When I was 19 I got 250,000 downloads on the Android Market Here's How

This was inspired by Noah Kagan, check him out:

https://twitter.com/noahkagan
He created: http://www.appsumo.com/

Originally this was gonna be an email, but it was so long he probably doesn't have time to read it all. (read all the bold parts to save time). Luckily I have so many tips, I figured I'd make this a blog post  :-D

"We have 400k downloads on the android market to date" I tell people whenever I want to puff myself up and start flexing. I'm actually not in the mobile business anymore, instead I do online real estate lead generation in a few states. >:) Even though I know how to generate downloads and growthhack the app ecosystem a bit, the dream of going Mark Zuckerberg viral has faded and I've actually grown attached to B2Bs. After getting up to 300k downloads and now probably 400k I only made about a few hundred a month when I was 19.

"Stop fucking lying to me! How the hell did you get 400k downloads, but only make a few hundred dollars a month?" You might say.

"Well, I don't claim to be a saint, but I'm certainly no liar my good sir or madam" I'd reply.

I can shed light on what I'd do differently and how I'd monetize now, but that'll be a different blogpost.
The company I started at 19 with my 17 year old genius cousin (convinced him to be a programmer not an aeronautical engineer) was called Shoplletes:

Before you judge me on this horribly made app...I would like to apologize and say I was young and hey it got over 150k downloads so...just accept my apology please!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shoplletes.android.dquotes

I'll warn you upon further inspection that our apps get complaints because people want updates, the quotes are only lyrics etc. No these app will never be updated, we actually made them to learn about the app market in 2010 by creating 30 apps in a similar field. On the other hand, my cousin aka CTO doesn't see much profitability and charity work isn't on his list of priorities so once again sorry.

Here is another one of our quotes  apps with about 70k downloads:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moonsoonmenu.android.eminemquotes

This company obviously failed, but feel free to check out all our other
celebrity quote fan apps as well. ;-) So what are my rules to getting downloads? How did I do it?

Tip 1: Pick a popular topic to get tons of downloads without trying too hard.

Obviously celebrities get searched themselves so we decided to leverage their popularity and create fan apps. This was in 2010 so it was a gold rush hour (still is). I checked various topics and saw millions of millions of downloads for mostly any popular celebrity.

This Lil Wayne Quotes app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fender.lilwayne

for example has a few hundred thousand downloads so I knew we'd get great results if we could do something similar.

After doing about 50 searches manually I knew the celebrity fan app market was generating tons of downloads on mobile (It wasn't so apparent then, but still very apparent).

Tip 2: Make sure your topic doesn't already have the exact keyword solution

In comes my "Drake Quotes" idea. He was a popular artist at the time, but not on the celeb quotes market.
Since I was first to market it gave me huge advantages.

The google play store search algorithm loves promoting popular apps, therefore if you start early in a niche where no exact keyword exists and start getting traction competitors will have a tough time catching up.
As usual in business, timing is critical. What's hot today will not be hot tomorrow. Make a topic of what keywords you want to target or better yet let the internet do it for you.

When coming up with anything I try to leverage as much as possible. After creating a bunch of "Ayn Rand Quotes" and "Emily Dickinson" quote apps we wisened up and used the interwebz to let us know what juicy keywords to target.

I WISH I had done this earlier. We simply modeled our quotes apps after every celeb on this website (if they weren't taken).

http://twittercounter.com/pages/100

After this we didn't have to brainstorm anymore, now all we had to do was cross reference this popularity list with google trends.

In the future it would actually be cool if someone made a tool to tell you how many downloads certain keywords get for apps automatically. $$$ >:)

Tip 3: Let the internet to figure out what'll be popular, google trends does the job quite nicely

For your pleasure here is an example of me searching 4 popular quote apps I could make using google trends:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=drake%20quotes%2C%20eminem%20quotes%2C%20ayn%20rand%20quotes%2C%20rihanna%20quotes

So the term "Drake Quotes" is the blue line, Eminem Quotes is the red line so on. What are the odds that google trends shows us a very close trajectory to what my app results were after I put them on the store? ;) This is how I knew which celeb quote apps to create first. It's a bit counter intuitive since some people have never heard of Drake, but everyone knows Eminem aka Marshall Mathers aka Slim Shady. Surely one of hip hop's greatest rappers should have received more  traffic? Instead of blindly publishing an app google trends will show you whats in demand.

Tip 4: Use the same base code for your  horizontal integration strategy

Move fast...how fast? Faster than that Zorro horse what's his name Quick Silver? Moving too fast to google his name :P

When I created Drake Quotes, or Eminem Quotes or Blank Quotes. I didn't have any guarantees which one would break 200k or even 50k downloads. What I did know is that if I hit up as many different popular keywords as possible by attacking the app market we'd be able to generate serious traffic. In 2010, Google promoted your app on the play store right after it was approved in the new section, so instead of working super hard and being stuck promoting an "OK" app, launch the MVP, get it out there! I'm convinced today you'd be able to get similar results with a tweaked strategy. Everyone always complains, everyone always says: "all the best app ideas are taken", but those people are complainers, you can still do it.

Conclusion:

"What about submitting your app to magazines? Writing to TechCrunch, submitting it to show Hacker News or Reddit? What about paying $3000 to have a dude talk about my app on a youtube or website?" You may ask.

Well, the only method I used was launching fast and it worked great (except the monetization part). We got 250k downloads in the span of 3 months after that things started cooling down. In retrospect posting on Hacker News and Reddit is a good way to help growth, but they don't give you nearly as many downloads as solving a real need in a large market, at least not for B2C products. Each business strategy depends entirely on the product and target market. I don't even use the internet to gain clients for Skyreal we grow our business through cold calling.

Anyways, feel free to ask any questions and I'll answer them. I'm honored you read this and always happy to help. :-)

https://twitter.com/VladMkrtumyan