Traction, how did you get it? | Hacker News Reader

Traction, how did you get it?

9 pointsmarklit17 comments

It feels like being an indie developer is 20% coding and 80% marketing. I've throw my credit card at every social network's advertising system, hit reddit and posted in the appropreate subreddits. Most of my friends are users of my service. The only complaint I have is that if I stop buying ads and running around telling everyone about my service, there will be no new users. Any tips to get organic growth kicking in? Will I be spending more time advertising my services instead of making them better?

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Traction is 100% about persistence. Nobody cares about your code. You need to constantly approach bloggers to write about you, post in forums, online communities and link sharing sites such as this, generate content and optimize your visibility on search engines, and mainly just keep plugging at it until something sticks.

Also, not every service can have organic traction. Some services are just not social / sharable (I would even say most services), and must rely on tried-and-true user acquisition techniques - ads, affiliates and so forth. It's also possible that your service is not of enough interest or use to people who are not friends and family (just putting it out there).

Cool, that's what I suspected. Maybe CTO should stand for Chief Traction Officer.

Are you a mobile app? Android? iOS?

Neither, I've built a Django-based website that helps mobile developers pick better keywords for the iTunes store.

Couple of points:

1) Are you just providing keyword tracking? While this is useful in the SEO-world, I'm not sure how useful this is in the app store. Mostly because there is very few actions they can take if they did drop their rankings. Do you provide actionable advice on getting higher rankings rather than objective advice like "You rank #5 for cars in the App Store"?

2) If your product isn't popular enough, you should consider pairing it with consulting service as well. Provide consulting for those that want to rank high on the App Store. That is.. IF you have the expertise in that arena.

3) SearchRank.is -> not a big deal for now, but you might want to consider rebranding it so that it caters more to App Store Optimization rather than SEO.

Overall, I'm probably in your target audience. But I don't care for knowing how I rank for keywords in the App Store. I want actionable advice. Tell me HOW to rank high for a keyword. Rather than a ranking tool, give me a GRADING tool. What changes should I make to my title? What keywords to add to my description? Is there a correlation between # of reviews and rank? keywords in those reviews vs rank?

I just checked your profile.

You work on a search ranking tool for IOS.

This line of questioning seems a bit odd given your experience. You should be giving us advice :-)

That's what I thought too. Not to mention oddly requiring a Facebook or Twitter log-in when so many people here complain about it (and all the stories about being hacked lately).

The main reason I choice it was because I only have to hold an integer id of your account id on twitter or facebook. If my database was ever compromised, there is only that piece of info about you that would disappear. It's basically leaving all the security problems (not to mention lost passwords, etc...) as a problem for Twitter and Facebook to deal with.

Do you need a log-in? Can't people use it without logging in? I would think you might want to go long-in free for a while and see how you do. Are you sure its not holding you back? What's your bounce rate? Do people show up and then disappear when they get to the log-in page?

Good point :) To be honest, people search for all sorts of things on the iTunes store but very few people search for tools to help them market on the iTunes store. Also, Apple have got a lot of good keywords trademarked and it's hard to use them via Adwords.

I am also trying to understand this- I wrote one loooong blog where you may find some information important-

http://www.starternotes.com/

It is mostly a compile from many resources and still working on it-

Options: 1) Charge more (or at least make it not free) for your product, making advertising viable forever. 2) Focus primarily on search engines, making organic growth sustainable.

Do any of your advertising efforts meet with success? Most app developers I know try advertising but never seem to get it to work.

Mine have been a mixed bag. At my current ROI I'm paying something like $7 for each person who creates an account. I've done marketing for big companies in the past and they paid like $2 per new customer via various means of online advertising.

I would guess PR would be more successful. Have you tried asking for people to try you out in the forums devoted to developers? iphonesdk; MacRumors has a new one for business and marketing; 148Apps has a business page with developer news. Just sending emails to noted indie developers asking them to try you (and taking out you twitter facebook requirement) might get you better traction.

you seem to be adopting Zynga's model of ad spending. Is it sustainable in your case? i.e is the revenue always more than the ad spend

Make more friends :)

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