Mobile App Marketing Articles, Tutorials, and Insights

New! International iOS report tracking

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:24:09 +0000

Today we’re announcing support for international iOS report tracking. This is a big, widely asked for feature, so we’re very excited to finally be launching it.

Now you can track Top Charts and Search Ranking reports for your app versus your competitors based on country/region. Currently, this is iOS only (we support US only for Google Play). By default, all your existing reports are set to the US.

Creating a report in multiple regions is easy. When creating your report, you’ll be asked to select your relevant regions. Choose as many or as a few as you would like.

You can find out which region your report is just by looking at the report page, which now includes a Region identifier.

We’ve initially made international support available to Professional and Publisher plans, so if you’d like international support and are currently on the Indie plan, just login and visit the My Account page to upgrade today.

We’re very proud of our work to date, but we’re always looking for feedback and suggestions. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me directly at iseff@appstorehq.com. Happy optimizing!

Why app icons matter for App Store Optimization

Mon, 07 May 2012 22:36:00 +0000

App icons matter.

Making your icon aesthetically appealing as well as descriptive will measurably improve your app store discoverability. There are plenty of articles helping app marketers understand how to design an app icon (such as this one), but there’s surprisingly less information explaining why a great app icon matters.

In web SEO, marketers optimize <title> tags and meta-description tags for two reasons: first, because a title tag sends a signal to a search engine about which keywords your page should rank for and, second (perhaps as importantly), because a good title and meta-description tag can increase clicks from within a SERP.

In the app store world, the app icon plays a similarly important role. Here’s why:

Like a <title> tag, your app icon can get your app featured

While your app icon can’t get you ranked for particular keywords in SERPs like a <title> tag can in web SEO, it can get you featured by Apple (or Google) in their New and Noteworthy, Staff Favorites, and other editorially curated lists of apps.

Quite simply, Apple and Google won’t feature an app with an app icon that has no visual appeal. Likewise, it won’t feature any app with suggestive or lewd app icon (assuming they even approve the app). They want an app icon that matches their internally-used aesthetic and overall emphasis on design.

Because of the prominence of these curated lists of apps (i.e. featured on the App Store homepage), they generate massive amounts of downloads. It’s important to create a great app icon in order to not shut the door on possibly having your app featured in these lists.

Like the meta-description tag, your app icon can generate more clicks

When a user searches an app store or is viewing the top charts or an editorially curated list of apps, they don’t see much. In fact, all they see is: app title, app icon, price, and potentially the category, release date, or publisher. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for understanding which app is best for them, especially when app titles are similar and the category is typically the same.

Therefore, the most useful place for an app marketer to spend their effort trying to increase clicks on a search results page (or top charts or other list of apps) is with the app icon. An amazing app icon can draw a visitor’s eye away from other results and onto yours, increasing clicks and conversions.

Summary

App icons are an important tool in an app marketer’s App Store Optimization belt. Having a poorly designed, non-descriptive app icon can drastically decrease your chances of app success.

Have you noticed that a great app icon helped your app succeed in the app store? Did you upgrade your app icon and notice more success? I’d love to hear your story, so please feel free to comment below.

App Store Optimization in 3 easy steps

Thu, 03 May 2012 23:07:00 +0000

Every day I speak with app marketers working hard trying to succeed at app marketing and app store optimization. Lots of patterns have emerged from these conversations, but the biggest one is general confusion about what makes up app store optimization.

It’s a murky topic with lots of variations and subsections, but I’ve found that breaking it down into the following 3 steps makes the process much simpler for app marketers to succeed.

Step 1: Find the right keywords

The first step is to find the best, most relevant keywords for your app. The goal here is to get ranked at all for keywords that matter to your app. At this point, it doesn’t yet matter how highly your app ranks, just that it does rank.

The best keywords to choose have lots of search volume, little competition, and are highly relevant to your app. In most instances, of course, high search volume has a direct correlation with competition. That is, the most searched for terms will have the most competition. As an app marketer, you will want to gauge your risk tolerance and decide, “do I go for the head terms — with the most volume and competition — or do I go for the tail where I have a better chance of ranking?” There’s no single right answer to this question; it’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself and your app.

Step 2: Rank highly for those keywords

Now that you have decided upon the keywords you want to rank for (your “keyword coverage”), you need to focus on ranking highly for those keywords.

In traditional web search SEO, this process requires both on-page (title tag, keyword density, etc) and off-page (link building, social, etc) work. The same is true with App Store Optimization: you have work to do both within your app’s meta-data as well as outside of your app’s meta-data.

For instance, within your app’s meta-data, including the appropriate keywords in your title gives more weight than in the keyword field. To give an analogy, your app’s title is like a <title> tag, while your publisher name is like an <h1> tag, and your keyword field is like normal text.

Outside of your app’s meta-data, you want to try to increase your app’s reputation (much like how building links increases a web site’s reputation). All else being equal, an app with a 5-star rating will rank higher than an app with a 1-star rating. Likewise, 1,000 5-star ratings is a stronger signal than 1 5-star rating. How many total downloads do you have? What about new downloads per day? These are all signals to the app stores about your app’s reputation and thus how highly in search results your app should rank.

Step 3: Convert visitors into users

You’ve built a broad keyword coverage, you’ve tweaked your app to rank highly for those keywords, and now you reach the final step of App Store Optimization: converting visitors into users. Unlike the web where the moment a search result is clicked the user is taken directly to your page, in the app store ecosystem a search result just brings you to your app’s detail page within the app store. You still have to convert the visitor into downloading your app and becoming a user.

Converting a visitor into a user is all about optimizing the information on your app’s detail page: description copy, icon, screenshots, video (where applicable), rating, and reviews. It is essential to convey the value of your app to a user simply and effectively. Screenshots can do a great job of this, as can your description. Ensuring that you maintain a high rating and great reviews will give visitors the confidence that your app is worthwhile and validated from external sources. Learn more about optimizing your description for conversions.

Summary

Breaking app store optimization into these 3 simple steps will help you make sense of the process in a more discrete, manageable way.

Have you had success thinking about app store optimization? Do these steps map to what you’ve done?

Announcing CSV and PDF exporting support

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:16:00 +0000

The last couple of months have been absolutely crazy for us at MDHQ. We’ve been busy dealing with tons of growth, helping out customers and listening to their needs, scaling our software (good news: the average page load time over the last week was 500ms — the lowest it has ever been. As Fred Wilson says, speed is a feature!), publishing great content on app marketing and app store optimization, and more.

But, in the midst of it all, we’ve somehow managed to continue building our product (this is all credit to our amazing developer, Brett).

One of the most requested features we’ve heard is the ability to export your data to CSV or PDF. Today we’re proud to announce the available of both PDF and CSV exporting.

All current Publisher subscribers will receive access to the exporting feature immediately and for free, included in the cost of your plan. We’re including this for all new Publisher subscribers as well, for the same price of $99/mo.

PDF Exporting

Our new PDF exporting gives you a dead-simple way to take any of your Top Charts or Search Ranking reports and turn them quickly into a downloadable PDF (perfect for sharing via email!). You’ll get all the same great features as the report page on our site: current ranking of your app and your competitors, historical rankings in a graph, and the current top 10 apps for this report.

CSV Exporting

CSV exporting gives you the flexibility to do anything you want with your Top Charts and Search Ranking reports data. We’ll simply give you all the data points we have for each report, and you can do whatever you’d like with it from there. For instance, the most common use is to import the CSV into Excel and build graphs or other reports from there.

How to export

Exporting is as easy as pie. As long as you’re a subscriber of the Publisher plan, you can export to PDF or CSV with one click. From your Top Chart or Search Ranking report page, scroll to the bottom and look for the Export section. In there, you’ll find a quick link for PDF exporting and CSV exporting. Voila, export complete!

We’re very excited to continue delighting and providing value to our customers. As always, we love feedback, good and bad. If you have any questions or comments about this feature (or any other), feel free to email us anytime at info@appstorehq.com.

Top 3 iOS App Store Optimization Tricks

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:00:00 +0000

The iTunes App Store is a tricky place to distribute your software. On one hand, it enables access to millions upon millions of devices as well as providing easy payment mechanisms for those users to give you money. On the other hand, it’s a black box that makes it extremely difficult for you to effectively market and distribute your app to potential users.

The following are 3 tricks for iOS iTunes App Store Optimization that you probably don’t know yet. We spend a lot of time working with new app marketers, and these are tricks which we consistently find those new app marketers don’t yet understand. Each of them can provide tangible increases to every app’s marketing success.

Trick #1: Use your Keyword field wisely

The Keyword field in iTunes Connect is limited to just 100 characters. This doesn’t leave you, the marketer, much room to ensure you’re targeting all the best keywords for your app’s audience. Moreover, Apple’s search algorithm leaves incredible amounts to be desired, which means you have to compensate for their simplicity.

For example, Apple’s search engine includes no stemming, so if you want to rank for the search terms “movie” and “movies,” be sure to include both the singular and plural versions in your Keyword field.

You can learn more about the Keyword field — and how to get the most out of it — from this iTunes Keyword Field Best Practices video.

Trick #2: Include the most important keywords in your app title

In iTunes, there are three fields, and three fields only, which affect what search results you appear for: app title, publisher name, and the Keyword field. You can see exactly how this comes from iTunes’ long history with music:

App title: The song name, which is the most important factor for music search.
Publisher name: The artist name, which is the second most important factor for music search.
Keywords: After song name and artist name, music doesn’t have much meta-data associated, but people might search for other things (“motown,” for example). Keywords were probably a very simple way to associate more meta-data with a song.

Because of the value of an app title on search, you’ll want to ensure you include your most important keyword(s) in your title field. A good example of this is Crackle, which is titled within iTunes as “Crackle - Movies & TV,” giving it even better rankings for the search terms “movies” and “tv.”

Trick #3: Optimize your description for conversions, not discoverability

A corollary of Trick #2 is that one of the pieces of meta-data that does not affect search is your app’s description.

Given that you don’t have to think too much about keyword stuffing your iTunes description field, you can spend the time thinking about how to optimize the description for conversions rather than discoverability. That is, anyone who is looking at your description has, by definition, already found your app’s iTunes detail page. Therefore, you now have the opportunity to push that visitor to click the Install button and download your app.

Again, take a look at the description for Crackle. It starts with, “Finally, watch FREE movies on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.” Crackle understands that the first sentence needs to be eye catching, simple, and enticing. As a visitor, you can immediately understand what Crackle does and why you should install it.

By comparison, Spotify’s first few sentences are, “Get free access to Spotify Premium now! With Premium you’ll get access to millions of tracks from thousands of albums and artists on your iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad. If you haven’t tried Premium before, you can try it on your mobile for 48-hours, completely free. You don’t even have to enter credit card details. Simply download this app…” Clearly, Spotify packs their first few sentences with marketing info about their Premium service, telling a visitor nothing about what Spotify actually does and why they should install it.

Which would of these would you expect to convert a visitor into a user better? I would heavily place my bets on Crackle versus Spotify. Remember, anyone reading your app’s description in iTunes has already landed on your app’s detail page, so focus on telling them exactly what your app does and why they should install it now.

Why TechCrunch is still relevant (or, how one article represented $25K/mo)

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:46:00 +0000

Just over a month ago, we were featured on TechCrunch with an article by Sarah Perez entitled, “ASO (App Store Optimization) Is The New SEO, And Here’s A Tool To Do It. It was a glowing review of our App Store Optimization tool, and we owe Sarah a debt of gratitude for writing about our little keyword engine that could. Still, with all the post-acquisition drama at TechCrunch, I had been wondering how their kingmaker status has been affected. The results? Not at all, at least for our data point. One TechCrunch article helped us create a profitable, growing, and exciting business that represents approximately $25,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

Five years ago, TechCrunch was on top the world. Michael Arrington was the outspoken author and editor appearing in Business 2.0 lighting a cigar with hundred dollar bills. Late in 2010, AOL acquired TechCrunch reportedly for more than $25m, with rumored revenues of $10m/year. TechCrunch was riding high as the authoritative source for startup and tech industry news.

But in an industry full of Shiny New Objects, a company that has been on top of their game for more than just a couple of years is considered to be over the hill and dead. Michael Arrington left TechCrunch, beginning an exodus of talent that would drastically change the company’s structure over the next few months. The story is well told, so I won’t repeat it, but tech insiders left TechCrunch for dead, assuming its best days were behind it. I assert that’s simply not the case, and that TechCrunch is still intensely relevant for startups.

Getting TechCrunched

For MobileDevHQ, TechCrunch seemed like the perfect outlet to launch our product: it has a large reach, an authoritative voice (TechCrunch as a whole is a well-known property, and Sarah is a well-known mobile writer), and an audience that closely matches our customers. Anyone interested in mobile apps is likely to read TechCrunch. Anyone interested in software marketing is likely to read TechCrunch. The intersection of those two groups is our ideal customer, and the desire to get featured on TechCrunch was a no-brainer.

We reached out to Sarah to tell her about our new Keyword Volume tool, quite honestly because we thought it was extremely compelling to her audience. She agreed and decided to write an article on it. There were no PR firms or crazy pitches — I think my original email was less than 5 sentences total. More than anything, it was just me talking to someone who I thought would be interested in MobileDevHQ and the tools we offer.

The final article was great, explaining ASO and our product:

But developers are often lacking knowledge, and especially tools, to help them out on this front. That’s where the newly launched App Store Optimization Keyword Volume estimator (whew!) comes in.

Don’t let the utility’s wordy, boring title fool you – this is a killer product for mobile developers. (If you want, you can pretend it’s called App Store Rockstar or something, if that makes it more palatable.) Created by AppStoreHQ, where it’s been tested internally for several weeks, the ASO Keyword tool tells app publishers how frequently a query is being searched for in the app store.

A business is born

So, what did TechCrunch do for us? In short: a lot. We’re a small team (just 3 people) so small changes in finances can have big impacts. Here’s how our TechCrunch feature impacted us, by the numbers:

Before TechCrunch

Number of visits sent: ~8,000
Total signups: 325
Paid users: 50
(Hypothetical) MRR: ~$750 (note: hypothetical, because this includes users still in their free trial)

After TechCrunch

Total signups: 3,420
Paid users: 705
(Hypothetical) MRR: $25,500

Some of the users have a 3 month trial (we gave 3 month free coupons to the first 100 TechCrunch users), but many of those customers have already converted and we’ve seen our first cash-flow positive month thanks to our new App Store Optimization product and TechCrunch.

TechCrunch is most definitely still relevant

It’s amazing what one article on TechCrunch did for our business. We hope to exceed expectations and build a meaningful product for all mobile app marketers, and hopefully we’ll be on TechCrunch again soon. We owe a lot to TechCrunch, and Sarah in particular. It’s been an exciting month and we’re looking forward to even more excitement in the coming months.

App Store Optimization: iTunes Keyword Field Best Practices

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 23:52:00 +0000

Transcript

Hi, I’m Ian Sefferman. I’m the co-founder at AppStoreHQ. We spent about two and a half years working hard on consumer app discovery, helping users find the best mobile apps. Recently we’ve started helping developers promote their apps and get more app distribution. We’ve specifically been doing that with a product that we’re calling App Store Optimization, it’s a little bit like SEO for apps: getting ranked higher in iTunes or Android Market.

So today I want to talk to you a little bit about keywords and specifically keywords in iTunes (they don’t really exist in Android Market). Keywords are a little bit of a black box and I want to make sure everyone gets the most out of them that they can possibly get.

So, the first thing I want to talk about is how keywords will affect your search ranking. In iTunes, there are only three different things that affect your search ranking. The first one is your app name. The second one is your developer name. And the third one is your keywords. So, description, reviews, none of that actually matters according to Apple.

So, when we’re talking about keywords, we first want to understand how long they can be. So the length of your entire amount of keywords can only be 100 characters, so that’s less than a tweet, right? So we have to be very cautious about where we’re spending our time and resources on keywords.

The second thing we want to talk about is commas versus spaces. When length matters, we have to understand: where should we spend our characters? The first option we could do, if we have two keywords that we care about, foo and bar, is we could have “foo{space}bar”. The second option we could do is “foo{comma}{space}bar”. And the third option would be “foo{comma}bar”.

In the first option, “foo{space}bar”, this is bad because Apple won’t necessarily know if this is one keyword that is just “foo bar” and you want to rank for the search term “foo bar” or if it is two keywords that you care about, “foo” and “bar”.

The second one is bad because, while you’re making it more explicit that this is “foo” and “bar”, you now have a wasted space in the middle here where you could have an extra character and going forward where you have many keywords, that could actually add up.

So the third one is what you want. The third one is “foo{comma}bar” and that allows you, as a developer, to have the least amount of wasted space and also rank for both “foo” and “bar”, and Apple will be smart enough to also rank you then for “foo bar”.

The next thing I want to talk about is around a specific keyword. In this case, let’s talk about foo. A big thing that is interesting to note is that Apple does a really poor job of understanding stemming and plurals vs singulars, right?

So, if I have foo, I may or may not rank for “foo”, but I certainly won’t rank for “foos”. But if I have “foo,foos”, now I will explicitly rank for both “foo” and “foos”. So, whenever you have the ability, given the length restraint, you really do want to have both singular and plural within your keywords. If you don’t have the ability because of length, I highly suggest going with the plural, because from experimentation that actually leads to the singular more frequently than the singular will lead to the plural. But, it’s still pretty hit or miss and you really do want both if you can help it.

So that is a very quick intro to keywords. And what I want just to let you guys know is that we’re working on this App Store Optimization tool which you can reach at mobiledevhq.com/aso and in that product we have a Keyword Verifier tool that you can copy/paste your keywords from iTunes and we’ll tell you exactly where you’re doing things wrong and what you could be doing better in order to make the most use out of your keywords. Thank you.

Mobile is eating the world

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:13:00 +0000

Back in August, Marc Andreessen (founder of Netscape and currently partner in Andreessen Horowitz investment firm) wrote an essay in the WSJ entitled, “Why Software Is Eating The World.” If you missed it, the essay described how software is, quite seriously, taking over every single industry. And if your industry hasn’t been transformed by software, it will be soon.

An excerpt:

…Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company…
…Today’s largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix…
…Today’s dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple’s iTunes, Spotify and Pandora…
…Today’s fastest growing entertainment companies are videogame makers—again, software—with the industry growing to $60 billion from $30 billion five years ago…
…The best new movie production company in many decades, Pixar, was a software company…
…Photography, of course, was eaten by software long ago…
…Today’s largest direct marketing platform is a software company—Google…
…Today’s fastest growing telecom company is Skype, a software company that was just bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion…
…LinkedIn is today’s fastest growing recruiting company….

The article continues with examples of where and how software powers non-software businesses (logistics at Wal-mart, oil and gas companies, etc). It’s a convincing argument that software is running the world.

Earlier this week, WhitePages hosted a Seattle Mobile VIP event, bringing in some of the best mobile companies from Seattle to demo what they are working on. We were lucky enough to be invited (and show off our App Store Optimization tools).

It’s not just software that’s eating the world, it’s mobile

As I was sitting there, watching the great demos by companies like Zillow, Glympse, Mindbloom, INRIX, Cozi, Uber, GameHouse, Zapd, Big Fish Games, and Rhapsody, I realized that it wasn’t just software that was eating the world, it was mobile. Companies are being born or redefined to make use of amazing new technology at an astonishing rate.

Examples of mobile transforming industries

Let’s take a look at a few mobile companies transforming industries:

Uber/TaxiMagic | Taxis and towncars

Taxis and cars, a decidedly mechanical and backward industry, has been completely transformed by Uber and TaxiMagic. Both of these tools allow users to call for a taxi (or towncar) based on GPS, find out where their assigned car is and how long it will take to get to them, and then pay easily via their device. It’s an amazing improvement on an old-world industry.

Zillow | Real estate

Mobile presents use cases that were previously never possible. For instance, with maps, GPS, and touchscreens, why not be able to simply draw exactly where you would want to live? With Zillow’s app, you can make precise boundaries of where you’re house hunting, and find details about a house for sale while you’re out and about.

Ultimate Sharks, Rhapsody, OMGPOP | Entertainment (Movies, TV, Games)

The entertainment industry has been completely turned upside down by mobile. If, as Marc Andreessen says, video games are the biggest growth sector in entertainment, then mobile is the biggest growth sector in video games. Just look at OMGPOP selling to Zynga for over $200 million within 6 weeks of launching a top app, Draw Something, as an example here.

Square/Back Office Labs | Payments

Square has obviously transformed the payment industry, especially for small businesses. But there’s more going on than just Square. For instance, BackOfficeLabs is working hard on creating a payments solution — run via iOS — specifically for sports venues (think: buying a beer at a baseball game from your seat).

What does it mean for marketers?

Last year Chris Dixon wrote:

Predicting the future of the Internet is easy: anything it hasn’t yet dramatically transformed, it will.

Given the rate of change in mobile and the amount of potential mobile is unlocking, I think this statement can be rephrased: Predicting the future of mobile is easy: anything it hasn’t yet dramatically transformed, it will.

For mobile app marketers, this means two things: first, it means that opportunity for building products exists everywhere. But, second, it means that getting people to notice you will become exponentially harder. Finding ways to profitably acquire customers is the number one problem I hear time and time again from mobile app marketers.

When getting noticed is close to impossible, and paying for downloads becomes prohibitively expensive, marketers will turn to proven techniques for raising visibility organically. That’s App Store Optimization, in a nutshell.

Ever wonder how frequently a keyword is searched for in an app store?

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 22:19:00 +0000

Today we’re officially releasing our new App Store Optimization Keyword Volume estimator. The Keyword Volume estimator allows any mobile app publisher to see how frequently a keyword is searched for within an app store!

App stores — such as iTunes App Store, Android Market, and others — are black boxes in so many ways. Not the least of which is search volume.

In the web world, there are tools everywhere to tell publishers how frequently a query is searched for in a search engine: Google’s own Keyword Tool or WordStream’s Keyword Research tool, for example.

In the app store world, however, there’s nothing. Until now. We’ve been working hard to get this tool out the door and have been using it internally for a couple weeks now. We finally think it’s ready for prime time!

Sign up for App Store Optimization and get the Keyword Volume estimator now

How it works

Enter your app and your competitors’ app URLs.
We’ll analyze the meta-data of all the apps you enter and come up with a list of the most important keywords for your app.
For each keyword, we’ll tell you which apps focus on that keyword (if your competitors all focus on a particular keyword which you’re missing, perhaps you should focus on it, too?).
In addition to which apps focus on each keyword, we’ll now also show you how frequently that term is searched for within app stores.
You can then use this data to determine which keywords are the best for your app to target.

Where we get our data

Apple, Google, et. al. are unsurprisingly reluctant to give away their exact search volume data, so we spent a long time thinking about how to get good data to proxy for the original source.

We ended up partnering with external sources, as well as using internal data, to blend together a proxy of the app stores. We believe the data sources we have now — along with the algorithms we’re using to merge and normalize the data — offer app marketers a great proxy for search volume.

Here are our data sources as of launch (more coming soon!):

AppStoreHQ: Web based consumer app discovery.
AppESP: Android native app for consumer app discovery.
Google Trends: Google’s web based search trends, with modifications to filter out searches unlikely for app stores.
Appolicious: Consumer app discovery.

We want to thank our partners immensely for sharing their data with us. We’re actively looking for more partners, so if you’d like to be included, feel free to contact me directly.

We’re looking forward to hearing feedback for this new product. The end goal is to empower app marketers to drive more organic downloads and we think this feature is a huge step in the right direction. Whether you love it or hate it, let us know anytime: info@appstorehq.com.

Sign up for App Store Optimization and get the Keyword Volume estimator now

The value is in the slog

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 02:28:51 +0000

There are groups of people and companies (blogs/media, conference operators, service providers) who portray the startup world as a fast-paced, high-energy double rainbow that always ends in pots of silicon-plated gold. This portrayal is like sex: it sells. If you’re a media property in need of pageviews or box office ticket sales, nothing’s better than Mark Zuckerberg’s $25 billion made in the midst of parties and graffitied offices.

The truth of the matter, though, is that nothing about startup life is glamorous. Your likely outcome is complete failure, but even if you don’t completely fail, the next likely outcome is either a soft-landing exit that isn’t worth the effort, or a self-sustaining business that doesn’t make you rich. Everyone knows only a small percentage of startups become big, successful businesses.

The high

You’ll fight those odds of failure because you’re passionate about what you do and think you can change the world and make some money in the process. When you start, the excitement runs high. Every product you develop is full of hope and promise, and devoid of technical-, marketing-, or any other debt. You’ll launch and get your first handful of users and paying customers. It only took you a few months to build and launch a product with revenue.

This is exactly how we felt with AppStoreHQ. We built an interesting product helping consumers find great iPhone apps on the web. Later we added iPad, Android, and HTML5 apps, along with other great tools like a native Android app, AppESP. At the height, we were seeing over 1MM visits per month to our consumer properties — not an insignificant amount of traffic and users.

The low

Then reality sets in. You realize that the small amount of revenue you’re receiving — probably in the hundreds or low-thousands of dollars a month — isn’t going to pay the bills. The users aren’t coming in as fast anymore and you become a bit worried about where to go next.

In our case, we felt like the headwind just kept getting stronger and stronger in the consumer land, even though the tailwind of mobile apps just keeps getting more forceful. We bet a lot on AppESP, and it turned out to be a great product that received a moderate amount of traction, but we never monetized it and it never grew exponentially. There was a lot of hesitation internally about what was the right next course of action.

Welcome to the slog

This is where the slog begins. Where everything you do seems to take longer to complete. Engineering a simple change now affects multiple pieces of your product, so something that used to take a day now takes three. Things that used to get picked up by bloggers are now just an incremental improvement that don’t warrant more press. Your metrics are up and to the right, but you’re not achieving escape velocity. The slog is when you feel like the boulder is getting bigger and heavier, and the incline of the mountain you’re climbing is getting steeper. It’s what Paul Graham calls the Trough of Sorrow.

The majority of value is created in the slog

Here’s the good news about the slog: this is where the majority of value for your company is created. You have a product. You have customers. You’re out there learning something new about your market every single day.

The only time you can truly find product/market fit is when you’re in the slog, experimenting. Your first version won’t be right, so now’s the time to get out and talk to customers, find out where the pain is, and solve it. It’s never easy — building a sophisticated product takes time to get right — but this is where the value is created.

So, just because the slog isn’t glamorous, requires hard work, and is generally a shitty place to be, doesn’t mean you should be giving up on your startup now. Instead, now’s the time to double down and find the true value.

That’s the path we chose with MobileDevHQ and while the jury is still out, we’re more clear than ever on what our mission is and how we can achieve that mission to build a big business. For us, it all starts with App Store Optimization and inbound marketing for mobile apps.