Cloud Quantity Surveyor
An app for building surveyors to record measurements
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December 4, 2020
Launched international version on Google Play
Created a version in a language different than English to test the app in a smaller subset of users, but to achieve growth an English version is obviously necessary. Used Flutter's internationalization tools to translate the mobile (Android) app on the fly, based on user locale.
7 Comments
Hey @okergo . May I know the other language you created the app in?
For growth, have you tried approaching the engineering firms directly? I might be wrong here, industries which used to paper intensive see the benefit of going mobile but the adoption rate is slow. It's still a work in progress I guess.
You could find the person you want to talk to on LinkedIn maybe and then send them a very personalised letter about the application. Why a personalised letter? Because the cold email might go unnoticed and be classified as another cold email/spam etc. The personalised letter will be a nice human touch.
Maybe I wrong about all this :)
Hi @Nakkeeran thanks for the advice. We started it in Greek (I am in London, but my friend is based in Greece) and have around 400 users at the moment. Just launched the English version for the other 151 or so countries on Google Play Store. Yes, our current approach is basically scraping emails of engineering firms, creating a newsletter-like list (with Yet Another Mail Merge) and cold-emailing them with a link to the YouTube demo of the app, a description of what it is meant to help with and a link to download it from Play Store obviously.
So far using the cold email approach, we are getting email open rates of about 35% and click rates of 6.5%.
The personalized LinkedIn approach is also interesting.
The problem I think is if the only monetization method is ads, you probably need thousands and thousands of users to make anything significant. We were also thinking about a potential freemium model with more advanced features later on. At the moment it is more of a side project made available for free and ad-supported.
Thanks for the reply @okergo . Wow 400 users is just amazing! That is seriously some good work.
Are most of 400 users from cold emailing? The open rates and click through looks good too.
I listened to this podcast by Laura Lopuch this morning and there are really great tips about cold emailing. We know most of it but fail to recognise why it's important. Worth listening to https://pod.salesforfounders.com/episode/how-to-write-cold-emails-that-get-results-with-laura-lopuch
Thanks for the podcast link, we'll check it out.
Yes, around 400 just from cold-emailing.
Scraping emails from Google and using mailing software to mail them all and track open and click rates.
Well, 30-40 is like personal contacts. We also have a Facebook group and post in other groups there too.
I think YouTube might be another growth avenue, posting demos or tutorials of your product there.
That's awesome. You have a niche audience so hyperfocusing on reaching them through various channels is a good idea.
Out of curiosity may I know which mailing software you used? How was the experience?
Hey sorry just saw this. We used this to schedule mailing campaigns: https://yet-another-mail-merge.com/
It has some limitations though, up to 400 emails per day etc. And sometimes they end up in spam, also it cannot detect invalid emails etc.
I would recommend looking into something like mailchimp for a more professional solution, depending on budget obv
Besides https://mailchimp.com/, https://www.mailjet.com/ and https://buttondown.email/ are also options. If you want to launch a paid newsletter that people can subscribe too, might want to look at https://substack.com/ too.