Our founder, Elad Natanson, gives insight into Growth Hacking tools for indie developers in his latest piece for Forbes.
In 2015, the mobile economy is booming and app marketing is feeding the beast.
With millions of apps now on offer on both Apple AAPL +2.05% and Google GOOGL -2.91% platforms, it is harder and harder to build awareness for a new app. Large app developers, particularly mobile game companies, are spending enormous sums of money on marketing. Supercell, the developer of the popular Clash of Clans and Boom Beach spent $440 million USD on marketing and advertising in 2014. King, maker of Candy Crush Saga, spent $455 million. How can small startups and indie developers with no marketing budget compete in this landscape? It may seem impossible, yet there are many apps that have grown tremendously while spending little to no money on advertising.
One phrase you may have heard about is “Growth Hacking.” In general, growth hacking means finding ways to grow without spending money on marketing. The concept is to combine creative and unconventional thinking paired with a rigorous, engineering like process to optimize customer acquisition and retention. Some notable examples include:
- Spotify integrating into Facebook FB -1.56% so a user’s FB friends can see all their playlists
- Dropbox incentivizing referrals by offering free storage to both a user who invites a friend to sign up as well as the new user who has been referred
- AirBnB reverse engineering Craigslist to enable cross posting of user listing
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