Our journey to 15 top paid navigation apps

[Gammapoint]

I would like to share our story with this great Mobile Portland Group.

Last year in July I had sent an email about the release of Extra Mile
App. Soon Apple featured us in New and Noteworthy section of
Navigation apps. We thought now we are going to hit the

market. But within a few weeks number of downloads started going down.
We thought we need a good marketing strategy and write-ups on
prominent blog websites. If Apple could find this app to be worthy of
including in New and Noteworthy section, bloggers will find it too.

I started emailing bloggers highlighting Extra Mile app features.
Everyday I will check my inbox with high hopes to hear back from at-
least one of them. But no one replied back. It was disappointing to
see that how various developers in the similar field were getting
talked about by all these mainstream tech sector news and blog
websites. We realized that its not easy to break into this without
contacts and big marketing budget.

But we were confident that there was demand for this kind of product.
We kept iterating and working on the next versions. We listened to our
loyal user base. Now we completely stopped our marketing campaign and
begging the blog websites for a writeup. We decided rather to devote
our time and energy to get media attention, we should put it in making
a better product.

After almost 9 months of hard-work we got into top 15 paid navigation
apps category. And yesterday we saw that Readwriteweb has added
ExtraMile App into 6 different kind of navigation apps list. This was
without 0 marketing efforts from our end.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/6-navigation-apps-that-go-the-extra-mile.php

All Appstore statistics and analytics state that it is almost
impossible to compete with big app development companies. But from our
experience what we have learned is if you make a good product, listen
to your customers you will get there.

If anyone is interested to check the app, here is the link:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/extra-mile-voice-navigation/id439589978?mt=8

Thanks for reading...

-Teena Jain



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gammapoint <jainte...@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 7 2011, 3:38 pm
Subject: Extra Mile - A Mileage/Gas Expense Tracking and Driving
Analysis iPhone app
To: Mobile Portland


We just released an iPhone app, Extra Mile, to track gas expenses
and driving habits. Extra Mile is different from other gas related
apps as it has Calendar View which shows the gas expenses on a
Calendar and it also tracks how you are driving. By analyzing the bar
chart of the driving pattern, you can improve your driving skills.
With only one tap, you can start tracking and logging your trip
details.

Here is the link to Extra Mile app:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/
extra-mile/id439589978?mt=8

[jonathan karon]

Teena,

Huge congratulations! I'm glad the time and effort have paid off for you.

I've had a similar experience with low-budget releases -- the most reliable PR strategy seems to be making something awesome and giving it time to percolate. People will notice if it's worth talking about.

~jonathan
----
Jonathan Karon, Tappister
+1 503.567.2778

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[Bental Wong]

Teena - congrats and I'lld definitely check out your app!  Thanks so much for sharing your experience.  We just launched a website/mobile apps to take on the problem of fake reviews.  I sent out a press release via PRLOG and also sent to various bloggers earlier this week.  It's good to hear about the challenges that may lie ahead.

Folks - please check out our website: http://www.kangareports.com.
Link to press release: http://prlog.org/11847289

Bental

--

Bental Wong

Kanga Mobile Technology LLC

Cell: 503-621-7418

 

[Mike Westby]

Teena,

Congratulations to you and your team, and thanks for sharing your news.  A Top 15 rating is a huge success!

I'm fortunate to have four apps consistently in the Top 100 of the Paid Travel category, and, aside from leveraging a well known brand, I'd have to say the two most important marketing tools I use are 1) Building a rapport with targeted bloggers and 2) www.PRMac.com.  I started out by tapping into about 50 different paid ($49 - $500) and free PR sites, but in measuring results, I found PRMac.com consistently outperformed every other PR site and generated a very solid ROI...at only $20 per press release.  (Full Disclosure: I'm not involved with PRMac.com in any manner.  In fact, I even butt heads with the owner now and again because we'll differ in PR opinions, but I have to admire his passion for his business.)  I tend to issue a press release on a Friday morning to capture the higher traffic of the weekend and I will see a very solid ROI on the $20 cost.  More importantly, plenty of bloggers pick it up and repost it on the web, thus generating more long-term search results, links, discovery and revenue.

I do think it would make for a good Mobile Portland meeting to have an open forum on the marketing and sales tips, tricks and efficiencies we've all learned along the way.  I met up with Patrick Thompson, Founder of Inkstone here, in Portland, a while back for this very type of conversation and a one hour meeting easily turned into two with all the information we shared.

Mike Westby

TimeStream Software

Mike Westby

Mike....@TimeStream-Software.com

2828 SW Corbett Ave.   Ste 140B

Portland, OR  97201

Cell: 503-709-2896

[teena jain]

Thanks everyone!

I am glad this has started a conversation about the important but mysterious  and hidden strategies of app rankings. It will definitely be a good idea to discuss at the next Mobile Portland Group meeting.

-Teena

Sent from my iPhone

[Jason Grigsby]

This sounds like a good topic to me.

Jason Grigsby
+1 (503) 290-1090 o
+1 (503) 502-7211 m
ja...@cloudfour.com
http://cloudfour.com

[Audrey Whitfield MacKenzie]

Great to hear the dialogue and congrats to Teena on their great success. It is impressive. I know how talented their team is. As a programmer turned marketer I just have to clarify one point Teena made that creates a false notion here and that is that marketing doesn't include listening to customers. In fact I would have to say the #1 marketing task is to listen to your customer and keep an open line of communication with them at all times. If you don't do that you'll go no where. Just standing up for the marketer here....

-Audrey