3 Ways To Launch Your Mobile App

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Launching your app is one of the most exciting moments in your journey as an app entrepreneur. There are only a few other moments in your journey as an app entrepreneur when things will get more exciting. Those moments will occur when you figure out how to get the hyper growth you are after, when your revenue and profitability will reach and surpass your goals for your app, and if it happens, when you sell your app for a lot of money. It is fun to dream, isn’t it? For now, let’s come down to earth from the clouds for a little bit, and make sure that you get your app’s launch right.

There are 3 ways to launch your app. You can do a quiet launch (this is what I did), a launch with lots of publicity and attention, and an extra loud launch on stage at a conference. Let’s cover all three in detail.

Soft Launch For Your App

A quiet launch (sometimes called a soft launch) is a launch during which you simply make your app available in the app stores of your choice, and only tell your friends, family and some professional contacts about your app’s availability. A small number of people will also find your app in the app store.

The point of a quiet launch is to have only a small set of users who will be your initial beta user group. This is crucial because you will need to observe how they use your app, and use analytics to get an understanding of how your initial users are using your app, what they like about it, and at which points of the app users quit using your app. Doing this will give you insight about where your app is strong and where it is potentially weak or buggy. The idea behind doing a quiet launch is to find as many places where your app can be improved, quickly improve it, and quietly release an update of your app with appropriate fixes to do more testing and monitoring of your users to determine next areas of the app that need to be improved.

Frankly, the iterative process of improving your app should never stop, and you should always devote resources to improve your app in the manner I just described. After all, product quality and customer satisfaction is one of your biggest assets when it comes to creating a great business.

Nevertheless, at one point you will wake up and realize that the app has been improved enough to be promoted to a wider audience. This is when you can start thinking about doing a big launch with publicity.

How To Do A Big Mobile App Launch With Publicity

Throughout the soft launch of your app you should be creating relationships with journalists who cover apps, bloggers who cover apps, podcasters who cover apps, mobile app review site editors, other app entrepreneurs, and YouTubers who focus on apps. If you are successful at getting them excited about your app, when you are ready to do a big launch of your app, you can reach out to them and tell them that on a given date you will launch your app. A few of those people will promise to help you, and suddenly you have
your launch date set, on which you can get a boost from extra publicity. If you are able to allocate a marketing budget for your app, it will go a long way to convincing people to help promote your app on their platform, significantly boosting your launch efforts.

Just launching your app and getting publicity isn’t enough though. You need further strategy and goals. Since, as you already know, most apps rely on app store search for many of their downloads as their main long-term marketing strategy, you need to incorporate that into your launch strategy by positioning your app to get a search rankings boost from your big launch. To position your app to do well in search, you must have a good title and description that target relevant search terms by which users will find your app in the future. And you can use the publicity and download burst from your launch to get your app to rank for those keywords because one of the metrics app stores use to generate search results is the acceleration of downloads for apps.

Let me explain this a little bit further. Remember how app stores track metrics like app download accelerations, positive reviews, and time spent on the app? Well, this is your chance to boost your app download acceleration by orders of magnitude via the publicity
during your big launch. You may be wondering how the publicity will help to increase the time people spend on your app. Publicity won’t help that on its own. This is where your soft launch and your beta testing should play its part. User engagement is one of the core aspects of your app that you must work to improve during your beta testing.

Ideally, by the time you do a big launch of your app, user engagement should be in a good place. If your publicity efforts result in hundreds or thousands of extra downloads, it should (no guarantees) help you immediately relatively good rankings in app store searches. Of course, if your app is in a very competitive niche, it won’t be that simple. Nevertheless, this is the strategy to give your app a nice rise in app store search rankings from the beginning, by having a great launch.

The kind of a launch I just described should go a long way to getting many downloads and helping your app rank well in app store search. Nevertheless, it doesn’t always work out perfectly. App entrepreneurs sometimes come to me after doing a launch like this, and ask me why their app isn’t ranking well. Most of the time the problem is easy to spot. The most common issue is that there is a big disconnect between what the app developers or app entrepreneurs think is a point where their app is good, and the opinion of their users. When I download the apps of those entrepreneurs to have a look for myself I can immediately spot places within the app where users would get confused, and stop using the app. Often, since their app is new, the app is so poor that is it barely even usable.

If I have not mentioned this before, and now is a good time. Confusion is one of the biggest reasons users quit using apps (or websites). It might seem harmless to us as app entrepreneurs, but when users are confused, they subconsciously feel stupid and bad about themselves. That causes them not to go back to the product that made them feel this way. You might think that they should just spend a little bit more time trying to figure out how to use the app, but many of your users simply won’t do that. They will just quietly quit without telling you why. Some of those users will tell you about it by leaving a bad review about your app. You certainly don’t want to find out about why they quit your app this way.

You must be very careful to make sure that your app usability does not confuse people at any point of using your app. This is easier said than done. To be completely honest with you, I still have spots in my apps where users get confused. Despite me knowing where my users get confused, to fix or improve those areas isn’t always easy. It often requires rewriting a large part of the usability without guarantee that the next version of the software will be any more user friendly. Nevertheless, as much as possible, try to minimize confusion points within your app.

When your app’s usability is smooth and has minimal confusion, and you are able to accelerate downloads, you should be in good shape in terms of app store search rankings as long as your app is in a niche that is not ultra competitive.

Bigger App Launch: Present Your App At A Conference

There is one strategy to take your big “launch with a boom” and amplify that boom further. That strategy is to launch your app on stage at a conference. I realize that this isn’t an option for most app entrepreneurs, but if your app is unique and intriguing enough, consider applying to launch at the Launch conference hosted by Jason Calacanis, the Tech Crunch Disrupt conference, any of the other major technology and app conferences, or a conference focusing on the particular business niche of your app. Presenting on stage will not only expose your app to the immediate audience of the event, but it will also inform all the reporters in the audience about your app, amplifying the chances of getting press coverage in the publications for which they write.

More Mobile App Advice: My Mobile App Marketing And Monetization Book

This article is a small excerpt from my full book on how to make your mobile app into a great business. If you enjoyed this article, please take a second to explore my full mobile app marketing and monetization book.

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