The path to the top cost of $ 5

A little more than a week has passed since the release of my first “real” application in the Play market. And oddly enough, it managed to consolidate itself in the top 10 new free (though not the most competitive) category in 2 countries at once (Russia and Ukraine). And even there slowly surpasses competitors. This is strange at once for two reasons - firstly, the only real investment in the application was my time and the time of my girlfriend. And secondly, the inexperience of our startup, both in product promotion and in developing high-quality applications. But still we managed to achieve, even local and small, success.
Anyone wishing to learn about the promotion of the application "little blood" - welcome under cat.

I think it’s worth starting with the fact that I’ve recently met with the development of mobile applications. She could not devote to learning all of herself - work and personal life do not leave too much free time. This has left its mark on the quality of the application, although there is still hope that I can still refine it. I just want to say that in the present conditions promotion has become more important than the quality of the application itself. Even not the most successful application can appear in the tops with a good advertising campaign, but a quality application can receive 10 downloads due to the author’s blind faith that “good applications promote themselves”. Maybe once it was, but what I’ve seen in the Android world of development says the opposite - a chance to be noticed without progress is approximately equal to the chance to win the lottery. Yes, it happens, but extremely rarely and not with you.

But now is not about that. Now about the progress and rake and random luck that awaited the application.
The first success was the release date of the application - immediately after the New Year holidays. I just had free time, but as it turned out later it was a very successful coincidence. The market in this period subsides. Even many big players are slowing down. For such a changeable top as “new”, where an additional 50 downloads per day can be the difference between 70th and 15th place, this can be the difference between success and failure.
Discounts at advertising sites were also pleasant. Those $ 5 that went on advertising were paid for the site, which in another period would have been twice as expensive.
It is also possible to call luck determining the target audience even before the release of the application. All the free spam to the target communities in social networks seemed to me to bring much more benefit than if the information was provided on the blogs about new applications.

Further a little about a rake.
Before the release, I planned to spend $ 15-20 on promotion, but everything was not so simple. At first there were problems with the creation of a webmoney ruble wallet. If you are in Ukraine, they also expect you. So if the funds for promotion will be used from this resource - try to do the whole robot service long before the release.
Another blow in the back were problems with the advertising cabinet of the social network vkontakte. When I finally found a way to replenish the advertising office and sent an advertising post for moderation, I soon received an answer, like "We advertise only apps with 100+ ratings." For a small startup in the first few days, this figure is too high, so the money in the advertising office remained to wait for better times. The only means spent on advertising was a direct transfer from the webmoney dollar wallet.
By the way, the effect of it was quite successful, from which I can conclude that advertising the target audience can pay for itself many times.
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When it became clear that we could not see advertising, we decided to go another way - to offer mutual advertising. We agreed to add the section “Partners” in which we will place links to resources that have placed advertising on us. So far we have just begun this process, so it’s too early to talk about the results. But by what is already visible now - we added in downloads for the day, and quite noticeably.
The important lesson I learned from this stage is to forget about modesty when it comes to business. I wrote offers of mutual advertising to such resources, in comparison with which my application looks like a tiny grain of sand. And some agreed with them! When looking for partners or investors, write to anyone you can. It will not be worse.

Unfortunately, we thought about monetization too late, so there is no need to talk about any commercial success. But this is a story the size of another article. It is quite possible that if I had put high hopes on my offspring, I would have been more careful with monetization and advertising, but alas, it’s too late to talk about it.

If you suddenly want to promote the project without investing a lot of money in it, then I advise you to make full use of various social networking communities, comments on YouTube and tweets on tweeters. Try to pay attention to the target audience (which needs to be determined even before the release of the application). As soon as you get the first couple of hundred downloads, offer everyone and everything to mutual advertising. Just try not to reduce the quality of the application itself. And of course, teamwork. To do this all by yourself is very difficult.
But do not expect to earn on such an application too much. Yet with paid advertising, new horizons are opening up.

PS I want to thank my girlfriend for help in creating the application. Without you, nothing would have happened.