How to climb the app charts
It was 2015. Hardly any new apps had seen movement to the top of the charts, but a new app called musical.ly got there with now over 100 million users.
What is even more amazing is a Chinese team created this app, and their entire market is in the US. How were they able to do this?
Below is based on a conversation between Josh Elman from Greylock Partners and Alex Zhu of musical.ly:
Make compelling content creation super simple
The whole idea behind musical.ly is to easily use music clips and allow users to put a video of themselves lip synching or dancing to the music clip. They focused their product in enabling content creation to be as simple as possible to be done in seconds — milliseconds.
The secret beauty of their product is they helped make the user look better. Who doesn’t want to sing like Katie Perry? All they need to do is provide the dance moves. On top of that, the videos are inherently viral — just like baby videos, you want to share them.
If you make content creation super simple, then you can focus on the sharing and virality side — enabling the content to get out easily.
Exploit growth hacks
In the consumer world, many admired companies grew from being aggressive and some borderline unethical. Facebook famously obtained email lists from Harvard. LinkedIn built an aggressive email importer that caused many people to “spam” their contacts. However, if neither of them were aggressive, arguably, they would not have gotten to where they are today.
Two growth hacks musical.ly exploited were:
- AppStore naming. They figured out that the AppStore search algorithm weighed the title a lot more than the actual keywords. So they had about a 20 word title with as many keywords as possible. Since then, this hack has been closed.
- Attribution. They were finding out that people were sharing their lip synch videos on Instagram. It wasn’t until they put an attribution “@[handle] musical.ly” that they saw real growth.
Use the external zeitgeist
Lip Synch Battle. musical.ly also found that their search for the app was the highest after the popular show Lip Synch Battle. They used this to their advantage and put it in the title so people could find it. They used the popularity of the show to market the app and tied it into their app.
Instagram. musical.ly also used existing popular social media to distribute their content. They made it easy to share on the most popular platforms. Everyone wants to build a platform and “own the user”, meaning they want to be the Facebook of apps, but in the mobile consumer environment, it is hard to get the growth you need in the amount of time by not integrating with existing social platforms.
We learned this early on at Kabam when we were called Watercooler. We emailed a bunch of people: friends, family, and targeted leads; however, the most effective was when we went to Facebook.
If the users won’t come to you, go to where the users are.
Offer unique opportunities
How they grew was that they needed to offer something that could not be obtained in mature platforms.
They offered three things:
- Dead simple content creation that did not require too much thought
- The content creation made creators look good
- An eco-system that allowed them to rise and be recognized in a way the mature platforms could not.
Alex likened it to attracting people from a developed country to move to a developing country. It is also a similar analogy of attracting people from the corporate world to the startup world. You must provide unique opportunities they could not get elsewhere.
This is exactly how America was founded. The first immigrants to America left Britain (a developed country) for America (a developing country). The main attraction was fleeing religious persecution, but persecution aside, many political and economic opportunities compared to their status back home.
Bonus: Coordinate spend and marketing efforts
This was not done at musical.ly but something that the gaming industry has pushed forward , which is coordinating spend and marketing efforts.
Because of the difficulties of getting users or discover for your mobile app, it is expensive, and usually, you get very few shots. Make the few shots count. Therefore, many gaming companies will make a three-pronged approach: spend money on marketing, PR push and any offline events they can work around — it could be an event that ties into theirs.
Finding symbiotic events, partners and synergies is always better than trying to do it alone. It’s always better to tack your marketing activities with other events happening in the zeitgeist. Much like musical.ly did with Lip Synch Battle and what Kabam does with the Marvel movies and their game Marvel: Contest of Champions. It’s a missed opportunity that could have you trying to sell ice cream during the winter.
Remember when it comes to distribution — use the buddy system.
While growth of a mobile consumer app is incredibly challenging to find growth in the mature mobile markets, musical.ly found away through these simple steps. Simple, but extremely difficult.
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I am the co-founder and Chief Development Officer of Kabam, these perspectives are my own and do not necessarily represent Kabam.