June BlueCloud 1

What is going on everybody? It's Carter here saying 'what's up'. Gosh, this summer is great stuff and wanted to say thank you. This is our one year anniversary of Blue Cloud Select! Can you believe that? That's unbelievable. It's been a great trip and I'm super pumped we're still doing this and people seem to be getting value out of this so I'm really excited and what you're going to see next month is that we are totally vamping up this whole place. So it's really, really exciting. So anyway, without further ado, we've got some really great questions and definitely stick around for the end of this. We've got some really big questions about how to build big games, about productivity and I'm going to do a special section on app store analytics that I think you're really going to dig so I urge you to stick around and go through all this stuff and make sure you get everything you can out of it. Okay so first question.

Question #1: When are you releasing your new event? If it is an in person event, there's no way I'm going to miss it. Please let us know as soon as you can. Can't wait for it! Can you give us any clue or anything to see what we are in for maybe? [1:11]

Answer #1:

·       Thanks a lot for writing that. That's super cool. I am the first to admit, I sent out a survey a couple of months ago and we didn't follow up on that and I should have. That's my fault and there's a good reason for that. Basically I got a way bigger response than I was expecting. I mean I had hundreds and hundreds of people write back and they're like 'where do I sign up', 'where do I go', which is kind of a marketers dream, but as you can imagine, I really don't want to do something just for the money. I want to make something really special and so I was faced with a position of do I make a big event and kind of lose that touch and you'll get a lot more people there and we can do a lot more with it because we have a lot more money, or do I keep it really small and it will be less people, but it'll be more intimate and we'll have a much more connective experience. So I'm still trying to figure that out and I think more logistically speaking, we're building a lot of courses right now at Blue Cloud and so the time line is just a little difficult.

·       The second half of this year I'm really going to try to make something happen, even if it's an informal thing where you know we just get everyone together, but once we get through upgrading this Blue Cloud Select thing, I'm releasing a massive like 25-30 hour course, like a boot camp 30 day course all about everything I've ever learned about apps and building awesome apps and building businesses that's not really about app reskinning as much as it is just this is how you really build real businesses up for an app. This is after interviewing tons of people. I did it for this podcast. I haven't released it. This is after my own experiences after working with dozens of top grossing and heavily funded apps out in San Francisco and so I'm really working on that and trying to make this thing super cool. I've been working on that a lot.

·       Like I said, it's a live event. I just need to figure out how big I want it to be and more than anything I want it to be the most possible value for all of you, the people who want to attend. If you have any thoughts on that, if you feel strongly one way or the other, always feel free to write me an email Carter@BlueCloudSolutions.com. I get that email. It's in one of my in boxes and you guys as Blue Cloud Select members, feel free to email me anytime. That's part of being a Blue Cloud Select member. I would love to hear from you. Otherwise in the next few months, definitely by the end of this year we'll have something on the books and planned out. Thanks for the question and a little boost to get that going because I know I would love that. All of us at Blue Cloud, we've got the whole team, fired up about meeting you guys, so we really want to do that too.

Question #2: My business partner and I bought Austin's 17+ app platform and we are just finishing up with all the transferring, learning a few of the platforms Austin used and I'm beginning to get back to thinking like a marketer. One of the apps that he never completely launched is one that I want to focus on pushing pretty hard once a couple bugs are fixed over the next week or so. For someone who is relatively new to the app world, from the developer side, but has a background in online marketing, what steps would you personally take to relaunch an app for maximum exposure? [4:40] Cool Jason. I'm not entirely sure who you're talking about. It might be Austin Church, it might be some other Austin, but I'm going to assume that this is somebody that you got 17 of their apps and you came in as a developer background and you're saying 'okay there's a lot of opportunity here. What should we do' and you want to know kind of how to launch, what to do first and things like that. So let's walk through that a little bit.

Answer #2:

·       So as a marketer, there's three parts to think about. Traffic, conversion and product. Those are the three buckets and what happens, especially in the app world and a lot of reskinners and old school people that are still locked in this idea of what reskinning was, they think all about the traffic and they think about getting eye balls and how do I get more downloads, but they don't think about the conversion of the product very much.

·       So what I would say because you're a developer and that's a good thing is I would really switch to product mode first and I think that you're probably ready to launch this app, but what you've really got to realize is you've got to launch this app and the data that is going to come in is going to be completely different from what you'd expect because you've never really launched this or done it under your tutilidge. The first thing I would recommend is alright we're going to switch this like a product and if you're a developer, you'll understand this switch means build, remeasure and reiterate and that is how you start thinking about this. You don't think "how do I get this in front of a million people" because that's going to be a waste of your time and money right now if you have no idea what you're doing with it.

·       The second thing is that ASO is going to be a big, that's becoming a more and more viable model as you get more focus on the app because the long tail key words start to come in so I don't know what this app is all about, but what I would really focus on is dialing in that strategy so at least you're going to have a really good foundation of downloads to get you enough data as this thing goes to help you decide what you're going to do and how to update the app specifically.

·       The marketing background I'm assuming you have if you are starting to think like a marketer again as opposed to developer, I would launch some sites and campaigns that push traffic to your app. What that means is go to an ad network, go to Facebook or whatever other sites are out there and start pushing traffic. Go [unclear 7:12] and try to get people to download this app and really just get traffic in there. Get used to that feeling of "I want to learn something and all I'm going to do is go get some answers because I'm going to go get traffic and those are going to get me answers that I need to solve this problem". That's a really good way to think about it. Just find data.

·       The number one thing I would recommend, like along the lines of a product, is focus as much time, especially if you're just getting, you're kind of in the front end of this. Focus as much as you can on the analytics. That is just going to totally change the game for you and it's going to give you such a massive advantage because so few people want to get into the analytics because they can't process the data. They don't want to learn it. I don't know why people are just so scared of data. They don't think it's nearly as important as the key words, which blows my mind, but that's what I would really recommend. Know what your analytics are, know how to process that data and know what to do with it once it starts coming in.

·       You can start to think about things like deals and joint ventures. In the marketing world that's a big thing where you connect dots for other people and that's how you make a ton of money. Joint ventures meaning that you partner with somebody and they launch your app and things like cross promotions or publishing are pretty hot right now. You can start thinking about things like that. If you have a very good app, who could you partner with to make it a really explosive marketing exercise for you? Start thinking about that as well and start making phone calls, start taking people to dinner, get them on the phone. Whatever it may be.

·       Once you have a product that works and is making money, plugin your marketing experience to blow it out of the water. I'm assuming you have some sense of marketing experience. If not, it's totally fine, but the point of all this is even with your developer background, make sure you can measure every single thing that you are about to do when you want to ramp up that marketing so that always comes out in the analytics and it comes down to being able to measure all that. Then when you really want to, the next step after that is obviously ASO, get some kind of like evergreen traffic coming through there and then the third piece is going to be joint ventures, buying traffic and then really going out and marketing it like a real product.

·       So I think that tends to be marketing 101 in terms of the full package, product marketing, product launches and things like that. Depends on the app, depends on the niche, depends on what you're doing, how big the app is, where your core audience is already, but those are the things to think about. One thing to think about on top of all this, which is on the top of my head because this is the part of the course that I just did, the 30 day course I'm doing. How can you market this outside of the app store? Instead of thinking about just buying traffic and getting ASO downloads and stuff like that, how can you collect email addresses? Like how can you send push notifications from somewhere else? How can you control your Facebook page to drive people back to download it? Things like that are another piece to really understand what sort of marketing experience can, how can you pull those users out of the app and get them into an ecosystem that's outside of your entire app. Think in that way. It can make a big difference on that sort of thing as well.

Question #3: Are you allowed to reskin an app made with open source code and then sell that app on the marketplace or does that reskinned app have to be free? If that app has to be free, are you allowed to put ads in it or are you not allowed to profit off of open source apps? [10: 58].

Answer #3:

·       When I answer this, open source code is kind of a loose term because there's a lot of different things that go into it. That's kind of how photos can be. Open source photography.

·       What I would say is when you're talking about marketplace, does it have to be free or whatever, there's a few different marketplaces. Apptopia where you sell full rights to an app and then there's iTunes, which is a marketplace in itself, but you know that's kind of the other way of looking at the marketplace.

·       If you're on Apptopia and you want to sell the apps, you can sell it, but you have to be very clear to the buyer that you're selling the license. You're kind of transferring the license over to them. You're not giving them the full rights to your code and that has to be written in the contract versus iTunes where it really does come down to just the license of the actual code. Some developers do open source and say "you can turn this into a huge business for all I care". Some people say "you can use this all you want, but you can't make money off it. You can't charge people for it". Just make sure you check the license. There's a lot of different licenses and typically developers who do open source are pretty good about telling you what license you can use.

·       On average, you'll be able to charge for paid apps. You'll be able to use in app purchases and things like that and the same thing with ads. It really shouldn't be a big issue and if you every have any questions, you can email the developer and say "what's the deal with this? What can I do? What can I not do?" If that doesn't fit into your plan, then you might want to think about getting even a dollar, spending a dollar on a source code because that gives you the right.

·       For Blue Cloud, we do unlimited license and you can customize that however you want so you can literally do anything you want to do other than go and resell our source code on like a source code website or whatever it may be, but that's also because we have a lot of paid stuff and it's a different license so when you talk about open source stuff, just keep that in mind and just check the license they have on their website that they have and that will typically answer any questions.

Question #4: What mobile game events are worth attending? What events have you gone to to meet amazing ambitious entrepreneurs like yourself? I really want to attend multiple events this year and get some serious environmental exposures from people that are getting the results that I am working towards. What are your recommendations? Or maybe internet marketing events that I could learn from and mastermind with? [13:43]

Answer #4:

·       Really, really terrific question and I have some, we'll start with the answer and then I'll kind of expand on that. There's a few ones. GDC is like the biggest one ever. Game Developers Conference is definitely all about gaming and it's so massive. I think it's one of the biggest conferences in San Francisco other than Sales Force which all [unclear 14:07]. It's just huge and there's a lot of parties and a lot of people hanging out.

·       E3 is the same thing. It's just this massive event. It's not in San Francisco, but there's a few of them all around the world. There's Casual Connect. There's World Wide Development Conference, which is Apple's thing. Stuff like that. What I will tell you about those big events is that it is 100% all about you get out of them what you put into them. So when it's one of those events where all you have to do, the price of entry is you just have to buy a ticket and you show up. Typically that's supported by people who have booths and there's presentations and it's a business. No one is going to go out of their way to say "here's someone you should meet". You kind of got to go make it your own.

·       Determine the people, not the topics. When I went to World Wide Development Conference, I went for the first time in 2012 and I was like "I'm going to go. I just got an app. This is so cool. I'm going to meet all these amazing people and I'm going to be so inspired" and I went and what happened is I realized when I got there it was all really hard core engineers and developers. I was one of if not the only marketer there at least that I met and the idea of talking about apps and templates and key words, this was 2012. People were looking at me like I had three heads on and so it was a very expensive event and I'm really glad I went, but I haven't gone since because what I realized was the topics that were there, I thought it was going to be about apps and cool shit and all that, but I didn't realize that the people there were all going to be developers and it's not a marketers conference. So you need to determine who is the type of person you want to meet? Is it a developer? Is it a marketer? Is it a business person? Is it a deal maker? Who is it? Then look through all of the events you can find and reach out to the owners and say 'who's your best customer' type of thing.

·       Getting almost one level down, you do things like meet ups. Those are really popular in most cities around the world that people say 'I'm interested in this. Who wants to go get five people and go to a bar and talk about this' or whatever.

·       Facebook groups and forums are awesome places as well to connect with other people and learn from them. It's necessarily live and in person, but that could be a really, really great way to do it.

·       GamesIndustry.biz if you're into the games and things like that.

·       GameConfs.com.

·       To answer your question about internet marketing and apps, as you can imagine we still work on apps at Blue Cloud, but we're a lot more, I've been focused a lot more on the internet marketing side because we've got so much information that we want to be able to proliferate and get to everyone correctly and do a good job in marketing so I've spent a lot more time in the IM space and there's a very distinct difference between the IM space and the app space. What that is is people share way more information in internet marketing because they've already gone through this whole idea of they're terrified of online market getting saturated. That happened in 2006-2010. Everyone was like "everyone's building a blog" or 'everyone's got an email list" or "how can I ever make money" and now it's five years later and everyone's saying "actually I can still make a lot of money and everyone else can too". It's kind of this abundance mentality where it just, there's no reason to hold things close to your chest. It's a lot better to share your information and strategies with everyone else and then everyone wins. Apps, where people, I can't tell you how many people come into my office or get me on the phone or whatever and they tell me these amazing things that they're doing and I'm like "this is awesome. Can I please write a blog post about this" or 'how can we tell people about this' and they immediately clam up and say "no, I don't want to share this with anyone". That's one thing you're going to find at a lot of app conferences. You're going to find a lot of really great people who are doing really cool stuff, but just realize that you need to be the person who goes and shares your secrets first and then you'll start to feel people give you their energy back because they're going to trust you if you give them a lot of valuable information up front, but just keep that in mind when you're doing it.

·       I think one more thing that I would put on this list is that I vastly prefer very intimate one on one meetings so I don't really like going to huge events and cocktail parties and shaking hands and having small talk. That's not really my thing. What I really like doing is I love meeting people and I have a huge network, but it's because I always go out to lunch or I get coffee with somebody or drinks with them or dinner and I sit down with somebody for 30-45 minutes and we actually talk about things that we really care about and it's way more than just app store or internet marketing or whatever. It's about the story and the strategy that we've had and the vision of it all and that is what's made a huge difference for me and that's what's really inspired me, especially based on your question "what's the best way to get that energy and juice".

·       To wrap it up, what I would say is it's really good to go to some of these events. I would definitely recommend finding some events that cater to what you're looking for and then once you've identified a few big events and if you can't find any more, if you don't know where to go, just go to GDC or go to Casual Connect. Just go to one of the big ones and go to their chart boost party or planning party or whatever it may be and then go to some local ones and if you can't find any local ones, start your own. Make one happen and then invite everyone you can and five will show up and go from there and then start doing the individual thing. So go on LinkedIn. There's a blog post I wrote about how to network like a boss or whatever and that gives a lot of really good tips about this is how you grow your network. This is how you meet people one on one. That can be really powerful and I can promise you it does not have to be local. It helps a lot, but you know if you live somewhere that's not near a lot of other developers or marketers or whatever, get them on video chat and say "can I get 15 minutes of your time? I want to tell you all these awesome things that are working in my app business". Everyone is going to say of course. They're got 15 minutes to hear about what you've got going. So I think with that, you'll definitely get a really good thing going and then like I said, with Blue Cloud, this is a huge piece of what we're trying to do. Part of souping up Blue Cloud Select is going to be to put together a really group and forum and then have this type of event, so we're working on that as well.

Question #5: I bought the source code Party Slots. I have created a reskin, but with very poor results, very few downloads. Does it mean that I need to improve the source code and change the theme with keywords with traffic because the current don't work anymore? The second question is to create a winner app, what is better: 1) to create an app with key words of a trending topic with traffic, 2) to create an app that the utility match the key words with a lot of traffic, or 3) to create an original and good app and hope Apple sends traffic? [21:29]

Answer #5:

·       Cool. Assuming you've gone through and you've looked at all the previous Blue Cloud Select videos, if not 100% that's the one thing you should do and so what I can tell you upfront is that number 2is what we're going to be talking about. You want to make this thing unique, you want something with the Party Slots code because a lot of people purchase Party Slots to this day, June 15, 2015. People are still launching it. The people who bought it and launched it still make money today, which is awesome and a lot of people bought it a year ago and never made money so it's really not about the market as much as people seem to think it is.

·       To answer your question kind of focusing on number 2 as far as that goes, focus on the functions and not the theme. So you've got Party Slots and you got a smoking deal on it and you're ready to go. Figure out what are the five things that you could add to it. Not what are the five themes I can match this to. What are the five bonus games? What are the five improvements I can make to this core template, this foundation that I have? Start there. Always start with the functionality, always start with how to do that and realize that if you focus on that, it's much better about the conversion than it is the downloads.

·       Eyeballs mean nothing if they don't convert to installs. I'm going to talk about this at the end of this audit, but the idea being you can go to ASO and you can get these key words and you can theme it all you want, but if they don't convert to installs, it doesn't matter. That's not going to change your business. That's not necessarily a good ROI. People are going to download for the functions way more than they're going to download for the theme.

·       Along those lines, create a better product. List off the five functions and rank them in order and most importantly, don't hope for anything. Number 3 was build it from scratch or start over and hope that Apple sends it. Never do that. You always want to have a very good plan. You always want to prove how that plan works.

·       When you're choosing a strategy, think about and this is really hard for anyone in the app business to wrap your head around and something that I'm just starting to get my head around. What would you do if you were five years down the road and you're still working on this game, which is very realistic? A lot of people think about five months. They don't think about five years. Which strategy would you choose if you were thinking about five years? What would you do next week? Which one would you choose based on it being long term? What you realize is that you probably want to focus on making it a really awesome product that has a formula for updating it and making it and improving it and getting better and better versus trying to be like "what's hot right now that I can capitalize on". So always think about that. What is long term? What's going to be around? What is going to make a really great product happen?

·       What I'm also going to talk about is you've got to make it unique. That's what functionality is all about. Make it really unique. Make it unlike a lot of other slot machine games that are out there. You're never going to make it 100% unique, but just go in that direction. Start pointing to the fact that eventually you will be unlike anyone else and people will love you for that.

·       The golden ticket is always you focus on the functionality. You build awesome functionality. You keep making it more unique and then your key words and your titles evolve to match that functionality and that's when you start to see really, really great things happen with your conversion rates and your ASO and everything else.

·       I hope that helps and [unclear 25:00] for you that code has done great things and continues to do great things for great people. So I'm sure you will knock it out.