How We Hit 500k App Downloads in Less Than 2 Years With Just $100

The complete journey, to inspire you

Marketing a brand new startup being a brand new marketer is very fun: you get to crush your hands and be creative. It’s even more fun when you are the only marketer: you are free to make mistakes, and hence learn more. I enjoyed the process first hand.

We started with one mission: Make Learning Fun. We didn’t have any resources, no knowledge and we started by bootstrapping. Full of blessings from the Uncertainty God.

Yet we started. We loved the process and we rocked the outcome. What’s sad about that is: in organic marketing, we can’t get the exact insights of what and why something worked but we sure can get inspired.

The Start

It all starts with family and friends. We got the prototype ready for free with the help of a developer friend of ours. He agreed to build it for free because our idea was related to programming, which he loves and he bought into our idea. This meant our idea has potential.

The Testing Phase

We then tested it out on our family and friends. We lied to them. We told, “Mom, please check out a prototype of my friend’s new venture.” to avoid biasedness and mother’s lovingness. They loved the idea and concept. This meant our idea had value.

Time for Going Beta

On 27th November of 2018, we released the prototype for the whole world to see, on the Play Store. We also put our app on a few beta testing sites, like BetaTesters.io and BetaList to get free feedback from real users.

People loved it and gave some amazing feedback. This meant our idea has future.

We also got some negative feedback which we loved as we had scope for improvement.

Cold Calling Gave Us a Kick in the Butt

We went to everyone in our neighborhood to get them to download our app not through the link but by scrolling 13 pages to find us. We heard somewhere that this will help with ASO. It sure did. We convinced almost everyone to do that for us for a cupcake (which our mother made), however, just that last house and all our happiness was lost: we got kicked by an old lady in our butts. We loved it, however.

We Pitched Volunteers Before Investors

Our primary goal was to attract volunteers to help us with our app as we didn’t have much budget to hire team members. We formed a gang of volunteers in our Discord server to help us with our dream app. There was no incentive involved. Some people loved our app and so they were willing to help us, but it all starts from asking.

We now have over 800+ active volunteers who have our back.

We Worked on to Have Atleast One Uniqueness

We analyzed our competitors and found one lacking: there was no (instant) support. This, in turn, gave us the scope of getting better with this. We immediately created a Forum in our app and slowly started replying to every user queries within 24 hours. We started getting amazing reviews on Play Store right after adding the Forum, which eventually made us hit the 4.9 rating mark (a world-record in the history of our competitors.) To increase our efforts in the overall app, we requested the volunteers to help us with this.

Our volunteers started helping us to give instant support, so we could focus on adding the contents and making the app better. We also didn’t have to spend a single penny as the volunteers were happy to help us, for free.

Note: our top uniqueness is we teach in a fun way, which is rare in the education industry, let alone our competitors. But, as we were just starting and didn’t have a complete course yet, we needed another uniqueness: instant support.

True Marketing Starts From Marketing Yourself

Way before we started our dream project, our founder has already established himself online. He has written 4 books already by that time. He has grown his readership by being on the bestselling author list, five times. He has already formed his loyal fans on his YouTube channel. He has already made a few deep connections with national and international influencers and best-selling authors. He has already been in the news and a few magazine channels.

This helped us get our customers very easily in the initial stage and this keeps on compounding now, as he reaches more audience.

Those Connections Gave Us Free Promotions

Those personal connections with influencers gave us a high boost in our downloads. We offered free premium access codes to their audience for promoting us and they agreed. It was easy to convince them, because of the personal connection we made way back.

Every Small Win Matters

We had an amazing pizza party when we hit 43k downloads in just 2.5 months. This matters a lot for the team spirit. Starting from nothing to this point is a great milestone for us, all by bootstrapping. We didn’t tell about this to our family members — only our team knew about this so that we could save some money.

We Got Interested About Comment Marketing

We got fascinated about comment marketing on social media. Initially, we started with Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, and Subreddits. We would look for the beginner programmer’s question and even some advanced level programmer’s and with every comment, we added value and wherever possible, we tried to talk about us as well…not selling us, but showcasing our benefits. This helped us get some initial traction very easily at the same time it increased our brand awareness.

We Improved Our UI/UX to Improve Our Success

We then improved our UI And UX to make the app better, and hence to increase our brand awareness even more. It took us two whole months to wholly reskin the app. We wanted to have something ten times better, but it was two times better than our previous one, yet we moved on. We promoted this new reskinning on our social media, to gain the traction rolled back.

Pitching Influencers Taught Us Two Crucial Lesson

Our app wasn’t great but it was good. Our pocket was small, but our dream was big. We thought: we can’t afford celebrity endorsement, we can’t afford hectic investors, but we sure could afford influencers, because we don’t need to worry about equity share, or constant pitching or money, but we surely could give away our access for free. It was in our budget.

We did that. Yet we failed. We learned a few lessons while doing that. One of them is: free isn’t always welcome to everyone. We did succeed once, free of charge. And it taught us that we always don’t need to sell ourselves. Just be yourself and people will love you for being you.

We Added a Video on Our Play Store

We spent 30 minutes working on a new promo video for our Play Store. We didn’t use any fancy software for that. We directly used our smartphone’s default editor and polished it there. It wasn’t bad enough and it worked: we improved our daily conversion rate from 19% to an astounding 27%.

We Even Talked About Us on a Cooking Show

We didn’t skip any chance we got to promote our app. Now, it was not a forceful promotion, but a value-added promotion. Even in a cooking show, we talked about the importance of programming but not directly selling us. However, we did offer free premium access codes for that channel’s audience. People loved it because of the unexpectedness: we showed five unique recipes and we combined a cooking show with an educational one. That cooking channel now has over 650k+ subscribers and we continue getting more reach through that.

We Expanded to the Apple App Store

On December 9th, 2020, we decided to expand: we thought to hit for the Apple App Store. With almost zero knowledge and no additional resources, still, we jumped onto it, and on March 27th, 2020 finally we were live. We promoted this on all our social media and the rich kids who could only afford an iPhone started using this app and bragging on social media, eventually promoting us.

We Got Super-Attentive Towards Email Support Queries

We worked on to reply to every user query we got within 24 hours, and we didn’t keep a user wandering for the solution…if needed, we would even jump into a Hangouts call.

We realized this sooner: the more we care about our users, the more value we provide them, the more we satisfy them well, the more they will support us and that support could take any form: giving a good review which might even get us at the number one position (who knows?), or they might get us a free promotion from their girlfriend’s YouTube channel comprising of millions of subscribers, or they might support us by purchasing or even investing for us. We never know. Apart from that, it’s the number one commandment in any business: Customers are God. Serve them well.

We Made Use of Reddit for Globalization

Our volunteers helped us translate our app contents and app description to a lot of languages. They aren’t professional translators and now we needed one to proofread the contents. But we couldn’t afford any. We made use of Reddit for this. When we were doing comment marketing on subreddits, we found it extremely powerful. Reddit has a big community on almost every topic. We got one for translators too. We pitched a few people and requested whether they could help us for free and if needed, we would provide them with a certificate for their work. It worked. We improved our app description to help with ASO and added translated contents to help us get more users.

We Gave More Focus on the Negative Reviews

We spent more time on our negative reviews than the positive ones. It might be obvious but we tend to usually forget that. We don’t even always think about responding to them, why? Because we feel it useless. But these negative reviews are what makes marketing more fun. Negative reviews are a blessing. You get to get out of your comfort zone. You get to get out of the normal template. You get to experiment. You get to try different things. And, as a marketer, you get to improve. It’s also a chance to make him/her your loyal fans.

We Got Super-serious With Social Media Branding

We wanted to serve more people and it’s way easier to serve more people through content marketing. We worked on our social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter) and kept adding value, daily, consistently. While doing so, we increased our brand awareness. We ultimately found a good amount of success on Instagram, as it resonated with our audience, which is teens.

We Tried a Different Kind of Twitter Marketing

On Twitter, we provide value to our audience with an informative post about programming, add a relevant but appealing caption, and then have our app link along with it. Twitter is all about hashtags. We use hashtags to reach a wider audience there.

From beginner to professional programmers, everyone has started knowing us. We ping them to start a conversation, get to know them better, develop better relationships, and convince them to try out our app, and then give us feedback on how we can improve. They are almost always generous to offer feedback for a good cause. We sometimes try to go a little more extreme: we ask them to tweet about us if they liked our app. They usually do and it gives us an extra edge. That’s the power of communication.

We also find relevant comments to add value to any kind of person interested in programming.

This way, the reach, and downloads of our app keep increasing.

Nowadays beginners also started messaging us themselves as they saw us credible. That’s a huge success.

We Even Tried Tumblr

Programming is already a popular niche on Tumblr. We couldn’t simply leave it out.

Programming related content on Tumblr seems to do pretty well, which we found after spending some time on the platform. Also, memes and humorous kind of contents get the most attention. The whole platform itself is more like a chiller.

We started providing value to the community. We consistently published both value-driven content and humorous content. After trying every kind of post we could, we found that engaging and funny quotes also work great with Tumblr. Tumblr has the option of publishing quotes. We started publishing programming-related quotes that were engaging. This got more eyeballs rolling on our profile.

We are being unique from the others. This gave us an extra and unfair advantage. Everyone is only publishing humorous content on Tumblr as the platform is made for that. We have flipped the game here by publishing value-driven content. The whole community started trusting us. After posting for one month straight, people who are interested in programming started messaging us as well and we help them by answering their questions and they themselves convert to our users.

Guerrilla Markering Seems Like the New Cool

We thought about some creative sort of promotion to easily get eyeballs on our app and finally, we worked on one. It didn’t work very well (maybe due to timing) but it got a few people talking and we got a few learnings.

Organic marketing is very fun. We have the freedom to try everything we can. Organic marketing has this rule: everything is ethical in the first attempt.

Don’t take our journey as a guideline. Use this as an inspiration and you will rock your next marketing. All it boils down to is to have patience, experiment, and keep adding value. We did just that.

Ohh, by the way, finally we are trying celebrity endorsement now.