Application marketing ideas

Question

As I prepare to ship v1.1 of Six to Eight, I'm curious as to what ideas other people might have for Stack Exchange app marketing. How do we reach Stack Exchange users without either annoying them with spammy messages or spending a fortune (or, indeed, anything beyond time).

Six to Eight has been about as successful as I'd hoped so far. I've shipped around 1000 copies: around 450 on the day it first hit the App Store and Jeff tweeted it, 150 when it came 3rd in the SE API competition, then a steady trickle at about 50 new downloads a week. I'm happy, but I think there're more users out there who might like it.

My only real ideas so far are posting on the meta sites, which I've rejected as being too spam like. I guess I could buy Stack Exchange ad space, but I've got no marketing budget for a free app. I like to encourage users to spread the word, especially to the audience on the new Stack Exchanges, but I don't know how.

How are other developers promoting their work, and what can I do to encourage more adoption?

Answer 1

Well, there's always StackList. I intended it to fill the role you just described.

Answer 2

I would break down and buy ad space, and just put an ad or two in your app. But, from experience, DO NOT USE MOBCLIX!!!!! [rant] When I first signed up, they would send you you're money every quarter (regardless of balance, which is why I decided to use them). Then, WITHOUT NOTICE they changed it so you had to have over $100 before they payed you. It took me nearly 6 weeks to fight it, telling them that I never accepted the new terms, but even then, they only gave me what I earned from when I started using them to when they changed the rules, so I only got about $10 instead of the $30. [/rant]

Answer 3

The first thing you should do is to update your SO|SE profile linking and describing Six to eight; learn to sponsor yourself.
Then try to became the new Jon Skeet (Jon has 156106 views on his profile), ok just kidding here.

I think we can't market our apps here on StackApps, we don't have enough audience and this engine, with limited appysh features, can't be our Apps-place (Check my answers here)
In brief:

• StackApp should be improved introducing a well organized stackapp-store section, splitting technical stuff from Apps.

• StackApp should be advertised: the first noob to the oldest guru should know the existence of StackApps. Imho StackApps is currently used by a small small niche of Meta aficionados users that is a small niche of the 200K users of just Stack Overflow. Add a Tools tab to the header, place a big banner..whatever you want. I think a small link on the footer and blog posts are just not enough.

I believe that SOFI has not enough resources, time and interests to build an app-store for our apps.

That said, I have two proposals:

1. Improve the great StackList with full blown domain, sexy layout and massive ads
2. Propose on meta an advertisement bar contest for our Apps

For what it's worth, I've asked a permission for a StackApps sidebar contest on meta:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/67272/is-it-possible-to-have-a-stackapps-advertising-sidebar-contest

Answer 4

I think a banner like the "You have one new response" banner at the top of each site to "advertise" Stacklist as place to find apps would be best. Even if only for 1 day or 2.

I don't see how that is spam, especially as it's not advertising a specific app. In fact I think stacklist should become part of stackexchange in that its got some presence on it.

StackList could be improved by reducing the size of the text as it is you can't see much on screen at once.

Libraries should be in a seperate section, and really more geeky things (i think like StackGuru) should have different section to apps like Six to Eight that are for the end user.

I'm not sure exactly but the checkered dark background just makes the text a little hard to read. Also reducing the size of the header as it serves no real purpose at that size.

The front page should have a recently added list, and a box for the most popular app of a certain time frame.

Also you should be able to select your device/platform and then gets apps based on that, so like Have some columns, Web Browsers and then below that indented Chrome, Firefox etc, Mobile Devices, again below that and indented WebOS, iPhone (iOS) etc.

Also not sure if you can already do this as I haven't submitted anything (yet hopefully) but be able to have users submit bugs/feedback that will show to the developer

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Also i think that if you list your app on StackList you should have a link somewhere relatively visible in your app linking back to StackList, hopefully something not size 2 font right at the bottom of the about page.