tracks repetitive motion.

So when Mike from Wahoo emailed me in May to talk about how my 7 Minute Workout could be integrated into their product line, I was a little hesitant.

We negotiated from time to time over the next two months, but I also felt that there was still unfinished business to do with the app and they were not fully prepared.

By November, things were turning around. I was going all in on Appbot when Wahoo again wanted to buy 7 Minute Workout. The timing was great and I also believe that 7 Minute Workout found a good buyer.

Everyone I've come into contact with at Wahoo has been amazing. I would like to express my gratitude to all the excellent people I met during the entire handover process.

They have great plans for the app too: there are already multiple custom fitness features, new videos, and integration with TICKRX for features like tracking repetitions.

My next step

I’m now focusing on Appbot full time, which is what I’ve always wanted to do. We have a lot of new features coming soon, many of which were inspired by this experiment, like the new sentiment dashboard. The excitement of a startup, the joy of growing and serving a paying customer, being able to connect with customers and help them do what they want, it's all addictive.

Final Thoughts

I still remember Chip (Wahoo’s CEO) saying to me during our first phone call: “If we hadn’t read your story, we probably wouldn’t have considered buying your app.

“So how important is it to create a good story for your product?”

I think it's really extremely important.