How I am launching my app today

Today I'm launching an iPhone app. It's called Tally and we (some of the former OMGPOP crew and myself) spent the last year working on it, refining it, and trying different approaches. While we are probably only 80% of the way there, it’s time to let it out into the world.

Tally is people powered newsfeeds about anything. In other words: group content feeds outside of your regular social networks. There’s no following, no Facebook or email login, and all the content is sorted by the community. Download Tally here. Our homepage is www.tally.la. Watch our video here or below.

Recently I've thought a lot about how to launch Tally. Since I made a previous app – Draw Something – that went to #1 on both platforms and has had over 200 million downloads, people think I have some sort of special knowledge. They call and email me to ask how to get their app to #1 on the App Store. My usual answer is something like – make an app people like and pray that you’re lucky. But the reality is there are lots of strategies. None are guaranteed or perfect, and you still need luck, timing, and a terrific retention rate.

Here are three strategies to launch:

Strategy #1

Release your app to a few hundred people. Maybe it's all your friends. Or your college/alumni network. Or your old co-workers or some other group. The idea is that the app is so addictive and viral that it will just spread like a weed. This was the Snapchat and Tinder strategy. The reality of this is twofold. First this ONLY works for truly social apps like messaging or social networks that require other people to be in the app to make it work. The majority of apps are not truly social and rely on word of mouth as opposed to network effects. When I snapchat, I need to send it to someone. That's why it works. What's also true is that in the early days of these companies, we don’t even know they exist. They grow steadily for a year and then as we start to hear about them for the first time it feels like they are exploding and going "viral." What we don’t see is that they've been at this for awhile already. Don't skip that first part, which is patience.

Strategy #2

Get influencers to talk about your app and everyone will download it. This is hard to do and is not as impactful as it was years ago. In the good old days, influencers didn't expect to be compensated and there weren't as many apps so people appreciated the cool factor of discovering something first. These days most everyone expects to get paid. It's the maturation of online celebrity power and also the sour feeling people had when they felt they had helped Instagram and Twitter reap billions but didn't make a cent themselves. Now that strategy has been diluted and even if you can pay (and even I will try to pay), it's hit or miss. There isn't a lot of open space for new apps on people's phones. I also include the "I will be on TechCrunch" strategy, which used to make your app pop at least for a day, but now that doesn't work as well either.

Strategy #3

This is my strategy and I call it the everything + day one strategy. Everything means I am doing basically everything I can to launch Tally. I have a list of 55 things (including this post) such as using my social channels, calling in favors from every person and company I know, to writing out my talking points. I am telling everyone I can on day one. Each little piece has to add up to a launch and hopefully downloads, especially if I can clearly articulate my value proposition (Tally is where you can share and browse tons of visual feeds of micro content that your friends might not care about but you do!).

But the reality is this is only day one. I am fully prepared that on day one, I will get press and downloads and on day two, I will fall off a cliff. It's called my day one strategy because every day for the next 365 days has to be a new day one. I have to keep telling everyone, I have to dream up cool press stories, I have to do 10 biz dev deals of which 9 will totally fail, I have to personally respond to and favorite every tweet, and I have to keep on believing.

I wish I could tell you there was a silver bullet and that the first time around, when I got a million downloads in 9 days (and 50 million in 50), that I could do that every time. But those millions of downloads were the result of a game we had iterated on for 3 years and a community we launched with that took 4 years to build. So this time, all I can do, and recommend to you, is to make a giant list of everything, and then do it every single day until you finally hit the big time.

Let me know what you think of Tally. I appreciate any feedback positive or negative. And if you love what we created and want to work together, let me know that too.

Email: [email protected] and keep the faith