Quick two liner about us – we are a design driven development company specializing in web and mobile apps. We have a product division which is currently our learning playground on cutting edge technology, and we use what we learn there while servicing our clients. Some of our successful products are Extragram (pulled down last week), iPanchangam and Screeny.
Why Screeny?
As app designers/developers, we ended up taking a lot of screenshots and all those pesky screenshots were a pain to delete. Point to note here – each screenshot is about 4mb+, and most screenshots are one use wonders(forget an app developer, people like me take screenshots of air tickets so that no time is wasted hunting for emails), so if you forget to delete them, they occupy a lot of space. While it is quite easy to delete them on Android(they get categorized under a folder in Gallery), on the iPhone, they go and occupy space in your Camera Roll. With the launch of iOS 8, Apple opened up a few of the sandboxed APIs and the Camera Roll was one of those. We wanted to experiment with Swift and the newly opened APIs and this problem seemed a good problem to solve, and we got started.
Screeny, when it launched was a paid app, and it did just one thing, and did that very well – it helped you delete screenshots from your iPhone/iPod easily.
The image below will give you a vague idea of the kind of success we achieved during launch (first 2-3 days).
Overall, we reached the Top 10 charts in over 20 countries and Top 20 charts in over 30 countries.
What did we do?
- We were nice to people, and that paid off 🙂
- Pitched shamelessly (closely tied to the point above)
- We used our promo-codes intelligently
- We wrote to people asking them to try our app (Tip: be normal, not cheesy)
- We wrote about how the app will help them (so that they even bother to try)
- We were active on social media, people feel connected somehow
- Made sure the sharing option inside your app has a nice image associated with it. This is what we used
and when people shared, this is what people got to see
Also, like I mentioned earlier, solving a pain point and asking nicely helps 🙂 We got featured in MacStories (Screeny Lets You Easily Delete All Your Screenshots on iOS 8), The Verge (Screeny is the screenshot-deleting iPhone app we have wanted all our lives), Beautiful Pixels (Screeny — Delete Screenshots With Ease) and many others.
A lot of people would consider this as success, and we certainly did think so 🙂
Also, like I mentioned earlier, all this was achieved with a zero marketing budget!
Note:
- The app is free currently, we are adding a few features which will come out as in app purchases.
- The purpose of this post isn’t to promote Screeny, but to let people know that “asking nicely” and “being shameless” really helps, and that’s something people shy away from quite often.
- I’ve skipped hyperlinking the various articles that came out – didn’t want the article to look spammy, but happy to share in case someone asks.
Twitter handle: @narayananh
asha chaudhry
hey narayanan,
this is cool. thanks for sharing 🙂
btw – we encourage rodinhooders to showcase their new products/apps/ventures so i’ve actually shifted your post to showcase! 🙂
pls add your twitter handle at the end so i can mention you while sharing this over social.
Narayanan Hariharan
Doing that rightaway!
Vikas Jagetiya
Can you elaborate more on “being shameless” to promote your app?
Sachin Bhatnagar
Superb. That is a great insight. All the Best 🙂
Sudev kk
Beautiful is what this is!. Thanks for sharing.
Narayanan Hariharan
Of course. So here’s what we did – we made a really long list of top journalists who write about apps in general and iOS in particular, the likes of Federico Viticci, Preshit Deorukhkar and Casey Newton. Wrote to all of them without wondering whether they would read or not(that’s the being shameless part!). In some cases we sent emails the moment we saw them tweet, and followed up with a tweet mentioning the email. Also, the email contained text that didn’t sound spammy. Wrote about the problem and how they would benefit. In addition, wherever possible, we gave them a free code to use the app without paying. The moment they used the app and realized the amount of space they ended up saving, the articles started coming, first a trickle, but by the end of the second day, once the biggies wrote about us and started tweeting, every Tom, Dick and Harry wanted to write about us 🙂
Narayanan Hariharan
Thanks Sachin!
Narayanan Hariharan
Thanks Sudev!
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
just be shameless. Got it chief! helps!!
CONGRATS TOO
Are you in touch with the iTunes team to promote this or at least know of this? Need help?
Narayanan Hariharan
Thanks Alok!
Soon after we hit the top charts, we did get in touch with the iTunes team to see if we could get listed under the “Made in India” category, but didn’t get any response.
Any help in this regard would be great 🙂
Ananthakrishnan V S
If it’s not too big of a secret,could you elaborate on your revenue model,and the revenue the app returns now.
Anyways ,
Awesome Job!