How to Get Over 10,000 App Downloads in Less Then a Week With No Marketing Spend

Appstem Co-founder and Founder of 2020CV Inc, Hart Woolery launched his new iOS app, InstaSaber last week. With no marketing spend at all, he has already reached over 10,000 downloads. His app hit #3 on Product Hunt, has been picked up by a numerous media outlets including the evening news, Digital Trends and has even had international coverage. 2020CV Inc is a company that produces augmented reality experiences using Machine Learning and Computer Vision. We caught up with Hart to see how he’s had so much buzz about his app with no budget.

Appstem: What is InstaSaber?

Hart: InstaSaber is an AR app for iPhone that turns a piece of rolled up paper into a virtual saber. It utilizes Machine Learning and Apple’s CoreML library to predict the location of the paper.

Appstem: When did you launch the app? How many downloads so far?

Hart: The app was published January 3rd around noon PST. In the six days since, the app has a little over 10k downloads, with about 40% US, 40% China, followed by France, Japan, and the UK.

Appstem: How did you publicize / market the app?

Hart: In December, I released a demo of the video which made the front page of Reddit. This helped me gain about 2.5k email subscribers who wished to be notified of the release. On the day of the release, I posted the app to Product Hunt, and the next day the cofounder of Product Hunt found it and helped boost it to the #3 app of the day.

Appstem: How much money have you spent on marketing? What worked?

Hart: I haven’t spent any money promoting the app to date, so I can’t offer much insight on paid marketing, but in terms of organic growth, what really helps the most is getting influencers on Twitter / Product Hunt / Reddit to share your work. In my case, I have the fortune of working with Mark Cuban, who can help spread the word in a single retweet.

Appstem: I saw some news outlets picked it up, how did they hear about the app?

Hart: I haven’t contacted or been contacted by any news outlets yet (other than Digital Trends on the day of the Reddit post). I’m guessing most of the recent articles and videos have found the app either through Product Hunt or Twitter.

Appstem: Any recommendations on how to market an app on a budget?

Hart: I was actually advised *against* paying for any marketing at this early stage. My advisor said it would be better to gather feedback, improve the app, and then promote at a later time when things were more refined. Like I mentioned above, the best ways to spread the word are to have people with great social media presence post your work, but getting them to do so unprovoked (or via solicitation) can be challenging. Ultimately, when the time comes for paid promotion, it’s more important to have effective marketing than lots of it. Your product has to be interesting enough such that your costs to acquire users is ideally much less than your average return per user. That way, you can easily scale your marketing efforts up, and not take a hit to your bottom line. In this day and age, I believe Facebook and Instagram are the most effective platforms (in the US) to advertise a consumer product, but I’m yet to put that to test.

Download the InstaSaber App (it’s free). If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our mobile app development company in San Francisco today!