How Apple Rumors Helped a Mac App Earn $30,000 in 7 Days
This is a case study on how rumors about Apple helped our Mac app go from 0 to $30K in just a single week.
My name is Josh Brown & I’m the ‘Don Draper” at Softorino, a company that develops apps for mobile & desktop platforms.
I can’t hold it any longer. I would like to tell you a story about one of our experiments that led to a discovery of iPhone 6 A8 chip being capable of playing back Smart-TV’s 4K video. By taking action quickly and pitching this story to the right people — the results helped our app earn $30,000 in a single week.
It’s been a trend to talk about the PR of various tech companies, though this subject is mostly written about the general ideas without a lot of detail.
Recently, we were able to literally learn the price for what they call a ‘good PR campaign’. Before I continue, let me clear the fog out: the story below — this is not something that was planned, it’s a chain of coincidences with action being taken in-time and sent to the right people. We simply “hit the spot”.
Softorino — a purely European crew packed with talented developers, designers & managers. Since the fall of 2011, we apply all of our focus into bringing simple solutions & fresh design into the world of Mac OS X & Windows. We decided to solve the biggest problem of every iPhone, iPad & iPod owner with a Windows PC. After we spent 14 months on developing a unique technology, we partnered with DAEMON Tools to release DAEMON iTools. An application allowing users to upload content to an iOS device+Transfer it back to PC without iTunes.
Our next solution, was to transcode media formats that are unsupported by Apple devices into a format that can be played back natively. We decided to name the product WALTR. The cool app name was actually inspired by Walter White from the American TV show “Breaking Bad”. Since the app was first of its kind on the Mac, right after the launch, we received some shockingly-good coverage about the app itself.
While testing version 1.0.2, just for the heck of it, we decided to see what happens if we drag n’ drop “like it’s hot” a 4K video file from Samsung’s Smart TV demos. We were very surprised, when our iPhone took it smoothly and played it back without a glitch. At that moment, we realised that this was revolutionary because Apple TV uses the chip from an iPhone and most-likely the next gen Apple TV will support 4K resolution.
We were extremely hyped because we had a real media bomb on our hands. Immediately, we got in touch with a few editors that wrote about Apple stuff and in a matter of 4 hours, we received coverage from TUAW, 9to5Mac, AppleInsider & MacRumors. Every single article mentioned Softorino and the app itself — WALTR. While communicating back-to-back with the press, we quickly made a video with proof and visualization of the whole process, a “how-to” tutorial on the main website and some images for the big announcement on Twitter & Facebook.
After putting together this handy “press-kit”, we blasted an email to all journalists that we could get a hold of to make this news as big as possible. This led to a second wave of press coverage, which even includes Forbes USA. They posted an article with news about the capabilities of next-gen Apple TV after a discovery made by our small company.
Now, with all this of this hype being gone, we can conclude the results:
Worldwide press coverage from more than 100 publishers with our company app, link to the website, product page and video url.
Video proof of 4K playback — 200K+ views.
Trial to Paid Conversion rate — 13,55%.
Installs to Sales Conversion rate — 7,05%.
Profit — About $30,000 in 1 week.
It was good while it lasted, but we were able to learn a few things from this. Some of it may not sound like anything “new”, it definitely won’t harm to re-think on it:
- Predicting the viralness of something is extremely hard. You have to think fast & “out-of-the-box”. For us, it was completely coincidental — thanks to a 4K video sample from Samsung, which we honestly, still cannot remember how it ended up on our machine for testing purposes.
- If you’re entering the market depending on Apple rumors, you must know how to “put together” your “rumor”. We rumor was strapped with a small video of proof and a “how-to” guide, letting people know that there’s no need for additional hardware and no jailbreak required. The less questions an audience will have, the higher are the chances for this news making it “big”. Simply, because most of the journalists and their readers will want to test it on their end.
- Fight for every single person that visits your website during the media coverage period. We were able to set up remarketing and with the help of the user’s browser cookies, we followed him everywhere he went. This actually explains our great conversion, during our unplanned PR campaign.
- Pick the right time. Do not blast out your rumor on Friday. No one will really be so interested in it and it will simply ware off over the weekend. For example, we actually did this right before the weekend. If we weren’t so pumped, the results could have been waaay better.
If there’s something I might’ve missed or didn’t provide enough detail — let me know!
