How to acquire 100k users on your app in a year with a low budget

A year ago, we released the first iOS version of our app Vegg’up, to help users reduce their meat intake and adopt a more sustainable diet. Six months later, we launched the Android version. Today, more that 100k subscribed on our app, and 80% came from organic (and free) traffic. Here is how we did it.

Tip #1: focus on a community to unlock ASO

App Store Optimization (ASO) is a main tool for acquisition. Very quickly, we popped first on words such as “vegetarian” or “vegan” on the AppStore & Google Play Store. We are dedicated to plant-based food: this gives us a unique positioning and enables a quick and easy optimization of the keywords used to find our app.

From our experience, ASO depends on:

• Your app name (until recently, our app was not merely “Vegg’up”, but “Vegg’up — Recette et nutrition” and our subtitle was “Régalez vous végétarien”): your keywords must appear on your app title and subtitle
• Your description: make sure to use keywords regularly (just like SEO)
• Your app screenshots
• Your ratings: on the AppStore, we have more than 1,8k ratings (4,7/5). For our most loyal users, we offer them, after several sessions and interactions, to rate the app directly from the app
• Your daily downloads

Tip #2: find relevant influencers — and offer added value

Our key feature on Vegg’up is to recommend customized recipes. Rather than creating our own recipes, we wanted to offer more visibility to talented bloggers. On our app, we recommend recipes from more than 10 bloggers, who tend to talk about us to their community.

This is a win-win situation: we offer bloggers visibility and they can target our users, and by doing so, they are happy to mention us regularly.

Tip #3: check your analytics

Subscribers is a nice metrics, but in reality, this isn’t the one that matters most: your need to leverage your DAU (daily active users), WAU or MAU, depending on your app.Therefore, analytics are key when launching an app.

Understanding your star feature will enable you to work on it and leverage retention. The more people use your app, the more they will share and talk about it. Because adding a “share” button on your app is great, but not enough to make users use it ;)

Tip #4: don’t spend time on PR too early

We have started to work on PR only a couple of months ago. Before that, we found that it was more useful to focus on micro influence, social media and community management to leverage acquisition.

PR is a great when you deal with a famous partner, or when you reach a significant metric (like the 100k subscribers ;) ). Before that, getting featured in media that don’t target your core audience might be a cool thing to show to your grandparents, but a waste of time to acquire your users.

If you liked this article, you can find out more about Vegg’up on our website. We were also invited on the Podcast “Vecus” (in French), to talk about our launch strategy when we released the first version.