That said, Apple's App Store is an absurdly tough market in the U.S. When your game goes live, it needs to be at its best, and even large gaming companies have trouble getting games out there that do well, even with significant legitimate ad spend.
Here are some ideas, based loosely off of the experience I have had:
- Start contacting other indie-devs with relatively high dau numbers and arrange for X-promo via notifications and features.
- Stage your ad-spend when your metrics are known. Ie, if you beta test your app in some country like Brazil or New Zealand and improve your metrics so you have a known LTV, you can spend accordingly when you launch in a big market like Canada or US.
- Start with Android first because it is an easier ecosystem to iterate upon and attain an niche audience.
- There is a growing body of proof that burst spending on launch day is not the best strategy. There are games that launch early and are unknown but gradually improve their grossing metrics and buy audience in batches over time. I believe Rage of Bahamut was one such game [1]
[1]. http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/rage-of-bahamut/ranking/hist...