Avoid the Feature
Early on, all those downloads are not your friend
It’s right there, like a glittering lure in a dark sea. An email from Apple. They want to feature your app when it launches in the App Store. This is it. Fortune will follow fame. You’re set.
No, you’re not.
A funny thing has happened on the way to the iPhone going mainstream: the App Store has gotten really, really big. You often hear about the app discovery issues now with over a million apps in the store. What you don’t often hear about is the flipside: when Apple does bestow a coveted featured spot upon your app, you get to rise above the noise, but the end result of that is a lot of noisy would-be users.
That is to say, while you’re getting a lot of downloads, they may not end up as users. Even if they sign up for your app once, which isn’t a given despite the download, they may never use it again. The masses may not be asses, but they can be fickle.
In some regards, this sounds like the definition of a good problem to have, right? Not really. And actually, for early stage startups, it is in fact the opposite. But again, it’s really, really hard to see that at first.
Talking to a number of early stage companies that have been featured at launch recently, they all have similar stories: a ton of downloads that resulted in very few users that actually stuck around.
But that’s on the startup, right? They’re supposed to make a service that people want to, and ideally need to, use. Sure. But how many startups do you know that launch in such a way right out of the gate? Almost none of them.
At best, a startup has had several thousand people testing the app rigorously to get it ready for the big launch. More realistic is having a few hundred friends and family who are putting a service through its paces. These are very unlikely to be your typical users. And they’re certainly not going to be the masses that come in through an App Store featuring.
In other words, you’re walking into a situation where your app is not likely ready for prime time, yet Apple is putting you on the main stage of American Idol. Good luck.
So you’re featured and get all those downloads. Lots of high fives that Thursday afternoon. Come Thursday evening, the first realization sets in: while some of those downloads are converting into initial users, they’re having all sorts of issues actually using your app. Bugs are exposed not by flashlight, but by sunbeam. Panic starts to creep in…
By Friday, that panic is in full effect. A single digit percentage of those users who signed up on day one are coming back to the app. You have some plans to get them re-engaged, but those are unlikely to work.
The best-case scenario is that those initial users taught you a lot and will make version 2.0 of the app that much better. The more likely scenario is that those users resulted in extremely noisy data which is not indicative of much beyond the fact that your app is both young and buggy.
And those initial users? They’re not going to give you another shot. Your time in the spotlight was largely wasted.
All of this leads to my seemingly counter-intuitive advice: avoid being featured by Apple in the App Store when you first launch your app at all costs. Apple may hate me being honest in this regard, but they shouldn’t: it behooves neither the app makers nor Apple to have a bunch of apps featured that aren’t going to provide long-term value to users. It’s the short-term gain for long-term pain trade-off. Big picture: it won’t be worth it.
While it’s a lot less sexy, what you should do is quietly launch your app/service and rely on some distribution that isn’t Apple’s firehose of mainstream users. Ideally, this would be natural, word-of-mouth growth. But, let’s be realistic, there will undoubtedly be a chicken-and-egg problem, so get creative. The tech press remains a popular route, but increasingly suffers from some of the same issues as the App Store just at a much smaller scale. Something like Product Hunt seems much more finely-tuned for testers these days given the highly targeted audience of early adopters.
No matter what method you settle on, just know that it’s going to take a very long time to ever get anywhere near the number of downloads Apple will provide with the App Store featuring — and that’s a good thing.
When you want to be featured by Apple — and when Apple should want you featured — is when your product is in fact ready for prime time. Your app will never be perfect, but it should be stress-tested, honed, and ready for mass distribution.
All of that is easier said than done, of course. The road to that stage will be both painful and painfully slow. And most apps/services won’t make it. But that’s natural. Being featured at birth in the App Store is not.
Postscript: I should note that while I’m much more versed in App Store launches, I assume much of this advice translates to the Play Store as well. The core idea remains obvious, yet hard to turn down for obvious reasons: aim for a massive number of users when you feel fully ready to have a massive number of users.
