Hi! This is "A Minute Of Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps. Now, this week I wanna
talk about "Why you need to start thinking about building up the audience
for your apps."
Okay, so I do a lot of work for...for clients, and they pay us to do an app and all that kind of stuff
We do a lot more work for ourselves. For me if I had to choose
between creating an app that makes me a little bit of revenue each month or
creating an app for a client that makes me a lot of revenue up front, I would take
that the one that creates a little bit of revenue, because that's you know over
time that starts to snowball, and what I've seen now is that, you know, the
majority of my income on a monthly basis is app
income. It's my own apps making money, but I do do client work as well, so it helps me to
keep my developers employed. It helps me to, you know, to buy fridge ,or whatever I wanna do for this month.
So, it really you know, that's... you know, you're always balancing two things as an app
developer. You say, if I go and work for clients, then I get you know I can get
that first, that immediate upfront money, but if I do my own app I release
it out to the world, and it could be lackluster and have to really work to
get...to get things up. However, another group of people that I talk to, and it's
just very rare that I have this conversation with anybody, but they have
like an app idea and they say they wanna partner with me, and my answer 99.999
percent of the time is no. It's like yeah, it's really not
you know, it's not worth me going out and getting my developers, or myself to spend
you know, two or three weeks or months, or whatever, coding an app and then for
free, and then hope that it does well, and then you just share your big idea
with me. So, and so, however one of the question, when I do have this meeting and
very rarely results in anything more than just a meeting, one of the questions
I ask is, you know, "What kind of audience you have?, like "How many Twitter followers
and how many Facebook?" and all that stuff, and more often than not they say "You know, I'm not really,
yeah I'm not really into the whole social media thing I'm not really
into the Twitter and everything like that".
and it just sort of shows me how, yeah it just sort of shows me how difficult this gonna be
going forward, like usually say "Hey Eric! I tell you what, you code the app, I'll market it
and then together we'll split the proceeds, right?" and when somebody says
they're gonna market something and they haven't even effectively market
themselves, that it makes..it makes it really difficult, like and it's hard to
market yourself, especially if you don't have a product, you have to go out there
and try to...to gain this...this momentum. You know, one thing that I think a lot of
people who I speak to don't quite understand is the scale that's involved
in making money with apps. I mean if you're talking about a free app, you're talking
about having, you know, give millions of downloads in order to to make ends meet,
or you know, tens of thousands a day just to, if you're going at advertising.
If it's a paid-app you need to have a certain amount of purchases, which is
very difficult, especially if you don't have a free app. I mean, if you look at my
percentage of paid apps vs free apps, it's like, I once has somebody say, you
should expect about a 2% return on purchases, and I see way less than
that. I mean, it's it's it's like you know .5% which is still...it's still
good. It's good enough for a small company like Overpass, so we can still
make ends meet, but...but it's not the...the millions of people are expecting, so and
I remember reading, a few years ago, it was a book...is a book about publishing eBooks
so if somebody saying, oh or no, it was about a writer who said that these days
publishers won't talk to you unless you have a social media presence, because
they need you to start marketing your book before it ever...before it's even
published, because you can't rely on the publisher to do all the marketing for
you, and I think it's pretty much the same with apps. If you gonna do an app, you
need to start marketing that early on, you can't just wait until the app is done, putting
on the App Store and just hope people will find it. So I mean, there's a huge amount
of scale involved in apps, so you know, it's...and it's difficult, it's always a difficult
conversation, so yeah but it is so. So my message this week is built an audience. I
mean, you have to kind of
you know, start promoting your app as soon as you get the idea. You have to start
putting ideas out there, and you can't pin this person who says "I don't want anyone
to steal my idea." because you are overestimating how lazy everyone else is.
You know, you've underestimated whatever, you know people are more lazy than you
think. The amount of people who come to me with an idea and say "How do I know you won't
steal my idea?" mainly "cause I'm too busy, and an idea as I've said many times
before, an idea by itself is nothing. So that's it for this week. I hope you've
enjoyed it. Sorry for a little rant there. I'll talk to you next week. Okay. Bye!
Hey, I really hope you like that video. Now, I do this once a week, so if...you if
you wanna hear more and you wanna hear more about our experiences with the App
Store, either Google Play or iTunes, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel ,and
please like this video and leave a comment. I love reading the comments. I
love hearing what you have to say. Even if it's just Hello or ..or whatever, and
like I say before. if you...if you're not sure what to say in a comment like I
never know what to say in a comment. I"ll make it easier for you, like if you like
it, just go ahead and say "Gnarley" which is an 80's term, or if you didn't like it,
just say "Bogus", and and if you don't think any of it, just say "Eh", so that would
be a big, big, big help. And another thing you could do which I'd really appreciate
it. If you are on the app store and you wanna try one of our apps, look up
some of the Overpass Apps. Applications either on iTunes or Google Play, and leave a
review, and let us know what you think about it, either good or bad, but, you know,
it's a ...we are all trying to build up in the market so... so that will be a big help. So
that's it, I'll talk to you next week!