It has been 7 months since we started Oceanhouse Media. The challenges that we face today are not the ones that I would have predicted. Back in January, I would have guessed our three biggest challenges to be…
1) Constructing a fast production pipeline
2) Securing good licenses
3) Building a large enough team
Fortunately, these have not been an issue. The universe has provided great answers/solutions/people for all three.
So, you might ask yourself, “What are the biggest problems for Oceanhouse Media today?” Well, it turns out that the iPhone app market is getting crowded even faster than we had predicted. When we started OM there were about 10,000 apps in the App Store. There are currently 70,000 apps in the App Store. Recent estimates are that 200-300 new iPhone apps are introduced per day! Therefore, our three biggest hurdles today can thus be summarized as follows…
1, 2 & 3) Visibility, visibility and visibility.
To this end, we have learned that the App Store itself is a poor place to expect app visibility. Unless an app is in the Top-100 of a given category it will not be seen. (The only exception to this rule is Games, which has multiple sub-categories providing additional visibility.) In order to drive sales you have to expect that 95%+ of your traffic must come from external sources. As with just about every industry out there, in the end, it all comes down to marketing and product awareness.
Here are a few ways that we tackle this problem today…
1) We develop products that have built-in brand awareness.
2) We use existing apps as viral vehicles to cross-promote our other apps.
3) We encourage user reviews.
4) We participate heavily on social marketing sites like Facebook and Twitter.
5) And we now have a new technique… We have just released our first FREE app aimed at generating awareness. The Hay House Card Sampler is an app that is a catalog for our other apps. The sampler allows people to touch, feel, read and experience one card from each of our Hay House card apps. If they like a particular author/image/saying, one touch on the App Store button will launch them straight to the purchase page for that app. Elegant. Simple. Of course we will update the Sampler app regularly to always ensure fresh content. We have high hopes. We log all traffic, so we’ll know in a few months if this technique pays off.
We have a few other ideas in the works. You’ll hear about those soon enough. At the core, it seems that this is a word-of-mouth business. Given this, we find ourselves asking the question, “What is the best way to encourage satisfied customers to tell their friends about Oceanhouse Media products?”
If you have ideas that we are not already exploring, we’d love to hear from you.
