How We Jumped 50 Places in the iPhone App Store - for Free | Hacker News Reader

How We Jumped 50 Places in the iPhone App Store - for Free

blog.gymfu.com

38 pointsJofArnold13 comments

> tweets from within the app...but instead we decided to also allow free-form responses risky, but important for maximum authenticity

I hope the MacHeist bundle people can learn from this.

Sending pre-constructed tweets is more like network marketing (alienate and/or annoy friends) than word-of-mouth.

We feel that pre-constructed tweets are downright lame; it's basically like saying "Hey, Mr Customer - we neither trust you nor value your opinion, but we want you to get your friends to buy our stuff anyway". Really old-school!

-- GymFu Jof

Cut the price, spend time advertising (through social networks)... jump 50 places all for free.

(Aside: Another thing that I can't check because I have no access to Itunes but a jump from say 1000-950 is not amazing neither is 700-650 so depending on where their app is placed and how many apps there are I don't know that this means anything.)

It went into the top 50. We'll supply more stats once they are worthy and detailed enough for comment --GymFu Jof

"So why not cut out the middle-men and make a sort of “in-app PR” – i.e. new features in exchange for tweets from within the app?"

I could have sworn that was against app store terms. If not, it still feels kinda slimy.

I understand your concerns here. Fortunately, the features users receive are permanent (for a given install) and we allow free-form responses (some guy actually wrote "Tweeting for upgrades sucks" in order to get his upgrade - and we're totally cool with that).

Mostly importantly, it's been a really interesting experience in metrics, marketing, user feedback etc. Not an especially profitable one, but valuable in our understanding of how this sort of thing can work.

-- GymFu Jof

I think what's against the app store terms is to show disabled features that are only available in the paid version of an app. (which Apple has done for years in QuickTime ironically)

This probably falls in a grey area: if you compare it to game levels that are only activated after you achieve something, it's pretty similar in spirit. Now that I think about it, I think some games are borderline then…

Yeah, that's how we saw it. It's definitely a concern of course! -- GymFu Jof

I guess that is free, if all of your time is worthless. Good customer service and PR is a good thing, but it's certainly not "free."

I suppose it's free in the sense that it's something they did themselves, rather than spending money on ads or external services.

It's free as in "didn't cost us money", rather than "didn't cost us anything".

Precisely. When you've got no cash, you at least have yourself!

Furthermore, this trial taught us a lot; the lessons and the feedback from the community have been priceless - well worth the time we put in.

-- GymFu Jof

Please don't sign your comments on HN.

Sorry! :P

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