This article is part of a 5 articles series about the publication of an Electron application into the Mac AppStore, Fenêtre.
Fenêtre,
fənɛtʁ, lets you better multitask on your mac. It enables a picture-in-picture mode for any website/web-app, image, video or flat file.
You can find the free versionand the paid version on the Mac App-Store.
This is where you have to excel if you really want to sell your app. There is no "organic marketing/sharing/growing", at least not initially. You have to go out there, pull your fingers from your ass 👉 🍑 (french saying, don't bother) and make your app look pretty and useful.
Make a video... or many
You've been working on your app for half a year now. Of course it's filling a need, it's obvious... to you... and only you.
People don't know they need it so badly. Sometimes, they don't even understand what it does.
A great way to fix this is to make short videos, showing how it works.
Here's what I did myself, I'm no video maker guru ninja, but at least it's showing some of the features at a glance and breaks the ice of the first use.
Another way is to share real-life usage. People need to see themselves using your app.
Multiple points of entry
You have to share your amazing creation and create as many entry points as possible. For it, you'll have to submit it to a big number of platforms. And more importantly, always share promo codes, you have 100 of them for each version of your app, so don't be cheap with them.
The way I see it, there are three types of channels:
- Ephemeral
This is where a lot of content is shared everyday, and it's organically and automatically curated by a great number of users. Big amount of content, big audience, very fast content rotation and very small attention span.
When sharing there, you'll have to be straight to the point with very explicit visuals. Show what it does and how it does it, limit your post to only the greatest/fanciest characteristics.
Be careful to sync your post with the timezone of your principal target as well, otherwise it will be drowned very quickly.
Here are many great tips for posting on Product Hunt.
Example of ephemeral platforms: HackerNews, ProductHunt, specific subreddits like /r/apple, /r/macapps, /r/appdev, /r/app, /r/startups, /r/entrepreneur, /r/sideproject...
- Temporary
Another less fast paced platform would be blog posts and videos. Small amount of content and big audience. There is a rotation of content but way slower than ephemeral platforms.
You have three possibilities here. Either your app gets published naturally when a blogger finds it via another channel. Or you'll send it yourself to as many tech blog as you can and get lucky. Or you'll write the article yourself, or five of them 😘.
- Durable
For a highly specialized content but small audience (at first), no rotation of content and great attention span, you have your own app's website/blog, advertising, as long as you pay for it, or partnerships with other services/products.
Show them what they're missing out
Free users have a limited set of features, but still get to see the settings window. It is a great opportunity to show them what they could get once they decide to upgrade.
Here's the settings of the pro version, you can change default behaviors and set your own hotkeys.
So here's what I first tried, a very light, subtle hint about the pro features:
Needless to say, this got rejected by Apple faster than I was rejected in high school. But Apple did let me have this instead:
So, don't be too obvious. Subtlety seems to work the best (should have known that in high school).
Everything is now in place to sell this app, but what about its after-life? What can we do Post release?
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