10 tips market your app to geeks..total cost $0 [kwiqq]

Posted on | September 2, 2008 | View Comments

It’s true when geeks say a good app (application) markets itself. i.e. One geek discovers it and tells their other geek mates through del.icio.us, stumble upon or the very reliable email service.

The question which arises is how will someone discover your app in the first place ? How many geeks need to be informed to get 10,000 to 100,000 other geeks ? This is where marketing comes in handy. A few tips we think might help pushing apps out there.  Emphasis here is to not spend a penny on marketing. Don’t spend a penny on something you deserve

1) setup a blog. If you can’t be asked to customize it, no problem, use one of the thousand themes available free (resource). You don’t even need to host it: use sites like wordpress.com, blogger.com, blog.com etc.

2) make a twitter account for your app. Update the progress of the apps development.

3) geeks tend to be critical about stuff other geeks build. So it’s worth taking their advice on board. Join a mailing list of your university computer science group and tell them the stuff you are building. Local geek groups can also come in handy.

4) focus on building the app. Your main aim at this point should not be raising funding. I see many statups who left their stable jobs and spend a good 2-3 months looking funding. Very bad idea! Build and promote till the application is ready.

5) figure out where does your target demographic hang out ! Is your site for a niche ? If it’s for everyone ( like most sites are ) can you find a group of people most likely to adopt it. This is vital you can not target entire market at once. So segment the target market into groups.. hit them one by one.

6) once you have identified your niche make it clear, the site is for them. This is often done by choosing an appropriate tag line. Dopplr (frequent business travellers) – not all travelers just frequent travelers. Similarly: geeks travellers who love hiking, weight concious girl geeks…

7) screenshots. Geeks are visual peple it’s a pity that some blogs don’t have any screeshots of what has been built. Words are good, pictures are fantastic, video is bliss, the actual app is nirvana.
on identifying your target audience make sure to invest time in which blogs they read. Add them to your RSS aggregator and occasionally post useful comments to contribute to these blogs.

9) community: you need to start building a community around your product. Some of it comes from your blog. It maybe wise to allow people to enter their email address to be notified when the application is ready.

10) Please note this may cost you money..you might be a programmer and building the cleverist bit of code but if you can’t present it your app adoption will not reflects it’s true potential. Hence get a designer involved as soon as possible. This also includes your logo/branding. A well designed logo makes you more convincing and inspires confidence.

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