Ep 02: How To Get Your First 10,000 Users

1BUZINGA APP DEVELOPMENT
Hey guys, Logan Merrick here and
you’re listening to episode 2 of The
Buzinga Podcast:
The number 1 resource for startups
building and growing their business
in the tech space.

Logan Merrick:
I’m the co-founder and director of
Buzinga.

Customer Acquisition Strategies - how you can pull customers in to get
a steady stream of app downloads.
I want to talk about some of the biggest and most successful apps in the
world, with millions of active users. But I’m going to focus on how they got
their first 10,000 users.
Intro to what we’re covering today

• Angry Birds
• Uber
• Tinder
• Yo
• Snapchat
• Instagram
• Candy Crush
• Fruit Ninja
Businesses we’re going to look at

Most businesses have humble beginnings
We’re going to start with how they got their first 10,000 app downloads
Why I chose this topic for our
2nd episode

• Initially it was a total flop - or at least for the first 3
months
• Where they went wrong: Focused on the most
competitive and (traditionally perceived as lucrative)
English speaking markets
1. Angry Birds

Founder Matt Wilson started targeting
smaller nations
• Suddenly they started seeing results - #1 on Finnish App Store
• Then 30-40,000 downloads from hitting #1 in Sweden
• Then Denmark, Greece, Czech Republic…
1. Angry Birds

• Then the founders linked up with app publisher, Chillingo to push into US
and UK territories (90% of market)
• In 2010 Chillingo got Apple to feature Angry Birds on front page of UK App
Store - game of the week
The rest is history!
1. Angry Birds

(Summary) What worked
Targeted smaller nations first - low hanging fruit. Then pushed into bigger
nations through publishing partnership.
1. Angry Birds

• Initially launched in 2010 - Silicon Valley, Uber
Black only. Built on $200,000 seed capital.
• Released UberX to open up to larger audience
2. Uber

• 2013 aggressively leveraging tech networks to get first drivers onboard
• Started offering free rides to students during Boston bus worker strike
• End of 2013 Uber had expanded from 12 cities to 35 cities. Revenues
growing by 18% per month.
2. Uber

Co-founders leveraged their networks in the startup tech scene to spread the
word around San Francisco. - Offered free rides. Raised $1.25m
2. Uber

3. Tinder

3. Tinder
Leveraged network effect (hyper-local viral growth)

3. Tinder
They targeted American college sorority girls as early adopters.
Why?
Because the more girls that would come the more boys would be drawn to it.

3. Tinder
Viral growth = imminent.
100% growth year on year

3. Tinder
How?
Free events and parties. Incentives!

3. Tinder
(Summary) What worked:
Identified their early adopters. Attracted them with special incentives.

4. Yo
• Yo is stupidly simple.And not necessarily a
successful business…
• Raised $1.5m at $10m evaluation… not sure
if it eventuated into anything.

4. Yo
• Created in 8 hours at Israeli Tech Company – Mobli
• Founders Hogeg and Arbel were so embarassed they didnt tell anyone
about it and wouldn’t publish it under their names.

4. Yo
• Launched quietly on April Fools Day.
• BUT… it was rejected by Apple.
• Arbel and Hogeg fought back and eventually got it through into the App
Store.

4. Yo
Founders eventually shared the app with wife’s
and assistant. Then made it available to all Mobli
employees - emplored them not to share with
friends…

4. Yo
But the app was impossible to contain. People
became addicted.

4. Yo
Within a month, 20,000 downloads iwthin Tel
Aviv..

4. Yo
Simple, simple, simple. Launched through the company they worked for.

5. SnapChat
• Nearly everyone knows SnapChat.
• Viral marketing - Word Of Mouth

5. SnapChat
• They noticed spikes of traffic between 8am and 3pm.
• Turns out the activity was centered around a high school in Orange
County.
• Evan Spiegel (founder) had told his cousin who was a student at the
school…

5. SnapChat
Other high schools caught on to it. Daily active
users climbed from 3,000-30,000 in a month.

5. SnapChat
Snapchat wasn’t exclusive to iPhones. Also
available on iPod touch which is popular among
younger generations with hand-me-downs.

5. SnapChat
Rapid growth through schools gave SnapChat a
platform for expansion
• We all know what the kids were sending each other.

5. SnapChat
Reviewed their data to better understand where their customers were
coming from. Luckily they were exposed to the high school. Exposing your
business/service/app to different demographics can quickly tell you where to
focus your time.

6. Instagram
Famed for becoming #1 photo
sharing app within 8 hours of launch

6. Instagram
In first week Instagram had been downloaded
100,0000 times
• Another week passed and another 100,000 downloads
• in 551 days Instagram userbase had grown to 30,000,000 users.

6. Instagram
Attributes their fast growth to linking in with other
social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and
Foursquare

6. Instagram
This allowed Instagram to be exposed to
thousands of people who wouldn’t normally have
seen it - 100% organically.

6. Instagram
Check out our Case-study in the show notes

6. Instagram
Leveraging other networks and platforms. Essentially, partnerships.

7. Candy Crush
Built in virality...

7. Candy Crush
Remember
Virality is not a strategy - but ‘encouraged social sharing’ most certainly is

7. Candy Crush
Cleverly integrated with Facebook to drive user
adoption

7. Candy Crush
Players progress in the game - Candy Crush would
post updates to FB on their behalf

7. Candy Crush
They also show user progression with friends. This
fostered competition among friends resulting in
sharing of achievements, friendly banter outside of
the game, and of course pushed them to play the
game harder.

7. Candy Crush
Lastly, if players run out of lives they can either
wait for 20 minutes...or they can invite friends to
the game. What do you think people did?

7. Candy Crush
Social sharing and social competition drove the
virality loop.

8. Fruit Ninja

8. Fruit Ninja
Developed by Independant Australian Game Studio - Half
Brick House
• Also responsible for Jet Pack Joy Ride, Monster Dash, Radical Rappelling,
Age of Zombies and Colossatron...and many more.
• Fruit Ninja was the game that put the company on the radar

8. Fruit Ninja
How did they get the game off the ground?

8. Fruit Ninja
Pushed the game to the developer community -
developer community is an extremely engaged
community. Incredibly helpful and look after their own.
Many developers do work for free to contribute to the
community.

8. Fruit Ninja
First launch video was the Lead in a banana suit
fighting a ninja

8. Fruit Ninja
Pretty amateur. Not for mainstream - but worked
for developer community
• This was very unusual for a game development company at this time...but
it worked

8. Fruit Ninja
They targeted the developer community as their launching platform. Created
a video to stir some laughter among their peers.

Hope you take something out of this

Remember
There are plenty of ways to market your product, and these are 8 really
great ways that have been proven to work.

If you’re going to use these strategies
& tactics make sure to adapt them to
2016.

If you want to learn more about marketing and user acquisition then check
out our blog, i’ve included 3 relevant blogs in the show notes for this
episode, which you can find on our blog at buzinga.com.au/buzz.
Launch Hack: How To Get 100,000 downloads in a month
Customer Acquisition: How to reel in your first 10,000 users
How To Build An App Born To Go Viral Like Candy Crush

For more of this please subscribe on
iTunes, on Youtube or on our blog.

See you on the next episode

Ep 02: How To Get Your First 10,000 Users

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