Ted Nash had worked on two applications already and they were a success. He had the idea of an application named AppDaq when he was fourteen. AppDaq is a stock exchange game that would allow the users to trade virtual shares of some of the most successful downloads of App Store. After the first two applications, Ted wanted to work with people closer to home for AppDaq, as he thought the application could succeed if he had more control. Ted, started working on his application with Floxx.

Dan, the CTO and Co-Founder of Floxx had made the prototype very quickly. Throughout the development, they came up with several new features. The main launch was, however, delayed as the development resources stretched.

Changes that Ted feels, he should have done in the course of the project

Committing Dedicated Resource

He felt that he should have set up a committed and dedicated resource rather than just allocating close people.

Involving With The Decisions In Development

He believes that from a marketer’s point of view, it is better to understand the product much better. The meeting helps find interesting areas to hook the customers in.

Mistakes at the end of the creation

At the end of the creation, there were several mistakes that cost them a lot. Most important of them were

• They pushed it to Apple when they thought they were stable.
• The first submission was rejected for violation 8.5 guidelines of Apple as it had other apps within the app.

Prelaunch Techniques

• The team created an attractive splash page to easily and quickly get the reviews of early BETA users.
• They got initial traction by generating hundreds of signups.
• A number of attractive banners were generated.
• The team created a press kit and a product page with screenshots. There was a press release, an icon of various sizes and a little bit of information about Ted and Floxx.
• Localized app description for various languages like Spanish, Italian, French and Russian was created.
• Youtube attracts a lot of traffic and capturing the attention of the reviewers on youtube could be a good promotion. So, the team identified reviewers on YouTube and reached out to them personally after the launch.
• The teams harvested Facebook ID’s connected to closed groups and fan pages.
• They also put app review sites that the users can their URL to get back the promotional offers.

Ted had mentions setup for Appdaq and it started to flood. This made them realize they were out in the market. Having known about this issue Rich proposed to perform a live test on the algorithm. For a few hours, the app had gone live and became an old news.

Apart from the pre-launch, there were also other problems like uploading the test certificate instead of a production certificate.

As the app went live, all the pre-launch activities kicked into place;

• The press release took place.
• Download of the AppDaq application was by the BETA signups.
• To generate early reviews Ted sent a cross-promotional traffic.
• Social announcements took place.
• The application links were sent to many YouTube reviewers.
• A number of posts were created on application based forums.

No Attention

As the app was launched earlier, the app aggregators did not pick up their app and the team did not get any benefit from the early/free publicity within these apps.

No bigger publications or medium sized blogs wrote about them. The following could have been the reasons:

• They had become an old news.
• Their product was not on the wishlist of the users.
• Poor press release.
• The team did not add value to the audience
• The team was not newsworthy.

Post-Launch

The beginning was good with good reviews and download. But after some time the team did not want to proceed. Ted wanted the product to expand, but he wasn’t ready to pay £20,000 for the development fees. He offered to pay £5,000 up front and give 50% of the revenue till the cost was settled. Floxx did not accept the deal and kept the Appdaq for his company. Later Floxx shut for a little while.

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Four things Ted learned

Ted has learned a few things from this experience.

• He feels he should have been more up front that the game will need iteration and won’t make $1,000,000 in a single night.
• The disjoint strategy cost them when they prematurely launched the application.
• Many review sites did not reply or consider about the product because of the different messages.
• He feels he should have been more transparent with open communication.

This journey gave him, Dan and Nate, whom Ted could consult for his new project TapDaq.