Project firestarter

Hi guys,

I always wondered what can we do to kick-start our new apps in Google Play. I’m just publishing a new game today and taking the opportunity to test out few things. I called the experiment ‘project firestarter’ to see whether investing a bit in advertising ($500 budget) in the first week/month will have a significant impact on how popular the app will be. You can read more about what I’m up to at my recently started blog Business of Mobile and I will be updating results of this experiment along the way on the blog as well as on this forum.

Here’s the link to the app: FreeCell Solitaire Champion

Now, I would appreciate some support from you - the app is in the market for an hour or so and a few initial positive rankings would help a lot. Especially that the requirement for AppBrain which I’m planning to use as one of my main advertisement source requires five positive comments to get started.

Also if you have any comments of what to try/avoid I’m all ears. Summer may be a good time for such test since ad traffic is low so ad prices are low. Or it may be a bad time because less people download apps in general. We’ll see.

This is AWESOME. +rep. I will be following the progress carefully, since I will be launching my next app sometime in the next few months!

Great idea - and glad you’re publishing the results! Do keep us posted about how you go.

I’ll give your app a try, and post a comment. One thing to bear in mind - AppBrain often takes a few days to add new apps, or update their stats (comments & ratings) for existing apps. If you’re looking to use their advertising platform to kick start your downloads, it might be worth emailing their support team to see if you can fast-track your app updates to cross that “positive rating” threshold.

All the best with your experiment!

AppBrain was almost instantaneous - as soon as I reached 5 rankings I logged in to AppBrain to see if I can do anything to make the app added faster and it was already there waiting for me :slight_smile:
Maybe it was because I have already spent some money with them before for advertising other apps, I don’t know.

Nice idea. You are my competitor by the way, I also made FreeCell Solitaire once. :slight_smile:

@Magnesus - yes, I know I am but I’m sure we can be friendly competition :slight_smile: This niche is big enough to accommodate more than one developer.

OK, here it is - Day One.

Short story:
344 installs on the first day
271 active users
74th place in new apps
17th place in ‘FreeCell’ search results.

Long story: read here.

I was hoping for a bit more but it’s not bad for a first day.

BTW - can anyone located in US take a quick look to see whether positions I’m seeing differ much from those seen from the US?

Position 25 in my search for “freecell solitaire” in the Games->Cards&Casio section on a Nexus 7 in the USA.

25th here as well. I deliberately set my phone’s language to US English - looks like the rankings depend only on chosen language and not on physical location.

Thanks.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. I tried a similar approach when I released my last app, but with ad-mob advertising. It didn’t go too well, spent about $360 and only got about 300 installs. At the time I thought that app-brain’s price per install was $1 at lowest. According to your report, $.20 per install, that would be an acceptable price per install in my eyes. May have to try app-brain with my next launch. Thanks for sharing! Encase your wondering about my report with trying ad-mob advertising, you can see the thread here: http://makingmoneywithandroid.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=431

Max, great journal mate. I have subscribed to your blog and this thread as well! I want to know if you have used appcod.es or similar service in order to track competitors as well as your own apps?

plus, do you use (or willing to use) exchange ad service like tapfortap or tapgage?

and what’s your monetization plan? Just through ads?

No, I haven’t heard of appcod.es before. Looks like an interesting service but seems to be targeting mostly Apple appstore. And to be honest it looks a bit amateurish and doesn’t even have a trial version so … probably not today.

Do you know of any other service that is good? There’s AppAnnie but I bailed out when they requested full access to my Google Play account with user and password.

TapForTap - another bad experience. I signed up with them some time ago (for a while). Cheeky ads, very low CTR, they take 50% of the cut, awful support (didn’t bother to respond to any of two e-mails I sent them). I even got some bad reviews about ads for the app where I tested them out.

My monetization plan - yes, mostly ads. For this family of games at least. At some point I plan to add either a paid version or in-app purchase to unlock ad-free version but I didn’t get there yet.

hi there, yes im aware appcod.es is targeting iOS market but i plan to release my app and game to both platform (iOS and android). I wonder if there’s similar service but target both platforms? AppAnnie is more like analytics, i want a service to track my competitors and my ranking position…

ok well per my research apparently the most effective technique to promote our apps/games is by cross-promote our apps by ourselves. Problem is, how do I setup the free apps to get lots of downloads before I “redirect” them to my more powerful apps? I love your firestarter project mate, you put everything there in details. However, i eager to know what works beside using appbrain :smiley: thanks!

First week of the experiment is over - here’s the progress update. So far I cannot claim it a success and looking at history of other apps that did become popular in their first month I might have missed the up-charts train already. We’ll see - still 3 weeks to come :slight_smile:

Pretty solid initial numbers I think. Well done. I’ll look into AppBrain I think. My ad impressions increase everyday but I could still use a jump start to really kick it off. I’ve had moderate success with an admob campaign. But got nowhere near the numbers you did.

best apps market! I just found this through my recent research and actually I wanted to ask you about it but it seems you have already used it yourself :wink:

nice to know it’s working

Max, any new updates on project firestarter? I released a new app last week and have been using your advice. So far about 2400 downloads and rank 57 top new in its category.

Yes, I will be posting an update later this weekend, need some time to crunch the numbers. In general the results so far are bitter-sweet. Not bad and generally I believe I will get the invested money back pretty soon but it didn’t bring the hockey-stick curve I dreamed of. So it’s more of a smolder rather than real flames so far :slight_smile:

But there are at least several important lessons learned - I would (and for sure will next time) do few things differently. More in the blog post.

Which one of your apps is the new one?

This one: Word Search Puzzle

Hello Max!

When will be the next report?