App Stores are powerful search engines
I've analyzed all 494 IndieHackers interviews and discovered an unusual number of founders getting paying users from various app stores:
- Shopify App Store:
When we launched on Shopify, sales began to trickle in and have been growing ever since. We've been attracting users in the Shopify app store from the beginning with very little marketing... - Shogun, a drag-and-drop-page builder doing $4.5k/mo
- Slack App Directory:
I was one of the first apps to be a part of the Slack platform when they launched in late 2015, and this drove a lot of users to updown.io (more than 500 active users). - UpDown, a website monitoring service doing $4K/mo
- Chrome Web Store:
...the majority of our growth on the Chrome App Store is organic, driven again by careful selection and placement of target keywords in our app description - SaferVPN, a VPN software doing $20k/mo
The last interview excerpt hints at my main point:
App Stores have incredible search volume
Take Shopify, for example. According to this blog post:
In digging into the data, we found that 60 percent of installs on the app store come from searches, making this a critical discovery surface for merchants.
Or take this official stat from Apple:
If 60% of installs on the Shopify App Store came from searches and 70% of apps on the App Store are discovered via search, what do you think that % is for:
- Chrome Web Store
- Google's Play Store
- Slack App Directory
While I don't have official figures, my guess is that it's larger than 40-50%.
Btw, if you want to receive awesome user acquisition tips like this one each week, feel free to subscribe to my Indie Hackers series:
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We get the majority of our leads through the app store of bexio (the leading online accounting tool in Switzerland) and are now one of their top selling apps. What I learned though - market places are no auto-lead-gen and require a lot of smart marketing tactics! One thing that really helped pushing us forward is connecting + engaging with employees of the partner, so they always have Tresio on top of their mind when talking to their customers. Plus, also connecting a lot with other useful (!) products that are listed and their implementation partners, so we can leverage our offerings by featuring each other on social / blog posts.
Thanks for sharing. I see you appear 2 times on the app store homepage. Does bexio promote their app marketplace to their customers somewhere in their interface?
Not really - in fact they could do much better on that. What they sometimes do (and here comes again the relationship building) is joint webinars with selected partners - this has always lead to tons of signups. And their sales team actively promotes us to new users, if they ask for services their own product could not provide.
Nice, that's really interesting. Probably harder to do with bigger players like Shopify, but definitely something achievable with "smaller" platforms.
Yes- we will try to copy and apply everything we learned with some bigger player(s) soon - I will share the learnings we make along the journey.
We get the majority of our leads from the Slack and Google Workspaces app stores. We've also leaned pretty heavily into these integrations as a major selling point of our SaaS (e.g. booking time off by writing to our slackbot). The flipside seems to be that channels like AdWords perform really poorly for us - my hypothesis is that those that care about a tool with an integration for a specific platform will tend to search on that app store, and thus those that search on Google tend to be the ones that don't care about integrations, who we then don't have as strong a value proposition for.
Interesting, are you talking about Hrvey? Curious if you've interviewed users coming from those 2 channels (Slack & Google Workplaces) on how they found you initially on those channels (either via search, or them proactively searching for something on Google, etc.)
Yep, this is really huge. Working on this myself for my product, after a handful of my existing users had mentioned: "you know, it'd be really useful if I could just configure things via an app in Airtable"
If you can think of a way that your product can bring value to users of another platform, it's really a no brainer.
These app marketplaces get heavy targeted traffic and if they're already opening up their wallet for the host app, I'd bet they'd be more willing to open up their wallets for yours too. Seeing your app in the marketplace conveys trust, and that's one of the biggest friction points for getting a new customer to pay.
Interesting! What app stores are you currently working on?
@dare0505 yes.
I remember reading about QuoraGuard, for example, having success with a lot of dev "marketplaces":
Do you think this principle applied to "smaller" app stores as well (like the Github Marketplace)?
Oops, commented separately instead of hitting reply. In short, yes.
Download Popular and Game mod Apk from Apk Pockets.
If your idea fits in these models (data processing/information handling), or you can lead with some form of app, I think you can cut out a huge chunk of work around marketing/copy/support/onboarding in the early days. Not only do they unlock access to engaged potential customers (which this post speaks to), they give you a lot of rails to build on.
Instead of having to build a lot of infrastructure to support users, you can move very quickly to having a product out and working.
I've been exploring something on the side and am excited to try and lead with a Hubspot app where I don't have to expend as much effort up front, and can focus on delivering the value I think I can offer.
...that said, they own the rails so you'd probably want to diversify off when you can!
Thanks for the insight. I run the solitaire website - https://online-solitaire.com/ - and I think I might try to create a Slack app and maybe even an Amazon app of it. Any other suggestions on which stores/marketplaces I could release my solitaire game on?
So interesting. Hadn't thought about this approach.
When it comes to marketing all the noise you hear is around socials and email (for a reason). But there is really a ton of other avenues out there!
Are there any good resources like blog posts, people to follow on Twitter, etc, that focus on building products as plugins or apps for marketplaces?
Would love to dive into some recommended reading.
I think the Huawei App Gallery app store holds a lot of potential, it is free to create an account but does require lots of personal information
Is it because Huawei phones can't use Google's Play Store?
Yes, it has been nearly two years I think since Google and Huawei had to cut ties.
Surprisingly, the Amazon App Store helped me a lot when I started, because I was there when it started :-)
So timing, and being there when a store is young, is an important thing (You can of course find it with YouTube as well, and other services)
The Google Play store gave me the most, as a few apps got more than 1 million downloads, including one that got more than 10 million. It's not only the search engine, it's also the powerful tools such as intuitive A/B testing of your app's page, something that no other store has (Apple just released their, and it's not as comfy)
Curious how you found the Amazon App Store in the first place. Do you have any tips for finding 'young' app stores?
There was an article of some sort, and I gave it a chance. You don't "find" them, but if you come across an opportunity, maybe it's going to be worth a while being one of the early adopters (E.g. Fiverr, Bitcoin, Udemy...) It's a bet.
Slightly off-topic but I had a similar experience with my first app and getting installs, I got around 100 from Google Play but on the Amazon app store I gained well over 1000 installs in the same time period, presumably the majority came from searches or Amazon's recommendations as I never paid for advertising. I had a small banner ad in the app and made a small amount of money from that.
Cool
Now I'm running an APP --Hai at Applestore and Googleplay, so far i gained 2 installs from both, did I missed something to gain more users
Nice! What was the name of the app that got installs on the Amazon app store?
Whack-a-monkey, it was a dumb game, just made from a tutorial.
https://www.amazon.com/Progressive-App-Developing-Studios-Whack-a-Monkey/dp/B07C83Z91B/
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/REInVent650/shared-pictures/main/whamazon.png this shows installs since 2019 which is when Amazon revamped their dashboard I had 500+ installs from 2018 not showing in the picture
Really interesting. Thanks for sharing the stats.
Curious how are people discovering these app stores in the first place.
Shopify promotes its app store across merchants. It's also inbound, I think. For eg, millions of people use Chrome and have needs that naturally arise as they keep using the browser regularly.