Hey, this is the Daily Overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps!
Today I wanna talk about how the way your users see your app is just as important as
what your app actually does!
Ok so ever since my app Ear Agent was suspended last week, everybody's been very kind and
helpful, they've been trying to grant some advice and everything like that.
So lots of things like I should appeal it more often, or change the name, go back to
Google again and do a second appeal and this time say that I'll change this that and the
other thing.
But one bit of advice that keeps coming up is that I should re-brand it as a hearing
aid application.
So some of you guys know, I've talked about this before, I already have a hearing aid
application.
This is one of the things that I think is the most fascinating about doing the app marketing
ever since I started.
So we did Ear Spy, it was called Ear Spy at the time, and it was red, it as...basically
all it was was it sent the microphone through to the headphones, had a graphic equaliser
so you can boost up the sound of what you're hearing, and if you have bluetooth headset,
you can leave it on the other side of the room, like a baby monitor really.
So once we released that, we thought, well why don't we release another one as a hearing
aid application.
So we did nothing different, we changed the package name, we changed the images so that
instead of red it's blue, it looks exactly the same if you looked at the two of them.
The code base is the same.
In Android studio it's just two different flavours of the same one.
So we released the both of them, and Ear Spy got thousands of downloads a day, millions
of downloads ultimately before it met it's untimely death, and then Ear Agent actually
did pretty well, 20 or 30, sometimes it got up to 50 or even 100 downloads a day so it
did pretty well, but there was definitely a difference just in terms of the marketing
and in the way that we positioned it.
One of them was sexy and cool, and one of them was useful.
But they were exactly the same tool.
In fact it used to crack me up because people would say "I've tried both of them and this
one works better and everything".
I'd say that's not possible, it's the same code base!
This was just like, one of the few times - well lots of times we take what we've done and
we just skin it a little bit which is apparently a bad thing now - but it was like looking
at two different markets.
It was like re-branding something as something else.
So when we talk about doing that, I could take that application and move it over to
the other market and say we're just gonna target as a hearing aid, but it didn't have
that sex appeal.
This appealed to more people.
And this is something that I think that was really good about re-skinning.
I've never really purchased code and re-skinned it, I did one time and it went horribly, so
one of the things that I thought worked about that is that you can take something that works
but then package it up for a new audience.
One of the things, I always find it fascinating that brain training games, the developer could
just say it's sudoku, or it is what it is or whatever, and somebody says no, it's brain
training.
So it's still just a bunch of games.
So they'll take something a re-package it as something else which is something that
I'm always thinking about.
So if you have an app that's not performing well, you think maybe it just doesn't have
the edge that it needs.
Maybe people just aren't finding it, because mostly that's what it is.
From a developer, we always think the product is what it is, that the product is key.
So I could take that same code and then redistribute it under a different brand, under a different
name, under a different audience and say no, it's not that.
But it would have that same sex appeal, it would have that same reach, unless they knew
what it was from before.
That's the whole thing.
It's something that I've played with and it's guided the way that I think about a lot of
things going forward.
When we put something out we think we're gonna put out this application and it does ok.
But then we can just tweak a few different things, we can change some image assets and
change the audience and say hey, this is good for this, and it's how you market it.
You're selling the benefits.
And the way that this really hit me - I was sitting down with a prospect and we're talking
about stuff and he said ""can you tell me about some of your apps?" and I said "I've
got this one called Ear Spy", whatever, it's embarrassing to talk about, and he takes it
out and he looks at it and everything was very serious up until this part in the meeting.
And he's looking at it like that and he goes "ah, so what does it do?" and I said "well,
it's supposed to amplify your hearing so you can eavesdrop on people or whatever" and he
put his headphone in and he goes, he was all very serious, and he went "hey, do you think
I could hear those people over there?"
And it was like his whole demeanour changed, he got this kind of sneaky, it was the exact
same thing, and it doesn't even do anything different than a baby monitor does, but it
gave him this 'I've got an inside thing', whatever, it was the way that he responded
to it rather than what the tool did that was the biggest selling point.
So anyway, just some of my thoughts today,I think if you have an app that's not performing
well, a lot of times you just look at how can you repackage it, how can you re-skin
it?
The problem with re-skinning at the moment is Apple will probably reject it but just
in general as a tool, on Google play it works really well.
So anyway, that's it for today, I'll talk to you guys again tomorrow!