RWDevCon 2016 Inspiration Talk – The Weird and Wacky World of App Marketing by Jeremy Olson

Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

I was finally able to overcome this. Seth Godin’s words started to get to me, I figured maybe at least I’ll try. I started a website, Tapity.com. This was the original, you see the old WordPress template here:

I just started talking about the things I was learning from other people. I synthesized them into principles and wrote about how am I applying them with my own app.

Again, I hadn’t actually released an app yet. One of the most audacious things I did though is I called this blog, “Tapity, How to Build Successful iPhone Apps.”

I’d never released an app before, but I was determined to figure it out and to help others do it. I wanted to lead, I wanted to at least try and see if this was something that I could do.

The posts went on. I didn’t get a lot of traffic in the first few months, mainly a few Twitter followers here and there, and some comments. A little while later, it got noticed by some of the people that I had been talking about like tap tap tap and started to build more of an audience. They wrote a post just about “You need to check out Jeremy’s blog.”

So I finally released Grades based on the stuff I’d been learning, and actually it did pretty well. It got featured in some press and there were a lot of Tweets about it. Ultimately Apple featured it which was amazing. I actually found out later that some people at Apple were reading my blog. Grades was featured in a lot of other places and ultimately won an Apple design award, so that was really cool.

The point is, all of this would not be possible if I did not market by leading. I want this idea to reach you because this is for you. This isn’t for somebody else, this is for you.

We desperately need this as an industry right now. There’s all this talk and negativity about the app store, how it’s impossible to build sustainable app businesses. Really, it’s just gotten harder.

It really has gotten harder to build sustainable app businesses. It’s not as easy, you cannot just put a 99 cent app on the app store anymore and make a million dollars, it doesn’t work that way anymore. There’s a lot more we need to figure out.

It’s not going to happen unless we have leaders. Leaders who experiment, who innovate, who don’t just complain but who actually do something about it and figure it out. Who pave a way to let others do the same.

That’s how we’re going to go on as an industry. I want to encourage you – I believe in this community. We’re going to do great things and we have a bright future, but we need YOU to lead us. Thank you.

About the Speaker: Jeremy Olson is the founder and lead designer at Tapity. His first app, Grades, won an Apple Design Award. His second app, Languages, won an App Store Best of 2012 award. His latest app, Hours, ranked #1 in Business, and was recently acquired by Five Pack Creative.

Would you like Jeremy to help you market your app? Tapity just launched a new service called Rocket to do just that!

If you enjoyed this talk, you should join us at RWDevCon 2017! We’ve sold out for the past two years, so don’t miss your chance.