Features for Marketing — BoostMyFund
Find Me!
As a small new indie developer and a part time one at that, the biggest challenge I face is discoverability. There are Indies out there who have been in the game for a long time, already have a presence online and engagement with existing blog and news feeds.
Lost
The appstore analytics does not give you much information on how people found your app, especially if you don’t have many downloads, so I have no idea whether my if my Twitter or Facebook links are working; and anyway I have a fairly small audience. What I need is someone else to blow my trumpet.
Thinking…..
So how can I achieve this? So here is what I am thinking…
From the outset I had setup the app in such a way that I could tag on new data sources. The next data source I had in mind was FitBit and I have already done quite a bit of the coding, in-fact the only real pieces left to implement is the OAUTH2 token expiry renew process. While on the surface it should be simple, the async nature of the process makes my head hurt when trying to tie it into the data request process.
So this is a great feature for Fitbit users, but fitbit users can already use the app, they can do it by syncing via Strava. While this is a good feature, I am not sure it is that compelling for Fitbit.
A new idea has jumped into my mind, sparked by talking to the JustGiving folk who suggested using their API for tighter integration. So now I have came up with the idea of giving the users of BoostMyFund the ability to post an update of their training directly to their JustGiving page.
Transform Thinking into Code
So this idea has some legs, I already have some sort of relationship with JustGiving and their API seems really friendly. So I am now looking into how to transform the training data into a JustGiving update.
There are two regular updates that can be made to a JustGiving page, text update (280 characters) and picture update.
I don’t just want to send the same poster to the JustGiving web page, so I’ll put this in the back burner, I think I can do a more specific training graphical update, but that will take quite a bit of time.
The text update could be quite straight forward. e.g. turn the training stats into a story.
I think this is quite a compelling feature for JustGiving users. I hope that JustGiving would consider allowing me to write about it on their technical blog and perhaps do a bit of retweeting:)
In Short
Build a compelling feature that someone else with a bigger following than me may be interested in it enough to share it on social media to talk about it ! Let see if it works.
…Off coding now:)
In the meantime you can get BoostMyFund here
