How We Jumped 50 Places in the App Store – for Free

In October 2008 we saw the writing was on the wall for small, unfunded, inexperienced pure-play iPhone startups; we figured the App Store was growing so fast that soon everything would get buried and only the big players (or a lucky few) would prosper. So we did what any self-respecting masochistic entrepreneurs would do; we started a pure-play iPhone app startup!

We did this for three reasons:
1. Get something out there for people to interact with and talk about (”Release Early”).
2. Understand people’s wellness requirements (”Listen to Your Customers” + “Iterate Often”).
3. Learn what we are good at and what we are crap at (”Fail Fast”).

We made a lot of mistakes (growing list here) leading to poor sales at best and major stress at worst…but there’s two things we’ve done well that have made a huge difference to our prospects: Customer Service and Social Media (and they are linked, in the context of this article).

Customer Service

This is our customer service approach:
1. Answer ALL emails and tweets.
2. Build a support site that is SEO’d and contains all the questions people ask (support.gymu.com).
3. Find our evangelists and love them.
4. Find our haters and love them more than our own mothers.
5. Do whatever it takes to fix a customer’s problem, even if that means meeting them to give them pre-release code!

I’ll discuss these in a separate post (especially 4!) but the theme I want to get across is ENGAGEMENT – by responding to every email, complaint, concern we’ve not only been able to improve products and see new opportunities but we’ve also earned trust.

Ok, so we’re 500 words into the post and you are probably questioning – what on earth has Customer Service got to do with jumping 50 places in the App Store? The answer is partly “freebies” and party trust – because with trust you avoid looking too stupid when you try this:

Social Media

For a long time we’ve integrated Twitter and Facebook (badly – we don’t use Facebook Connect for historical dev reasons) to enable users to share their fitness progress with their friends and get extra motivation. In exchange there’s the hope that potential customers will become aware of the brand and/or click through to the site/twitter feed. We try to avoid things being a bit one-sided by interacting with those tweets as best we can, but there’s still this feeling “we could be doing more”.

Then it dawned on us:
1. We’d already coded a load of unreleased features we knew the customers want.
2. Many of our customers use twitter and facebook.
3. Any money we’d have made from micropayments (for new features) we’d have put back into ads.

So why not cut out the middle-men and make a sort of “in-app PR” – i.e. new features in exchange for tweets from within the app? Of course, we probably could have used pre-made text like “Hey, buy GymFu – it’s great!” but instead we decided to also allow free-form responses – risky, but important for maximum authenticity

The beauty about this approach is that it’s free – it’s code we already had (mostly), we don’t have to rev share, we don’t have to pay ads etc. The question was, would it work? We had absolutely no idea, but we knew what was critical was to hit everything all at once.

The result: both PushupFu (app store link) and CrunchFu (app store link) [motion-tracking personal trainers - see app store links for more info] jumped up 50 places in the App Store! Sweeeet! (BTW we did also mess with the pricing – I’ll discuss that in the comments if you want).

What could we have done better? Well, we definitely should have built up the hype a bit more – sending out the emails earlier would have hopefully queued people up ready to tweet all at once; had we done that it might have trended on Twitter. We probably should have timed things better for the West Coast users also, as they are our biggest customer area. Finally, we could have avoided annoying a few users by pre-warning them we were about to tweet a LOT – SORRY to all thoses guys who were deleting SMSs as fast as we were tweeting.

It might not even be a sustainable boost (the proof is in the pudding) but the chances are one of you could use this hack very effectively. As for for us, we’re pretty happy – and apart from a nice jump in the raw app sales, a lot of extra people are talking about us now.

We hope you enjoyed that post. For more information why not check out the afor-mentioned promo website here. Failing that, if you are interested in geek fitness have a look at our blog here or follow us on twitter.

Not got one of our apps yet? Don't miss out - get PushupFu, CrunchFu, SquatFu and PullupFu to start improving your health now. You can find out more about them at GymFu.com here.