PushBullet: From 0 to 15,000 users in 2 weeks
blog.pushbullet.com
blog.pushbullet.com
To keep the press buzz going, consider directly pitching journalists that cover Android stories. Send them a three to five line email about your app and the growth you have seen over past two weeks. To find the emails of these journalists, Google: [insert name of newspaper] + [Android], and you will find journalists who write about Android stories. Most of the time, they will have the writer's email there. And if not, you can try firstname.lastname@newspaper.com.
Here is an example email pitching PushBullet:
"Hi [insert journalist's name],
I see that you cover Android stories for [insert newspaper].
I am the founder of PushBullet, which is an app that makes it easy to push files, lists, addresses from your desktop browser to your Android devices. We launched two weeks ago, and have grown quickly to 15k users. We have been featured on LifeHacker, Geek.com, and Android Life. In the coming weeks, we are going to do [insert new features].
Please let me know if you want to set up a time to talk about PushBullet or if I can answer any question you may have over email.
All the best, Ryan [insert your phone number, journalists like calling people]"
Even something as simple as $2/mo for 500 pushes. It creates perceived value and with that you can then use to create more buzz by then giving something of value away.
Talk to #android blogs and give them coupon codes for accounts that they can then give away and they will be more than willing to help you promote.
Whereas before if you pitch them to write about something free it just gets lost in the fray of blog posts pointing out other free things that come and go.
Good luck.
Incentive free users to market the app for you, and only charge heavy users. Down the road a few months, when he has proven the app's value to a large number of free users who have in turn told their friends, he can start charging everybody. This approach would still show perceived value by charging heavy users, while not limiting the app's growth potential by giving access to everybody.
So. How many active users?
And how many have left after pushing just one thing (whatever it means)?
--
(edit) Re-read my comment and it comes across as dismissive. I didn't mean that. What you got in terms of raw numbers is impressive, but since 90% of your traffic came from Reddit, I'd show very cautious optimism. Reddit crowd is easily excitable and it tends to be supportive for the sake of being supportive. They are the do-gooders and this translates into overly positive skewed feedback. Try and not get carried away here. Having a lot of foot traffic is great. As you correctly pointed out, it created a positive feedback loop and helps self-propel the promotion. But it's really of little value if no ones sticks around. I don't know your active/return user counts, but judging by 25k/15k ratio it's probably not mind-blowing, in which case you should use your current momentum to try and fine-tune the details. In fact, you must. Engage the visitors better and make them stick. The launch splash is a one-time event and the level of attention you got so far will be very hard to replicate.
I haven't messed with weekly active users, for example, because my sample space of time is so small I couldn't really make any statements.
The other thing I take as a good sign is that the number of registered devices has officially overtaken the number of registered users, meaning people have taken the time to register more than one device more often than not even registering one.
I spent a couple evenings getting pseudo-authentication working with OAuth to log people into the extension, it was annoying and a real pain.
Then, the third evening, I realized that as an extension, any ajax request I make will have access to the same pool of cookies as normal browser requests, so it turned out that if a user is logged in on the site, they're automatically logged in on the extension, too.
This made everything SO much easier, but I had wasted like 8 hours of work to get there :)
I started going through a complex process to make sure everything was properly collapsed and still recorded when it suddenly occurred to me: "Hey, we already have order renewals for dvds. This is basically the same thing."
So, a day or two of complex work ended up being solved by s three line change that I should have thought of immediately. Good times. :)
edit: found it, just had to click on extensions https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pushbullet/chlffgp...
I had a couple friends I told about it and I'm sure they upvoted the submission, but I think really I did well because PushBullet is exciting to Android users and r/android is a hotbed of people looking for exciting things to do with the devices they know have a ton of potential.
The app receives the tickle and makes a quick api call for the push data and sees it needs to get a file. It then asks for the file and I make sure they have permission to download it and then let them.
Over engineered? Maybe :)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-chrome-to-p...
A suggestion: add a simple share button since most any Android app now has that option.
Future feature: push to friends
It might become more viable for developers to first develop an app for Android, make it free, just to test the waters, and if the app is success, make a paid-for iOS version.
A tip for the Chrome Extension: A majority of the times I have wanted to push a link (the default) I want to push the page I am on. I suggest that you prefill the "Link title" and "Link URL" field, if possible!
I'll figure something out, I work full time so I can manage the costs without noticing but that isn't an answer so much as a deflection :)
And as others have said; setup tiered pricing ASAP.
How are you in contact with users? Any email marketing?
I've set up an account and am leaning toward SendGrid right now since I dont need an SMTP server as MailGun requires.
Am I wrong about that, btw? It's all new to me. (I use Google Apps for Gmail, etc. and MailGun wants the email dns stuff which is a problem.)
The problem is Google never really took it any further and stopped supporting it. Classic example of a project that simply withered without any love.