The Night Intern Team 6 Took Down The App
Welcome to the trenches. Today’s mission from Phenom HQ was to send in our elite team of interns (we prefer “Intern Team 6”) to dethrone the cost per acquisition (CPA) that, for many start-ups, results in their demise. The tactic? Understanding our users better than our users understand themselves. We have a clearly defined target market, 13 to 18 year old amateur athletes (ourselves 10 years ago), which allows for easy engagement in the world of guerilla marketing. We used this knowledge, paired with some clever sweet-talking, to drive a large amount of downloads at a CPA of $0.02. This same tactic, with more eyeballs, has the long term ability to manifest into thousands of downloads a day.
Cost per acquisition, the average amount spent on converting someone to a user, can prove to be a proverbial shot to the heart for any company. In today’s day and age, the average CPA for app marketers is around $1.79 (trademob.com). While this number may not seem high, it definitely adds up when you think about the amount of users required to start churning out a profit as compared to the marketing budget of start-ups. Originally, our head shed planned on spending $2.00 per user. Nonsense. Intern Team 6 used some clever Instagram knowhow to MacGyver together a plan involving multiple high-traffic accounts and some Putin-esque trolling. We reached out to several of these accounts that had a good amount of followers and even better follower engagement. Surprisingly, a lot of these accounts are run by high school students, which allowed us to negotiate promotional posts that resulted in almost no marketing budget casualties (Obama, take notes). Because Special Forces do their best work under the cover of darkness, we waited until nightfall to unleash our promotional posts to almost 200,000 eyeballs. As the night wore on, we bagged countless POW’s (Phenoms of War, AKA new users). Unfortunately, our servers weren’t quite ready for such an invasion of data.
To pay tribute to our POWs that had to deal with sub-par app performance on their first day, we brought in the M*A*S*H and reached out to as many users as we could on Instagram. We would comment, direct message and do anything within our sphere of influence to let these new users know that they are in good hands.
We understand our product isn’t perfect; but then again, our 1040% growth in the last 30 days is pretty damn good, no matter what stage of development we’re in. Knock, knock… Phenom’s here to make some noise.
-Jacob Shelt and Connor Klammer
