How we reached our first 25k app downloads in eight weeks.

We recently launched our first app and generated 25k organic downloads in eight weeks. For a team with zero marketing experience, we were blown away by the reception. It might not be a lot compared to some businesses here, but we’re super excited. We’ve used TikTok as our primary marketing channel, growing to 14k followers.

Our app is a workout tracker that makes it easy to visualize progress. For example, it turns bench pressing 100kg into bench pressing ten honey badgers. It tracks how much weight you lift in total, so you can complete challenges like lifting a Stonehenge Slab.

We thought we’d share five things we’ve learned that helped us make the launch a success.

1- Use your fans as marketers.

Kevin Kelly wrote an excellent blog piece called ‘1000 True Fans’. This theorizes that all a business needs to succeed is 1000 true fans. These people will act as your brand ambassadors. It is better to be loved by 1000 users than liked by 100,000. If you want to go far, first go narrow. Identify a small market and develop a product that people love. We set up a Discord channel where we can interact with our most passionate followers.

2- Choose a specific target audience.

When we launched, we targeted a wide audience. We created boring content that nobody related to. We got lucky with one viral video, but our standard content wasn’t engaging.

We sat down as a team and decided to market to younger gym goers. This was a market we identified with and related to. We made all our new content with the audience in mind. Our engagement massively improved.

Choosing a specific target market can mean your messaging excludes certain people, but it was worth the risk for us. Great content is polarising content.

3- Don’t exclusively use one outreach channel.

Most businesses will have one marketing channel that brings them 90% of their results. For us, that was TikTok. Find out where your target market hangs out online and focus on this platform.

However, it’s also a risk to exclusively use one platform. Around week five, our TikTok view count dropped and only our followers could see our videos. TikTok had shadow-banned us. Thankfully things normalized after a week, but we learned to expand our presence on other channels such as Instagram. Concentrate on one platform, but keep a backup.

4- Provide free value to your customers.

Workout tracking apps are a saturated market with high switchover costs. This means it’s very hard to gain market share.

To differentiate ourselves from our competitors, we decided to provide our customers with free features that our competitors lock behind a paywall. In a saturated market, you really need to stand out. Being 5% better isn’t enough, you need to be 50% better than the market leader.

5- Don’t be afraid to launch an MVP.

We showed a teaser of our app and had the video go viral. It reached over 800k views, but we didn’t have an app ready to ship. We decided to push the app anyway. This was the best decision we could have made.

It was a busy launch week, but we focused on responding to every message and bug report that came our way. People loved how responsive we were. Their feedback helped shape the app. Your product will never be perfect before you launch it because product-market fit requires user input. Ship early and improve often.