| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ-eVK0dzuw |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kv42s47n5bfb1tk6tcz15hqk |
| Readwise ID | 01kv42s47n5bfb1tk6tcz15hqk |
| Date | 2023-06-16 |
| Author | App Masters |
| Category | video |
| Cover image | https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JZ-eVK0dzuw/sddefault.jpg?v=6489fdb6 |
[Music] foreign [Music] ation it is the young founder of appmasters.com and this is the place the right place that you should be every Friday at 9am Pacific because we’re going to work on a really break down
what’s working in the app space today and one of my favorite topics to talk about is early stage growth because I love talking about from going to zero to something one I love that topic because I feel like it’s one of the hardest things to do and then once you get to 1 to 10 to 15 to 20 it becomes a little bit easier and here to break it all down he is Nathan Hudson he is a 2X growth head of growth and founder of perceptix
and I’m going to bring that on a strategic growth partner that helps early stage mobile apps scale from pre-seed to series B and his dad’s pretty cool too so shout out to you Jude but let’s bring in Nathan foreign [Music]
how are you Steve I’m good how are you I’m amazing man I’m better now that you’re here dude I was lonely by myself doing this um I love having conversation with this if you guys want to check out Nathan’s website it is in the YouTube description or your favorite podcast app it is perceptix.com really beautiful website as well man really cool all right Nathan let’s kick it off dude so when you’re working with the client and maybe we can do the interview now and we’re trying to think about like
when to do it well let’s really break it down so when you work with the client like hey Nathan what are you routinely hear from them like what questions do they routinely ask and then like what is your process to help them so early on you know Finding product market growth what metrics you like to focus on so break it down all for us awesome yes I think to be honest whenever I’m working with a new client typically they’re in the mindset of we need to grow right like I want more installs more trials more subscriptions more app opens like
just give me more um and they’re always kind of talking about that Top Line growth um and like Top Line growth is amazing don’t get me wrong but when we’re talking about early stage apps and maybe in a minute like we should actually Define an early stage um but when I’m thinking about early stage apps oftentimes like growing is the last thing they should be focused on and they actually need to be focused on like building a product that people love or at least improving the product so that people will love it a bit more
um and I think metrics wise it really varies like you know finding a North star metric with each of the clients is super key and then finding you know some core growth levers from there um I think that’s awesome but like product Market fit wise I love the Sean Ellis survey the kind of you know how disappointed would you be if you could no longer use insert product name and if you’re getting 40 on that that’s a good indication that you’re moving towards product Market fit um one other thing actually with new
clients is just taking a look at like their analytics like product analytics like what is the retention curve of um if it flattens out towards you know a decent number if it doesn’t like Drop then it’s a pretty good indication that you’re nearing product Market fit because if people stick around you must be doing something right yeah so true okay well let’s start with that then how would you define an early stage app yes so a lot of the apps that I work with are like see backed right so early
stage for them is often not early stage for bootstrapped you know apps or people like at home like you know solo developers trying to build their own app so I’m really talking about people who maybe have a prototype at least like a working version of the app that they’ve tested with some people um if they have raised funding then you know they’ve maybe raised like a pre-seed and they’ve got something that does something but they don’t really have users on it um that’s kind of what I’m talking about
it’s like the hardest thing right Nathan like I I talk to clients and I’m like do you have downloads okay great if you have downloads we can fix anything and I’m like anywhere from like 25 to 50 we don’t need much like if you have daily downloads I can fix anything and I’m ready to go if you don’t have downloads well shoot man it becomes harder to go hey I want it Romaine hey love Mike Tyson how does he know how does he know what are you I need to know that um
for everyone who’s like what why are you talking about Mike Tyson so it was actually when I met Steve I was speaking about product Market fit and I use this kind of example of Mike Tyson I also did a LinkedIn post so maybe that’s where it remains so but essentially like when I think about Mike Tyson I think about this like absolute monster of a a man right like he was ferocious he was scary people were just scared of him like there’s stories about his you know opponents like literally shaking before
they stepped into the ring with him um and I call it like brutality like he’s just brutal and when it comes to you know working on your app whether that be improving the product whether that be figuring out which channels to use whether that’s you know going through your screenshots to optimize ASO conversion whatever it is you need to be brutal like being nice is good but you need to be brutal when you prioritize like if you think something really isn’t going to work and something really is go
with the thing that you think is going to work um and if you’ve got data to prove that 100 go with the data be brutal um think what would Mike do I like it yeah I thought you’re gonna throw in uh Mike Tyson impersonation too at the end I was waiting for that punch line dude the problem is Steve a lot of people think that I’m some sort of joke man but I’m brutal bro I’m brutal I’m gonna get in trouble but Mike’s
gonna find me man uh I want to say hi to some people Ricardo’s here Mary what’s up sup girl hello I’ll just be listening today okay thank you during the workout maybe and then Ricardo loves the dad jokes Mary says I’ve been in early stage growth for six years haha what’s happening lyrics and then Adrian I’m early stage and it is a I think we could say that good afternoon what’s up Kevin and then Romaine we met in London okay awesome Prez from Nathan
Steve too that’s awesome and then Patrick is here in Aromas is here as well all right Nathan hey what I want to talk about with you is that hey they might have a working prototype so when you don’t have downloads when you don’t have any analytics because of the debt you don’t have any downloads then talk to me about your process I feel like that is the hardest problem to fix so do you focus on downloads first so that you can get some data what do you do first really good question I think the first
thing is like set up analytics right get things integrated um I love to use like segment uh amplitude mix panel whatever you want to use um you know purchase the revenue cat anything like I’m not affiliated with any of the tools I love them all but you need to be able to have visibility and I’ve worked with so many apps where they’ve been so focused on building Feature Feature Feature Feature where it’s like if we don’t build in these features we can’t launch like let’s forget analytics let’s just build out
more features and then six months down the line they’re so angry and frustrated because they have no visibility or no data and all they’re looking at is App Store connect right and they’re trying to manually like fill in spreadsheets and that that kind of stuff so I think step one take some time to build in and get a good sense of analytics like build an event tracking plan every single screen View track it every button track it every onboarding step definitely track it um your core actions track them
properties and property values for example like let’s take a simple sign up event if you have sign up you want to be tracking whether or not people are signing up with email phone Gmail like Apple sign in Google sign in you want to track those everything um spend some time doing that that’s the first thing and the second thing is when you ask the question do you focus on installs or not I’m going to go out on a limb here and say no we’ll go right now I know I know
right A lot of people I know are like look just pour some proper funnel and then like fix the rest after and I think there’s a time for that but I think there’s also a time to just get the product in front of some people so I have a question actually and this is like for everyone watching to think about anyone who works in apps or anyone who is building their own app and that is do you think of your app like an app or a business and what I mean is I was speaking to this founder a couple of months ago and
he said when you think of like uber Uber are effectively a taxi business with an app right if you think about like you know big music streaming apps they are you know music businesses with an app like took the app away they would still find a way to deliver content and I think the same way when it comes to the apps you’re working on is an app or a business and it can be both right but if it’s a business then hopefully
you’re trying to solve a problem like a real life problem you know the problem Uber is solving is how do I get from A to B the problem like deliveroo is solving is how can I get food to my home like headspace calm like how can I cope with anxiety you know these kind of things so I think if you’re solving a real problem then you’re on to something and you’re on your way to building an app but a business as well and I think that’s a really important kind of nuance to highlight because when you are solving a problem it means that there’s
someone out there with that problem and I’ve been like not literally attacked right shots fired shots fired but people don’t like it when I talk about this because I feel like I’m calling them out but if you’re building an app for a problem that you either don’t have or don’t know anyone that has like I recommend stopping um because if it’s not solving a problem it’s probably not a big enough pain for someone to pay for and you’re going to be really lost so the kind of actionable
Step from all of that is let’s say you’ve got your prototype and you have this idea go and find 10 people with that problem let’s say You’re Building like let’s keep it really easy right an app to help you sleep go find 10 people that struggle sleeping and get them to use your app whether that’s downloading it if you’re already live whether that’s a test flight whether that’s sending them the APK like whatever that is get them to use your app and have a close relationship with them to get feedback because that’s when you can really really learn and it helps
a lot in the long run I love it so it’s almost like user you know usertesting.com you can do that if you want to go the easy route it’s kind of like a reminds me of what Hannah said she’s like I’ll go up to people on the street like look at the screenshots what does this app do you look at the onboarding what do you think this app does and then get them to do it so it’s almost like don’t worry about it just find the first 10 you’ll be all right find the first 10 right like if you’ve got the first 10 they will probably give you some feedback that is really um brutal hopefully unless it’s your mom
right don’t ask your mum don’t ask your mum if you’re married ask your spouse if you’ve got children definitely ask them um it will be honest um but yeah like essentially not I I’m not a fan of kind of like overly indexing on like the kind of user testing platforms only because sometimes they don’t necessarily have the problem and they can kind of give you a bit more of what you want as opposed to what you
need to hear but like whatever you need to get started go through I love it Nathan I’ll tell you a quick story my I built this app like this was like 10 years ago or something but I quoted it myself and I was really proud of it right and then show it to my son I was like hey you know this is my new app he’s only like two or three at the time and then he’s using it and then hit the home button like after five seconds I was like oh no brutal honesty go show your kids trust me they’ll figure it out I love that hey I want to go back to you said hey track everything
why are you tracking it what are you hoping to find with this data that you’re tracking good question so I guess the initial answer is if you’re at this stage you don’t know like you don’t know what you’re going to find um that’s why you want to track as much as possible right um now if someone’s coming in who’s either like working product or growth person or someone who’s got you know some app experience like a data analyst whatever they’re going to kind of be asking questions and trying to figure things out for example let’s say that
you launch your app and you find that no one’s signing up right classic problem you’ve got some sort of onboarding but no one’s signing up if you don’t know which screen and you speak about this all the time right like if you don’t know which screen someone’s dropping off at then you have no idea what to change you may have a 10 screen onboarding and it may be screen five where you lose the majority of people and you’re like you know let’s be systematic let’s change screen one and then two and then three if you have visibility you would just
start at five um so I think there’s obvious things like that but beyond this and this is where we can go kind of deeper you want to kind of get an understanding of correlation and causation right long term so for example if there are certain actions in your app that end up leading to more long-term retention then you’ll find that there’s a correlation ah people who use this feature stick around longer it doesn’t necessarily mean that the reason they’re staying is because of
that feature it just means that there’s some sort of link between this feature and people sticking around then you can dig into that further right so you might be like let’s see what happens if we make this feature super prominent in the app like let’s make it a big button on the home screen let’s you know as soon as they finish onboarding redirect them to this screen you can do things like that and then begin to see if that improves retention now it might not because it may just be correlation right it may just be that that specific group of people had a specific need for that
feature and it’s that need that meant they stayed around whereas everyone else on the app didn’t um but if you’re not tracking you can’t do that so those are just a couple of examples I love that yeah and things I look at I completely agree with you one of my clients went from seven onboarding screens to four because his date was like now they’re married at the time now they’re married but the date was the first date she’s like okay cool she’s just like exited during the onboarding because she’s like so yes she probably wasn’t the ideal user but the fact that she exited he brought it down to Florida
and saw an improvement in conversions we’re actually working with one of our clients who was like you know we’re only getting about 60 I think it was like 40 on the sign up rate and I was like okay let’s really fix the sign up the registration page and then remind you of our conversation with Leia and she’s like hey you know we 90 of iOS users use you know Apple so I was like okay leveraging that data point I was like okay let’s move the apple and she’s like look we just moved the Apple first and we saw like I think it was like a 10 lift on that sign up page because it made the continue with apple button the
number one option versus the number two or three option yeah on that note I’ve got the um spanner to throw in the works not of what you said but just the people are going to be like this guy don’t listen to this guy um so and I’ve seen this like multiple times and I’ve always been against it because everyone says from the day to they see that it’s different but like position of sign up right now it makes sense to have a long onboarding
ease them into the product right you know deliver some value before either paywall or sign up oftentimes um however when you’re early stage people may drop off really really quickly and you also need to be able to speak to people right so what I’ve done before and when I was working at spoke we did this was we actually put onboarding after sign up just so that we can capture information
um we also removed like apple sign-in and Google sign-in the reason being is obviously if people opt out of Apple’s um if they have their privacy settings not passing through the email and they sign in with apple you can get the private relay and email them in certain ways but you can’t have the same kind of communication with them um so removing all of those and forcing people to sign up means yeah you’re going to get less people signing up yeah you’re not optimizing long term but you may have a bigger pool of people to
speak to and kind of do research with um so it’s a little trick just to kind of you know help you develop your product early on definitely don’t stick with that long term um but it can help in the early stages I love that and it reminds me of another interview this is why I love doing this Nathan it’s just like data points that I have but I apologize for bringing the name but okay I won’t forget you bro but the the another another interview we had was and I will pull up the name but he said look we didn’t build up a sign up
feature we just asked for their email right and I think if you’re gonna do that signup process which I love Nathan I really do love that I wouldn’t just be saying if I didn’t but like you just said hey what’s your email and that’s what he asked for because I think on the sign up process if you are just trying to engage your users and you want another way to communicate with them all you really need is that email don’t ask me for my name don’t ask me for a password that’s what all he did was like what’s your email address grabbed it didn’t ask for a password wasn’t really even creating a new user account but wanted that to further communicate with these users so that’s an easy process to
do I love that that’s a brilliant idea yeah I’ve never even thought of that I think probably because the apps I’ve been working with already had signed up so it was more like backwards but yeah that’s brilliant love it okay and I’m gonna pull up that person’s name she’s like I told you that Steve how do you dare not remember me romain’s here of course he’s the French guy he’s the French guy hey what’s up Romaine and then Peter is here Patrick says yo chill Mike is more chill these days so you’re probably gonna be fine don’t worry about Tyson
and he said loves the positivity from you both that’s why he’s here business shout out I’m a business Miguel’s here what’s up Miguel hi fam Joe finally and then Steve’s son Noah give me a one star it’s Noah’s birthday guys 80. I love this too you can expand on this Nathan but like when asking for people for opinions they always ask how do I do this I always reply I like to see if you can work it out yourself if you can’t I got work to do I love that Aiden and one of my biggest pet fees is when somebody shows me their app and
just walks through it and shows me everything I’m like bro you ain’t gonna learning thing let me figure it out that way you will learn stuff so I love that idea too I think I mean yeah you put it really nicely right one of the things is uh it’s that kind of famous Henry Ford quote like um if you would ask people what they wanted they would have told you you know give me a faster horse um whereas he was kind of building the
car and it’s like not exactly on this point but closely related because I find like when you’re the user or you’re the tester of the app like yeah you want to know how to do it but by figuring it out the developer can learn so much more but at the same time the developer needs to really pay attention to the problems that the user has because the user can’t tell you what to do or they might tell you what to do but you shouldn’t listen to them um yeah for example I’ll give an example right so we were building I was working
with this app it was kind of like a mindfulness app and the founders wanted to interview all of the users and just ask them like hey what features should we build and they wanted to like reel out five features and be like this one this one this one this one or this one um the microphone and different people were like oh yeah yeah yeah I like that I like them all oh yeah I like them all and it’s just not a good way to figure out what to build like either you telling them through them telling you I
want this means nothing because people don’t know what they want I think the great thing about like developers and product people and you know entrepreneurs is that they have this Innovation right they have the vision and I think the intuition of hmm I see you’ve got this problem here I’ve got this idea how about this idea solves that problem that’s where the magic happens the magic doesn’t happen in them telling you yeah build this so sometimes it can but not all the time I love it
the there was something I wanted to move on to all right let’s go into tahid’s question consider using Google ads as a mean to drive app growth and revenue for any developers struggling with ASO challenges what are your opinions on that should we be using Google ads to drive some organic growth interesting question I think it really depends on why you’re struggling with ASO I think right I like to bring ASU down into Discovery and conversion if
it’s a conversion problem I.E people are landing on your product page and not converting then running paid traffic isn’t going to help um like you need to be testing the headlines you need to be testing the subtitle the description the screenshots adding a video switching position of screenshots you know that needs to happen so you can improve conversion and then when you push paid traffic through you’ll get some results now if discovery is the problem like you’re struggling to get people to find your app like because of your keyword research then I would
again follow up with another question which is why are you struggling to find the right keywords because it could be that your app is super super Niche and there’s just not a lot of volume for those keywords and in which case sure you may struggle with ASO but it also might be that you just don’t understand your your target user very well and you’re not putting the right keywords in so I would say try and figure out ASO first um or at least you know give it a lot of
attention and put those keywords in do the customer research you know use the ASO tools that are out there that Steve has loads of videos on by the way that can really easy to follow um yeah um start with those and then move across to paid ads there’s a caveat though should I tell them the caveat of course please giving away all my secrets all right well yeah let me make you the focus okay here we go here we go here we go the benefit of running paid traffic
um not so much Google ads I guess it depends right if you’re talking like UAC or plain you know Google search ads to a landing page to download the app it depends on what you mean um but the benefit of running paid traffic is that you can test really quickly so you can test different copy you can test different messaging you can test different images if you use meta you can test creatives you can do creative message testing and all of this stuff which can then inform your store description and you know give you some
different ideas for like standard ASO tests so there is a caveat but generally I would say if like I was reviewing the app let’s try and figure out why there’s an ASO problem okay here’s what I would say to that we read so using Google ads look I agree with Nathan if you have your ASO Foundation set in place Google ads we have one big client running massive UA campaigns and we’ve seen good res really good results with our keyword rankings
posts it’s one the benefit of our you know having the right keywords in the right places but also a lot of the UA side of things so I think I would do it if you have nothing because you need something and we are seeing positive effects with ASO once you have some downloads too so it’s a great starting point but you got to make sure you found your ASO Foundation is set and then Google will give you a little bit of push and your keyword rankings you should start to see a difference what’s those downloads come in too and so that’s what I would say as well the
other thing I want to say Nathan was like when you said the niche you know like are you solving a real problem I prefer to be in the niche under a niche you know what I mean like how Niche can you go because I think developers tend to be like this is what I hate all the time when I’m talking to the startup Founders like it’s for everybody bro I’m like yo it’s not for everybody like if it’s like fiercely sleep okay help you sleep in what way you know is it through white noise is it through meditation is it through acupuncture like what way and
then just solve that need hey you want to go on sleep through acupuncture and here this is what this app does go ahead try it out and so that way you can build the right features because here’s what I feel Nathan if you go Niche within a niche within a niche you can always go back up right whereas people tend to start up here instead of starting way down here because I want the user base down here making money because we’re a business and then I can know I can go all the way up here stop starting from up here start weighing the niche you’re you know it’s easy to go up it’s really
easy to go up yeah 100 it’s like the narrower end of the wedge right stop Niche and build out I think one thing to add like one problem I’ve experienced in the past when dealing with a niche app and I’ll use it as an example but I’m not going to say the app’s name um so we try the Apple search ads right and because there’s so many competitors in that specific space yeah it meant that this app was a niche in the niche it was like an app for specific people
struggling to sleep right it wasn’t like it’s not everyone’s going to use it um so of course the challenge was it was more Persona and culture oriented than it was necessarily um like a use case yeah so there was no way to Target that person with the keywords like you can change the keywords but it’s going to be the same people and that means that like you’re going to get loads of Impressions and they’re going to be people with the problem but because of the type of app it is and the
kind of who you’re appealing to it’s going to be a really small percentage of those Impressions that actually want the app so if you are doing a niche within a niche you have to work really hard at knowing who those people are and like realistically testing a lot more channels well this is a great transition to our next topic how do you use meta ads to test your jobs to be done so I agree with you and I think I’ve worked with certain apps like yo we’re ASA is not the right platform for you like we’re gonna have to use Google or Facebook meta in my opinion because then
we get really targeted with who we’re looking for versus what they’re looking for so break it down for us how do you use meta yeah so let’s say you’re a niche app within a niche right um if you have your target user in mind one of the first things I would recommend doing is finding some creators who will resonate with that person right so I’m talking about like finding some ugc creators or some influencers if you have enough budget to work with you to make some content
in fact I’m going to push that to step two I’m gonna I’m gonna go back even further you want to do is speak to your customers right interview them and get some cues on different types of language to really understand their job to be done and I think jobs to be done is sometimes misunderstood okay funny story I spoke to this one founder and I said have you heard of jobs to be done and he said yeah only from my wife um when it comes to the Garden at this job oh my God
but looking at the job to be done framework is when I dot dot dot I want to dot dot dot so that dot dot dot right so when I am struggling to sleep I want to get to sleep faster so that I can and this is the important bit feel more rested in the morning right like we we talk about feature benefit a lot in marketing like the feature will be like
50 different sounds and the benefit is to help you sleep but it’s so much deeper than that it’s but why do you want to sleep like do you want to sleep because you wake up in the morning and you you miss your alarm do you want to sleep because you’re not feeling productive in the day do you want to sleep because you’ve started like exercising you’ve seen some YouTube videos that sleep is important and you like want to get into your Fitness like do you want to sleep so that you can wake up early and get some work done like there’s so many different so that I can’t and that’s where you can focus so
I would take all of those if they’ve come from users and I would just create really basic static image ads on meta right like in camera however you want to do it really cheap and focusing on the different messages so for example one might be fall asleep in minutes with this one might be you know get to sleep so that tomorrow you can you know get to the gym I don’t know I’m just making this stuff up don’t test these These are rubbish
I like them what are you talking about but like those kind of things and I would test them as images and then I would and this there’s Arguments for and against this I would then try and test either for installs if you have enough budget or clicks if you don’t or I would you know set up like a web campaign and try and track the web conversions um to like a waiting list or an opt-in
page just to see people converting for those different jobs to be done once you’ve got those you can now go and find some ugc creators for your specific Target user right so remember we’re talking about the niche in the niche yeah so let’s say let’s say this is a sleep app for gym dudes right Jim Bruce um I might have to do that go and find some like massive guys or like you know gym people and get them to be creators in your video
um you know script out some things storyboard out some ads and let them run them um maybe take the top five and push them out because in doing that you’re going to start to bring in the right type of you know Persona and you’re going to be hitting the the use case well as well so it’s a combination of persona and use case um that’s how I would use meta to do it yeah I love it look here’s the easy way to I’ve tried this you go on Fiverr and look up Tick Tock ugc you can select your favorite influencer and because
I’ve done influencer marketing it is the pain in the butt to find the right influencer and you message them all that jazz you can go if you want to shortcut everything you know try out Fiverr as well and we we found an influencer on there she created the video we liked the video we started running that as an ad sometimes you know this is all you need too so yeah maybe we could put Jim bro when you want to put jimbro let’s do it let’s see what happens okay well some things came up but you know you can see the people and you can pick the right influencer that works for
you and then this is a great article jobs to be done process a customer goes through whenever she aims to change her existing life situation into a preferred one and you broke it down beautifully with the Sleep model here’s your customer I love this quote dude every here this one this Cosmetic in the factory we make Cosmetic in the drugstore We Sell Hope and yeah that’s good for makeup yeah yeah I mean I think the thing about jobs to be done that people sometimes struggle with is that when you’re trying to uncover them you’re looking for the
transformation right so what someone wants but you’re also looking at the current state where they are now like in order for there to be a transformation it’s taking something from point A to point B or from this thing into that thing right and sometimes like people know what they’re selling but they don’t know the initial state or sometimes people really know the initial state but they don’t know what they’re selling right so like it’s it’s both right it’s
the struggles and the desired outcomes yeah I love it right here and Mary has a comment yes Nathan I went to Brandon burchard seminar and learned that X Y and Z statement about I make X for y so they can Z so Mary for you you make an app that helps people remember names easily so maybe they can sell more of their product or they can feel more confident in their communication skills I don’t know I love it okay uh anything else on the meta side that you want to cover for jobs to be done
this thing I not really I think one thing I would say is if you’re using meta for kind of these tests you want to make sure that you give it enough time like if you just put out mediocre creatives with some messages on it’s not going to be successful that’s why like at the beginning I was pausing with uh do you go to ugc creators first ideally if you know who your target like Persona is find people that will resonate with
that people and just start with the creators like Steve showed Fiverr right if it’s cheap enough and you have enough budget and you can afford to and you do invest more in the creative you will get better results yeah I love it I agree with that too you know I think targeting is super important and I Nathan like I think people talk too much when they’re trying to do user research like listen for the words and then listen to the words don’t take the words then I listen to the themes this is why I love doing this it’s like I listen to the words and I’m engaging every conversation but then
if you start seeing the same things as my pass you know guess I’m like oh there’s a theme now I go execute now I’m like okay this is a theme now so I’m looking for Words first and then themes and then I follow the themes versus just following the words yeah I’m proud of myself did you hear that all right strike shock says hey guys how do you create a strong Community for your app this is a good question okay so there’s some apps I’m working with right now that are doing this right and actually
have communities and I think you’re going to be like this guy is a spinning record it comes it starts with how well you know your customer right like what community are you trying to build and who you’re trying to build the community for the thing about community in my opinion uh and maybe it’s not an idealistic tree of not an ideal trait of human being but we tend to Clique together right like we tend to want to hang out with people like us so if you’re building a community you need to know what the like us is right
who are you trying to have this community for and what are you trying to have them do in this community um so I think the first thing is figuring out who and being really specific about who you want in the community and the second thing if it’s an in-app Community is you’re going to have to really spend some good time in development and having a community manager to kind of manage the community um but to kick things off to be honest whether or not the people you want to
bring together want to be together I will give an example I’m trying to think of one so let’s say you are a 53 year old business owner and you own a takeaway right you might have the idea I’m going to make a community for 53 year old takeaway owners that takeaway owner might not care about the community they might be super busy right they might be
too focused on actually doing work and the last thing on their mind may be a community and sometimes I’m seeing it as a trend now like probably because AI is taking over and we’re turning to community more than content right but sometimes it’s not a solution to build a community um I’ll give you one like one example I was speaking to this app and they are a parking app right so they help people find parking and they were like they wanted me to come in and speak to
them about Community like building a community um and I went in and spoke to them about the reasons they should not build a community and the prime reason was like that is not enough validation that anyone cares about parking right like if you think about gymshark right consumer brand not an app but consumer brand used influencers massive community if you think about parking like it’s really functional
um so anyway I went off on a tangent go on Steve no I love it hey just because I come back onto the screen doesn’t mean I want you to stop talking I’m just trying to give a different visual as pretty as you are and enjoy it again it’s still video videos I’m trying to give a different visual to the audience too I love that one of the case studies or past interviews Chris Shout out to you Chris he built an app to help you quit smoking weed and he went into so how do you build a strong Community maybe join an existing Community learn from their
needs learn what they’re talking about and that way you can build the functions that you need and also base the community because you know what they’re talking about within the community so he built this app entirely on Reddit like he went to the subreddit about quit quit smoking weed he was like hey guys I’m trying to build this app here’s some screenshots here some beta all this stuff and he started building this app based on the community feedback and the mind-blowing thing that happened was you say hey guys I’m ready to launch if you want access to the Bay data give me your email address I was like Chris how’d you
get their email address was like a Google form type form what is what did you do he’s like I said leave your email in the subreddit I was like people just left their emails and then he’s like yeah I was like what it was insane I was like yep that’s how they did it and so it is being that Scrappy sometimes but I would say you know if you don’t know what to do yet and be able to join a community see what they’re saying and then you could start figuring out okay what features I need to build too and that’s what he did he joined that Community figured out what features to build and now you know what people are already talking about to then build your
community as well yeah I love it okay let’s see some comments Mary said I got data on people on how people perceive and navigate my app by going to Starbucks with five dollar gift cards and offering to buy them coffee if they could just use my friend you know if they could use the app for five minutes and see what they do I think it’s a great way to test like UI ux stuff but to Nathan’s Point Mary like maybe you’re not finding the right user for your app but you’ll figure out if your app is usable by a
dumb person okay and then David says hey hey David I’m struggling with the 41 score keywords on position three what can I do it to get to number one I’ve been struggling there for three months any feedback for him you’re gonna have to kick this one off Steve okay I’ll tell you why I wrote years ago right when I was starting in apps like I went to app Masters to learn about ASO so for me to take this
question I have no idea man thank you for that uh okay David here’s what I do there’s obviously some tricks that I know that might I won’t reveal here but here’s some obvious tricks that you can do depends on the keyword you might never beat them so if you really don’t think that your app is better here’s what I hear Nathan my app’s way better than that first position is it because are they making more money than you do they have more ratings than you yes functionally you may be better
but on the surface you’re not badder and apple is always going to wait that app a little bit higher than yours so maybe one think about if they have less reviews if they don’t have as much revenue as you then I can truly help you get to number one but if they do let’s say I’m call like a meditation app right and I’m number three I’m never gonna beat these guys so I’m gonna give up so the other alternative is to find a new keyboard that is less competitive that
is Niche within a niche within a niche and if you know I did this case study where we were ranking number one for two keywords around a search traffic of 30 we’re making eight to ten thousand with this app and it’s getting about 100 downloads so maybe there’s another app that another keyword that you can rank number one for instead of trying to live why be the third best when you can be the first best in a smaller pool build up that and once you start generating revenues then maybe go back to this number three position keyword and you can finally beat the number one
anything you want to add to that yeah I think so obviously reviews and ratings are super important right like I sometimes I’ve heard this question from apps that have like two stars and they’re like they have two stars like how do I get to visiting one and the the actual position one is like 4.9 nine thousands of reasons it’s gonna take some time um I would say to be honest if you really really want that keyword
and you want to be higher let’s go try some apple search ads yeah right like I if if you can or the other thing I would suggest is going back to the drawing board and like having a kind of strategy out for okay I’m going to start with these keywords and then once we’re ranking higher for those we’re going to switch to these keywords because they’re you know higher difficulty and we’ve got lower chance at the moment but as we you know improve our conversion on these keywords then we can and then kind of going through that City process I think it’s good to keep in mind the keywords
that you want to rank for long term but also be realistic about what you can rank for now yeah I love it here’s what I was I love that let’s add on this this is why again I love what I do okay here to to Nathan’s Point go aggressive so David have a apple search ads campaign with just that keyword create a CPP promoting that main keyword as the number one screenshot be like you know let’s say sleep sounds Sleep Number One sleep sounds app or whatever come up with some
tagline with sleep sounds right go super aggressive like I want to do like a 10 cost per tap I’m gonna go all in create an in-app event with the title having that same keyword and then the short description all that stuff so now you’re truly maximizing everything that you have in your Arsenal to then hopefully outright that and then go all in for a month or a week or two and see what happens sometimes it does take time to do this but that’s a strategy I’ve been wanting to test on my own so I don’t know if this is going to work or not but
that’s an idea that I had was like if I wanted to go all in on these set of keywords why don’t I just create an apple search ads campaign where I am so aggressive that I’m gonna get like 60 70 of the impression share and then I’m gonna create a CPP I’m just going to maximize my efforts and I’m going to create a nap event to hopefully help my keyword rankings and further maximize all my efforts going all in yeah I’ve done something like that yeah like it worked but the reason it worked was because the the app was converting well right so like it there
was a very long lifetime value you know Auto trial was it was good so it could be done but sometimes like there was another time where the cost per tap got to the point where it was a little bit too expensive to where it didn’t make sense to actually try and compete on these keywords um so I guess that’s the only time where it doesn’t work but apart from that with the other app that kind of had product Market fit it worked I love it cool David reach out to us exactly thanks my app has much more revenues and two extra
ratings than the first app but the second one is the biggest which makes hundred give me the keyword David if you want to then we could really break it down so if you’re open to it give us the keyword there too all right Nathan you ready for my favorite part of the show oh yes here we go let’s do some dad jokes [Music] all right yeah guys before we do that dad jokes we this is normally when we do our app audits if you want us to take a
look at your app there is like a six to seven multiple Point all right just keep that in mind go to appmasters.com audit and we’ll take a look at your app and do it an audit Live on YouTube in a future live stream all right we are playing for dinner so either Nathan’s gonna come out to me in Vegas next year or we’ll probably see in London but that’s what we’re playing for all right Nathan you wanna you go first how about that you go first I’ll go first the second round yeah because I’ve got a few okay hey so uh Steve what did the ocean say
to the beach what nothing it just waved all right I like that all right here’s one uh I’m trying to find one okay all right stop writing them now what is this look literally dude I’m looking at it this is from in and out my kids went there they had a bunch of dad jokes and I was like I love it okay I love this
one okay here we go this is the winner all right Nathan Nathan what do porcupines say when they kiss I don’t know what do they say ouch there you go all right but but ask if you thought my joke was better put in if you thought Nathan’s joke was better oh I know David headbands all right we’ll get to that David all right first app that we will do look there’s a lot of line I need you guys to vote Mary stopped working out put s for Steve put n for Nathan if you
thought his joke was better Jake and Steppin was the app that said hey we didn’t build a sign in feature sign up feature we just asked for their email address and so I don’t know if they have a sign up feature yet but when we broke it down on a live stream previous livestream he did share that and I love that strategy so that was Jake shout out to you Jake for sharing that all right we’re going to take a look at this app by Emmanuel and he says Steve help me with some ASO that’s all he put so Nathan go ahead lead it off for me
okay so I think the first thing that stands out to me are the screenshots well actually is that 1.5 star yeah yes okay okay so I’m going to be nice but real right so I think trying to improve ASO like you know Impressions or conversion with 1.5 star rating is really tricky because I I come to this page and I’m like yeah this app probably
has bugs right and I think I haven’t read the reviews but I guess if we did read the reviews there may be some this app’s buggy um if that’s the case I would say pause on ASO fix them up first right go back to those reviews reply to every single person and say hey we’ve actually fixed the bugs sorry about that have a try now I’m sure you’ll love it if so can you kind of change your review it would help us out a lot and try and really build up
the the rating there or you know bring on new users and try and build up the rating there that’s one thing I would do um I think that’s very important the other thing if we scroll down to the screenshots this looks really nice yeah the screenshots look um they look like something went wrong in export right so the text on the first screenshot seems super high up like
download and manage your your social media videos so that’s that’s strange also there’s a lot of text on that first screen and then screen two three five don’t have any text so I would suggest splitting the text across the first three you know um download social media videos from the first one you know um and then kind of put the different messaging across the screenshots also a big one is if you make the images
slightly smaller so you can make the text bigger and that may be helpful maybe it’s because I’m looking on the desktop and not on my phone but I’m pretty sure that the text looks a little bit small yeah um and also I’m just looking at your your videos at your fingertips without Watermark it’s all very wordy right so starting with the screenshots like you have to really take time to begin to understand what it means but actually like the app is a really straightforward really simple really great idea so if you can find a more
concise way to communicate that message that would be the first place to or second thing to look at after the reviews yeah I agree and you know like video downloader might be I completely agree with you that reading and so does Mary to fix it love that tip by fixing the rating and then replying them later gotta give it a try so I would fix that because you know I have have worked with a client that has like a 2.3 and they rank really well for a lot of keywords but they’re running massive growth so
great campaigns and if you’re not able to afford to pay you know 10 20 000 a month doing that it’s you’re never going to keep up so fixed ratings first and then from a keyword perspective Maybe video downloader downloader is to too like broad whether it’s tick tock whether it’s let’s just say tick tock downloader maybe finding the niche keyword would be more valuable there was somebody at our Workshop in San Francisco and that’s what they did they helped you save their your Tick Tock
videos and they’re doing really well in the app space and I was like whoa that’s crazy so like think about what people are looking for whether it’s YouTube video downloader or Tick Tock video downloader like I said if you don’t have a big budget start within a niche within a niche as long as there’s keyword traffic about at least 20 to 30 that’s enough for you to get organic downloads and start ranking for it it’s enough for you to start optimizing your funnel too yeah one other one yep and I personally don’t like putting app in the title
unless you’ve done your keyword research and I know that that should be there um yeah it’s a personal thing because everyone knows it’s an app right um the other thing which I think is helpful here and which counters what I’ve said is you can actually optimize your title for Discovery or for conversion right so if you are not that worried on you know increasing Impressions increasing downloads from ASO because you’re
running other channels maybe you will down the line what you can do is you can have a more landing page style headline that isn’t necessarily focused on keywords but it’s focused on highlighting that core job to be done um and then that will convert so for example um get to sleep faster right now get to sleep faster maybe sleep faster actually in fact yeah I do know that you know sleep faster
so that actually is a headline actually could work but something like that right like you know download videos download videos now or something like play around with those don’t do it because I know that you do want to actually get you know more downloads with ASO but just want to bear in mind for down the line or for anyone else who is running you know significant paid campaigns that’s something you can try yeah I love it okay and then David to close the loop on that says I put some in-app purchases for free and then when
the user purchases the in-app purchase I immediately show that person a review alert it works for getting positive reviews so that’s great too and his keyword is called headbands instead of bands so manual to close the loop on you fix your product you know figure out the one thing before you even think about ASL like fix your product all right headbands yeah I don’t know David I know you have more reviews but I don’t know they might have been around for a long time you know we can I think
I worked with him sorry Dave if we did work together but the thing I would yeah I don’t like I said I I tried the in-app event and I tried to figure out how to do it and you know we can talk about some strategies privately as well all right because we’re sure on time I’m gonna go straight to I’m not going to look at manual zap because he didn’t ask me to look at it so I’m just not gonna do it we’re gonna go to round two of dad jokes but let’s go round one here I got a boxing Bill too where the
hell is all my stuff all right round one ghost Nathan Mary Romaine Ricardo thank you Ricardo I’m glad you like that Patrick Samuel you want that man hey all right I wasn’t giving score I knew it was a blowout all right I will go first this time my man uh since we’ve been talking about this topic Nathan why did the man run around his bed
no clue why did he run around his bed to catch up honestly yeah I’m gonna have to bring out some of the uh the big boy dad jokes for this oh okay shout out to my son for this one he learned this one from school what do you call a cow with no legs what ground beef okay all right you know the drill and
for Nathan I’m feeling I’m gonna be Oni I’m gonna buy dinner for Nathan as well but let’s see what the votes show all right Elizabeth said take a look at our app she wants advice on ASO as well so I will look at her app from an ESO perspective it’s called X verse the number one Bitcoin and web 3 wallet here it is all right Nathan kick it off kick it off for us so I had a look at this
app right I downloaded it and everything I really like the kind of screenshots and everything I think it is there’s a lot of ratings right it looks like you’ve thought a lot about kind of the copy on top of the screenshots so I think on it and it looks like you’re really going after keywords there in the subtitle in the crypto tokens nfts D5 so honestly it looks like you’re doing the basics well so this one’s a lot harder to critique without seeing kind of you know your keyword rankings your app store
conversion like I could say something that could completely just wreck everything um because it’s nonsense however one obvious thing for me is I would make the font thicker on the screenshots um for the text um just so that it pops a bit more I would also not necessarily give you something to do but process to follow is I would increase the testing Cadence of your screenshots so you’ve got send and receive you know BTC nfts I’d switch that with you know a home for you for
ordinals and Bitcoin nfts or switch that with you know earn 10 Bitcoin rewards I wouldn’t you know play screenshot order also also I think a big one is I’m not sure whether or not people care about earning 10 on bitcoin rewards um or whether or not they care about having a home for their ordinals right like if you do a bit more customer research and try and prioritize these screenshots based on the core use cases and that can help as well
um sometimes when we’re working on the app ourselves and in the product label we have this idea of what we want but it’s not what the user wants so that’s one thing an easy way as you’re scrolling to the reviews actually is just browse the reviews and see what people are saying about the app like what are you helping them achieve just take that out and then just Chuck it on one of the screenshots maybe add a review there’s no reviews I don’t think on those screenshots either yeah great app for Stacks if you want to use sax protocol for nfts or get the ordinals
directly on Twitter yeah that’s what I would do too and I love that because screenshot order does matter and what I’ve been saying too Nathan is like don’t overlap them because then it makes it harder for you to just test the order like keep it like this format that way you can test the order really quickly with and the cool thing about Apple’s product page optimization is you don’t you can put new builds up now thank you Apple for fixing that so you can still run a B test while putting new builds into your app store so I love that tip the other thing I would say Nathan
is so I’ve been sharing this the App Store the US App Store indexes of ton of localizations let’s see if I can do this properly so this is the Spanish Mexico right no and what you want to do is since you have crypto token nft we’ll throw them into the title right we know title has the most weight so in the Spanish Mexico localization put these English keywords into its title because then that helps too and I have a case study on that and then in the Vietnamese one throw
whatever you have in the Spanish Mexico subtitle down here maybe you have other keywords like ordinals or whatever right and then throw that into the Vietnamese which is also helping the US to its title and have a whole new set of subtitle here so every localization that the US indexes have a different title have a different subtitle that you want to leverage we have case studies where by moving by sort of duplicating what was in the
the US subtitle and then moving in Spanish Mexico title I didn’t remove it from the U.S title but repeating it did help our keyword rankings for an older client it is a little dated case study about a few years ago but yeah it did work so that’s how you leverage those 10 localizations that the US indexes okay well I’ve got some very sad news for me not the news for you my friend but looks like a clean sweep so Patrick to Patrick give you an in I mean
Ricardo thank you Ricardo Samuel Mary all chairs really all Traders well congratulations my friend I had some there you go here I have an Applause thing for you [Applause] you’re welcome anything you cover Nathan Before We Say Goodbye gosh no I mean there’s always more to cover
but you know how long have you thought right I think Joe was saying Steve can you have I’m like okay Nathan don’t worry I’ll have you back on all right yeah look guys if you would have me back then we’ll talk about more I love it a little teaser for round two I gotta redeem myself I gotta open this ad jokes look guys if you guys really want to work with Nathan you shared a lot of great tips it’s gonna walk you step by step from if you got raised a little bit of money have that c founding and need to get to the next step he’s
gonna walk you step by step through the next step and help you really grow not just the top of the funnel but the the inside the funnel itself as well so go check out perceptixperceptics.com and that’s perceptix with a Y instead of an I but it is linked up into your favorite podcast streaming consumption media consumption platform as well and Nathan if the audience wants to connect with you personally and say thank you so much for coming on you want to send them anywhere else LinkedIn is a great place yeah LinkedIn
um awesome there’s so many Nathan Hudson’s so you might happen or type in like Nathan Hudson perceptix um but yeah Nathan Hudson Mike Tyson should get you to the right AKA Mike Joe says it’s a great team Nathan had helpful insights and then yes come back Nathan so people want you coming back or Nathan’s LinkedIn profile is linked up into your favorite media conception consumption platform as well next week
we’re gonna have my buddy moyo to come on and really break down his Indie success story as well so join us every Friday at 9am Pacific whatever time zone you might be in 12 a.m Eastern what is it in London like 5 P.M yeah almost six so nine five PM in the UK Nathan thank you so much for coming on man thank you for having me it’s been great thank you guys for watching I’ll see you on the next video