Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name
is Eric and I make apps. Now this week I
wanna talk about "Your App's Target User".
Okay, so this week I wanna talk about
Target Users and being able to
target your App Store users. So that like
as we talk about every week, the biggest
problem that we have as app developers
is getting people to find our apps, right?
We may put like loads of work into
them or not a lot of work into them. We
may reskin them. We might
code them from over the course of years
or months or days but it
doesn't matter. But the big problem we
have is when we put on the app market is
competing with the thousands of other
apps that have been submitted just that
day let alone ever. So our big
problem as app developers is marketing.
So one of the ways that you could do
better at that is thinking about your
end-user. Now the reason I bring this up
is because somebody asked me on Snapchat
earlier this week. Oh by the way, if you're
not following us at Snapchat, there's the
Snap code and we put things out everyday
but somebody asked me and say "Hey I was
looking at some of your games and how come
your games for more like apps and not
really like games" right? and it's the
same question I get from
talking to relatives on Skype.
Like last month, people I haven't seen in
a long time said "Yeah we saw some of your
apps. Tell me do you have anything I
could play that if I didn't want to
learn Swahili or something?" and I said
well no not really. All of our games
are education-based. They're either
Algebra or learning languages
or Chemistry. And my kids are the same
way. They're constantly complaining that
we don't make games that are actually
fun. They'll play like...
they'll play like a game like Jetpack Joyride or
something on a phone for you know look
at me they'll say see that's a real game,
right ? So yeah I guess I don't
know what to say.
The reason why I don't really target
mainstream games and the games
are very simple and more towards
repetitive learning is because that's
what I'm interested in, right? I'm
thinking about the target end user. Now I
think I would find it very difficult if
I did like a Candy Crush clone or
something like that or if I did something
like a broad mainstream game meant
for everybody 'cause mainly because I
wanna how to market it, right? When
I thought about doing the language games,
I thought about
myself 20 years ago learning Chinese
Mandarin in the army and later learning
Vietnamese, it was really hard to find
like good language learning resources. So
yeah I mean this is pretty
internet but you're going into a
bookstore looking around and you know
there's loads of Spanish, German and
French books but you're gonna find very
much about Mandarin and if you could, it
was maybe one or two books and they were
very beginner. Now Mandarin is more
mainstream but there are other languages
that are not very well
served and it might not be easy to learn them.
Swahili is a good example, right? So when
I think about my target end user going
onto Google Play or the App store,
I don't think about them saying "I just
wanna play a fun game",
I think about them saying "You know I
would really like to learn Bengali",
right? So then they'll type in "learn
Bengali" and then that's a very much
smaller market and then I could try to
target towards those keywords. So rather
than advertise to everybody in general,
I'm thinking about a small group of
people. Now my big app Ear Spy
that does have broad appeal, right? So you
know but that was sort of I was
thinking about a target group of people
there too,
it just happened to catch on. Now one
thing like say Vietnamese Bubble
Bath is a learning Vietnamese game,
somebody wanted to learn Vietnamese
would come in and they would search say
learn Vietnamese or Vietnamese game and
you know my app has a better chance of
showing up because they've con in and
search for it, right? So however there's
not gonna be a whole lot of people
learning Vietnamese. However, if somebody....
my logic here is that if
somebody comes in and they started
looking for Vietnamese games and they
finally find one that they like, right?
They're more likely to make a purchase,
they're more likely to play it more
often than not, they're more likely to just
stick with that one subject. So this
is how we kind of doing that,
this is why we can make revenue with a
very crowded market because we have a
very niche subject or it's actually we
keep duplicating that same model across
different niches. Like other
topics like Speed Reading is something
that's very interested in. So yeah we did
a Speed Reading application.
We've done Algebra. We just
this last week we had Agent X was
featured several times on iTunes so we
have thousands of thousands of downloads
actually you know nearly 100,000
downloads and last week but prior to
that we've had like hardly any but it is...
it's a very niche subject. So somebody who
wants to just brush up a little bit,
don't go in there and do that so but
that's just my strategy. Now when it
comes to other things you know
I think the point I'm trying to make
is when your marketing your app or
your game, you have to think about that
end user. If the end user is you
then it's even better because you know
the kind of things that we're
looking for. You look at the kind of
things they'll be attracted to.
What would really stand out to them? What
can you write in the description and on the
screenshots that would make them say
"that sounds really good" as opposed to
I just want to build something that for
everybody.
I mean think about it as if you were a
musician and you just wanted to
write the next big pop song, right? So
you would just do something very bland
and generic and put it out there and hope
that it gets eyes on it.
Or let's say you're a musician and you
write commercial jingles, right? You have
a much smaller market, less competition
probably less money,
the rewards are smaller but the chances
of success are higher. So that's it
for this week. Again think about your
target audience. If I was gonna
have a Candy Crush game, I would not
know where to start but when I have a
game about learning a language,
I know where to go, I know what
keywords to look for, I know how to
target it but uh and it's all because
I'm thinking about my end user and when
you start getting users then you put
analytics in there and know who your users
actually are, they might not be who you
expect, like with Ear Spy we
know that they're males between
18 and 25 for the most part but it's
very spread and other games you know we
kind of we can target certain things so
you start putting things out there. So
that's it for this week. I hope it's been
helpful.
I'll talk to you next week!