Mobile Growth: Across the Spectrum

A recap of our latest Mobile Growth Meetup for app developers, covering everything from planning your app to creating a sustainable source of income from it.

Building a successful app is a juggling act. A lot goes into it: once you come up with an idea, you have to plan a product map, build its infrastructure, write the code and engineer it, build up a user base, and then what else… make money on it! Not an easy feat. But it’s more than doable with the right tools and strategy driving key results at every stage.

To provide a real-world blueprint for developers, we partnered up with Branch to host another Mobile Growth Meetup in Bangalore. We brought in industry experts to break down the critical success factors at every stage of an app’s lifetime. So whether it was ideation, creation, acquisition, retention, or actually generating revenue with a sustainable monetization strategy, we covered it and held some great discussions with developers at every stage of their app’s journey.

We realized that not everyone would be able to make it to our developer-focused meetup in Bangalore, so we put together some of the key points our experts in the mobile ecosystem emphasized throughout the day.

Monetization Techniques

How do you make money from your app? Our monetization expert, Ashwin Shekhar, talked about choosing the right mobile monetization mix for you. When it comes to app monetization, it’s tough to nail down what’s best. No one buys apps anymore because everyone expects a free service. If your app is in a vertical in which in-app purchases make sense, then monetizing this way is an option, but a very low percentage (usually under 1%) of your users actually make these purchases. This means that over 99 percent of your monetization potential is in non-paying users—meaning you should show them ads!

We understand the importance of remaining non-intrusive to your users, which is why Ashwin explained various mobile monetization models, ad formats, types of demand sources, and then how to marry them all together as you find the right mix for you. In the end, ad mediation brings everything together on one platform. What should you be looking for as you search for your mediation solution? Get in touch to find out.

Engineering: Mobile app deep links

Web links don’t work with native mobile apps. When you use your mobile device to open a link on a website, you are taken to the destination within the web browser even if you have the corresponding app installed. This is not the desired route because the mobile app will generally have a better user experience than the mobile web version.

Ankit Saxena, Tech Evangelist at Branch, led the discussion behind the importance of deep linking. Since the early days of URI schemes, deep linking has grown and become more complex. However, since iOS 9.2 broke deep linking with URI schemes, Universal Links have become the de facto way to open apps within iOS. Universal Links show an increase of almost 40 percent on key app metrics for activation and retention of users. However, they do not work as deferred deep links, nor do they provide attribution out of the box. During the meetup, Ankit explained how Branch links work across platforms, covering all edge cases of deep linking. To do a deeper dive on this topic, head over to Branch.

Product Management

Subhadeep Mondal, CoFounder of PregBuddy — a women’s healthcare platform, pointed out that while one must think big, they need to start small. In other words, figure out the small functional part of your overall product that your targeted potential users need most and start with that. Get it to market as soon as possible. Also, don’t make the mistake of wasting your time funneling your resources into the wrong steps of the product development process. Rather, spend most of your time prioritizing and defining the product to avoid bottlenecks that can quickly drain your money and exponentially increase your go-to-market time. Another great point to keep in mind is to stay in touch with your users. Subhadeep shared that he speaks to 2-3 users a day just to check in and understand how his product is useful to them as well as how they think it could be improved. That’s an easy thing to implement right away!

For more insights from Subhadeep’s talk at our mobile growth meetup, check out his recap: 5 things I learnt building products for the past 5 years.

What’s next

There were a lot of key insights exchanged around mobile growth at our latest meetup with Branch. Between growing your app, keeping users engaged and figuring out how to monetize, the work never really ends. But, hey, this is why we host mobile growth meetups, right? …to learn and grow together as we discuss and share insights from all perspectives on the spectrum. So, thanks to everyone who joined and we look forward to future conversations!

Stay tuned for future workshops around the world.

Last but not least, thanks to our mobile experts…