Cookbook was an experiment that we started back in September 2013. It was a simple utility app, with bare minimum features. There was no focus on the look & feel. It focussed on ONE thing alone—inspire a foodie to cook something that he would love to eat. Read on

This time last year we met Kanan Rai at Startup Village. She then headed Google’s Admob for India. Kanan talked to us about driving revenue from apps via Admob. The biggest take-away for us from the conversation was a piece of information that she shared—

A good app acquires 1 Million users in 3 months.

This meant the app had to get over 11,000 downloads every single day.

We launched our first app, Movie Tarot in February last year. The 11,000 downloads a day felt almost impossible ‘coz our movie tarot was hardly getting just 500 downloads a day.

We wanted to be successful on the Store, but had no clue how to go about things! That’s when we met Dhanan Sekhar. He was really kind to us and our first tips about the Play store came from him. Dhanan’s ‘Android Black Magic’ did it’s trick; but even with his tips, Kanan’s 11,000+ seemed almost impossible, especially without any kind of ad campaign.

An year has gone by since our first baby steps on Google Play. Now we acquire over 500,000 users every 30 days. Thats close to 16,000 downloads a day. The last 1 year has seen a drastic change in our approach to the entire process. Being successful on the store has a very definitive method. A method starts even before the app is made.

2 approaches to being successful on the store

1. Big BANG marketing
   Most of us feel this is the ‘go to’ way to create a successful product. We go all in on ‘building the brand’. And YES, this method works; provided you’ve lots of cash to burn.
   eg. Big shot games like Clash of Clans, Angry Birds, Hey Day etc. all focus on this method. They go all out on launch; pumping in millions of dollars into app distribution.
2. Organic growth
   Here the focus is on building a ‘sexy product’. This takes time. Very little is spend on marketing; mostly to supplement growth.

WeChat spends roughly $1 on each free user it acquires; while Whatsapp doesn’t even spend a dime on marketing.

At Riafy, we follow the second approach. Bootstrapped organic growth. Once you get the hang of this, your growth will be as impressive as any ad-campaign driven growth. ☺

The process

STEP 1: Pick a problem & solve it. Build really simple use-cases. You might’ve heard this a thousand times already. But how the heck do you pick a problem?
This was the first thing Sijo Kuruvila—one of our mentors, ever told us. But it took quite a while to understand how to go about it.

Solving real problems is important because it’s the only way you can convincingly pitch your product to a potential customer.
eg. Whatsapp lets is light, clean, lets me text all my friends and helps me save a fortune on SMSs. A win for everyone!

STEP 2: Start with a ‘bare-bone version’. This is important because, we’ll NEVER launch other wise. We would spend countless hours working on features that we arent even sure if people would want to use. So leave the fine tuning to a later stage and LAUNCH the basic app.

Most people get stuck at this step. Since our idea is so dear to us, there’s always the fear of failure. We always keep asking ourselves, ‘What if these features are not enough?’. This eventually defers the launch.

STEP 3: Work on building a ‘Sexy Product’
Take feedback from your users. Everyone will have a opinion on how your product should be. Don’t listen to everyone. It’ll get you nowhere. Incorporate feedback wisely into your product and release timely updates.

Google Play loves updates; and when done properly, your app will see a substantial rise in install counts. But don’t release updates just for the sake of it. Crappy updates may help in short-term download spikes, but your app could get ‘red-flagged’ for trying to game Google’s algorithms. This will affect your chances of building a long-term app.

PR & Branding

Once you’ve a sexy product; journalists/bloggers would want to write about you. Reach out to folks who’ve already written about similar products on twitter/email. For a start, here’s a list of folks writing for Techcrunch.

Do this ONLY when you feel your “App is READY”.