Visibility
Knard has been on AppStore, Google Play and Amazon Appshop for 3 weeks now and my parental leave has started. It's time for an early résumé!
When people talk about their awesome indie games, the first thing that'll come up in the discussion is 'visibility'. Will your game/app (even though it's oviously awesome) be found in order to be bought?
I've been doing a lot of PR in the last few weeks. I emailed mum blogs, parents web magazines, parents print magazines (mostly local ones) and my feedback so far has been great. A lot of very nice people have answered my mails, even installed TestFlight and mostly found Knard to be an awesome app. A high percentage even promised to write an article about Knard and thanks to those people Knard got some visibility in the first place.
Lessons learned?
- Someone once told me that it was all about getting apps published quickly (instead of working on them over years when you have no idea how they will be liked by their respective audience). This statement made me (to some extent) doubt my own approach of creating something highly polished in the first place, and I still dont know which is the better way, but i know this much: If you consider visiblity the greatest hurdle, make one polished thing instead of many prototypes. It's much easier to go through the tedious process of writing a hundred emails if you already invested ten times as much in the quality of your app in the first place.
- Don't overlook whole categories. The first 'category' i adressed was mum blogs. The second one was general app 'tickers', and finally after not receiving answers from the two big german familiy magazines, I found that the many smaller local parent magazines where a good idea to address. And many of those (every big city in Germany has its own) answered me.
- Don't try to judge categories. I would have assumed that parent blogs and magzines were most important because their audience would be most likely to actually be interested in Knard. Still, I contacted apps news pages like ifun.de and i was really surprised by the impact they had: being connected with many other apple news ticker pages their news about Knard (which wasn't really enthusiastic and just mentioned that 'nice new children app') was forwared to many other pages and resulted in one day with a peak of 204 sales.
To me, number one is the most precious lesson: Put all your love in what you create and you won't get tired of doing PR, even if you're not the type who likes to adverties your own work. And so far, some nice people's answers have definitly been the most rewarding part of publishing Knard!