The power of influencer marketing
My accidentally little experience with it
Hey, listen!
Last year I made a little game for iOS.
It is a free one, but you can give tips for the developer.
I barely made a penny with it until…
I am fully recovered from the flu and back to coding again! 🤘🏼
This week, I was crushing lines for my new app for surfers 🏄
By June 2023, I was still freelancing for a living.
While binging YouTube, I watched a video of a game developer that made a game for Android in a couple days about a TikTok trend: The Blind Number Challenge.
It thought “That’s a pretty cool idea for a fun weekend project!”
So, I got down to business and coded it in a few days.
For fun, I also played around with the Neubrutalism design trend, and I think the app ended up with a pretty nice looking UI. You can check it out here if you’re curious.
If you like the Neubrutalism, style I shared a gist with some SwiftUI buttons here :)
With this app, I learned to implement ads with Admob and payments with RevenueCat.
It was a free app, but I put a full interstitial ads every 5 tries. You could get rid of ads giving a tip to the developer, choosing the amount.
My plan wasn’t making any money with this app, just playing around with monetization as I already had in mind going full time indie.
I barely had any sales. After a month of the release date, I got my first purchase from USA.
Months went by and I wasn’t having barely users, making monthly cents from ads.
In a year I had sold 3 tips, so it was an almost dead project.
We jump now to this year.
One random day I woke up and checked RCKit in my iPhone (the app I used to check RevenueCat’s stats)
Holy moly! What the heck was happening!? I had suddenly like 10 sales, and some them big tips of $10! 😱
A few hours later, someone quoted me in a tweet…
It was a Spanish girl that had a small channel (5K subs) about tech tips for blind people.
It turned out that she was looking for games with good accessibility for reviewing in her channel.
She ended up downloading my game and liking it so much that she made a pretty awesome review for her audience:
This made me realize how powerful an engaged audience is.
People tend to trust and buy way more when they like the person.
You can check out that the video has 2k views. In YouTube terms, this is super tiny. but his committed audience made in my little game a huge spike of sales.
It was a short spike, but compared to the 10 previous months, it was an increase of 735% in revenue in just three days.
I learned a big lesson from this:
When I want to go serious on a project, I’m going to double down the efforts in influencer marketing.
Doing that, or becoming one myself… 😏
If you’ve made it this far, please go support my friend Max.
He’s totally crazy and is launching today a pretty dope hardware piece in Product Hunt, called DeskHub.
See you next week! 🤘🏼
Juanjo