Reaching 10M Downloads, And The Guerrilla Marketing Tactics We Used To Get There
The day my app (AutoCAD WS) crossed one million downloads on the App Store, the first question that crossed my mind was how did I ever end up doing marketing? I was a techy product manager and never imagined myself in marketing, until my app was in a life or death situation. The startup I co-founded (which was later acquired by Autodesk) developed a CAD B2B app for engineers. After launching our product, we started marketing it by the book – crafting our positioning and working with a PR agency to approach bloggers. This didn’t work. We went at it a second and third time – tweaking our positioning and web site once again, adding more product features and writing to more bloggers. Didn’t work – again. I gradually came to an understanding that when competing with hundreds of thousands of other apps for attention, marketing is not just another ingredient in an app’s success. It’s the main one. We were a small team with a very limited marketing budget, so we declared war the only way we ...