Shockingly easy way to get thousands of users to your new app

It’s THE challenge for mobile app developers.  

How to get a new app noticed amongst literally a gazillion others?

I’d been mulling this over leading up to the launch of our first .

We were confident we’d created something unique and fun. But would any even get to see it?

So a plan was put together leading up to a big (for us) marketing campaign:

1. Private alpha on iOS to validate MVP (done)
2. Public beta on Android to tune for monetization & retention (done)
3. Launch on iOS as a paid app for final run with testers and friends (last weekend)
4. Change price from paid to free in preparation for marketing (yesterday)
5. Begin our marketing campaign (starting later today)

Whilst the real judge of the plan will come out of #5, something interesting came out today in this part*

4.  Change price from paid to free…

We found though when we changed from paid to free, within an hour we started appear on several “Sale Alert” sites and apps:

Which then corresponded in our analytics to a big uptick in the new install rate:

Which in turn led to our game starting to appear for the first time on several charts:

We originally went out as paid to discourage people from downloading and give us a chance to iron out kinks before starting marketing.

And by doing that and subsequently dropping to zero, we got thousands of installs in a few hours.

 All before spending a single dollar on marketing.

Caveats:

• I wouldn’t say I recommend it, if you’re large you’ll annoy a lot of users
• if you’re small, you’ll annoy first adopters who commit to you (as we’ve found out)
• you can’t start free, then go paid then go free and have the same impact
• yes, 3000 users is small, but for a small startup it can kick start your growth 
• most important - this all doesn’t matter if your app doesn’t resonate with users (we spent months in beta first)

* ps - I’ll be blogging about the result of the marketing campaign and other parts in coming days, lots of fun things to share