How Indie Developers Can Survive In a Big-Budget World

forbes.com

In 2015, the mobile economy is booming and app marketing is feeding the beast.

With millions of apps now on offer on both Apple and Google 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 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 listings

In each case, these clever strategies resulted in massive growth by leveraging either existing users’ networks (Dropbox) or a large distribution platform (Facebook for Spotify or Craigslist for AirBnB) without spending any money on traditional advertising.

But the ultimate growth hack is even more fundamental: it is conceiving of your product in such a way that it contains the seeds of its future growth. In other words, designing your app so it has virality baked into the cake from the start. Virality is a much used (and abused) term in the consumer app space, so let me offer a definition:

A product is intrinsically viral if the core use of the product generates a “direct marketing” moment that sells the product to a new user.

To be fair, most apps don’t have a chance at being truly viral. It’s not in their DNA. Which ones do? More than one type of app, as we’ll see. I will use examples of three totally different types of apps that achieved viral growth: Venmo (P2P payments), Trivia Crack (games), and Blab (live video chat).

Perhaps the most obvious example of a viral app is a communication platform, because the core use case involves two or more people using the app together. From Hotmail toWhatsApp and more recently, Slack, communication apps that offer an improved user experience or benefit can grow rapidly, as early users invite people in their networks to join. Positive network effects accrue as the body of users grow, leading to a tipping point where non-users feel compelled to join to be able to stay in touch with their friends and peers.

But how can communication apps get going from zero? Normally both users have to have already loaded a communication app to use it. This creates a point of friction. Blab, a new video chat app that does live group chats, has overcome this problem by enabling someone to use the app before loading it. This enables existing users to use Blab with their friends who are not yet users, creating an organic marketing moment. This has resulted in exponential growth in minutes streamed on Blab since its launch in April 2015.

Another type of app with viral potential is a game. Games are often played between more than one player, and even single-player games can elicit competition among peers. A game that created a unique product feature, which led to viral growth is Trivia Crack. Trivia Crack is a trivia game built by game developer Etermax, based in Argentina. Launched in 2013, the app grew explosively, spreading from Latin America to the U.S., and then to the rest of the world. As of 2015, the app has gained over 150 million users while spending little to no money on advertising.

How did it accomplish this extraordinary feat? One, they focused on regional markets to make sure that the trivia questions were culturally specific and relevant to those users. Two, they did something else, which I believe is what made the product truly viral: they sourced trivia questions from the user base, and gave them credit. This accomplishes two things: it keeps the content fresh and relevant, and two, users who see “their” questions being used are more likely to continue to use the app and also are more likely to invite their friends. Today Trivia Crack players submit over 200,000 new questionsper day.

Finally, Venmo is a great example of how attacking a specific real-world use case involving sharing can lead to viral growth. Venmo is a mobile peer-to-peer payment platform. Similar to Paypal, it is a digital wallet that enables people to send money to each other. Unlike Paypal, which grew as a result of integrating into eBay, Venmo focused on millenials who are always splitting bills in restaurants, bars, etc. This use case turbocharged adoption, as one Venmo user sitting at a table with friends could get the others to load Venmo on the spot to split the check more easily than handing the server ten debit cards. Venmo estimates that 49% of their P2P payments are dining related. By leveraging this real world viral setting, Venmo experienced 347% year-over-year growth and surpassed Starbucks’ mobile transaction volume in 2014.

As we can see from these examples, there is no one formula for making your app intrinsically viral. It’s not easy to do. But by doing so, even the smallest developer can create an app that can spread around the world like wildfire.