Spend two weeks on keyword research, then put the best terms in your title

Joseph ChoiSo, what did you do for growth? How did you grow from $60 on launch day to switching to a free model? Are you just continuously posting on Reddit, or are you doing other growth strategies?

Kyle FowlerRight. Yeah, the the biggest growth like the the initial hit, we just kind of like had that uh initial post and just let downloads trickle in, which I assume were from ASO, but I didn't know. I just kind of had the "if if you build it, they'll come" strategy, which [laughter] doesn't really work, but worked a little in our case 'cause it was so niche. But eventually, I heard about uh Apple had this $100 free ASA promotion, like for App Store ads. And that kind of got me into the idea I looked into that, and I was like, "Oh, if I'm going to spend $100, I want to use it optimally." So, then I Googled and looked around at some websites on uh like I think uh Sensor Tower, whatever, um Appfigures. They had some posts on it about ASO.

Kyle FowlerAnd optimizing that for organic downloads and it just made so much sense to me. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, all I have to do is change this, and then people can just find me naturally by searching the right keywords in the App Store." We optimized for that pretty early. That was huge for us downloads-wise. That was when we really started taking off. I think that was actually probably the spike we saw on there.

Kyle Fowler… App Store. And now there's a billion of them if you search them, and most of them not not even all like clones of our app or anything. Some of them do things different, but there weren't any. I think there might have been a Pokémon card scanner before, but I'd never heard of it. So, it was fun to invent that. But yeah, no, the we optimized for "baseball card scanner," "baseball card value," like basically anything that felt like it was worth it.

Kyle FowlerLike I did the free trial of the Sensor Tower and looked at all the top keywords that were related or I just kind of brainstormed a list, and there's tons of good resources about how to do this online, but I just brainstormed a list of ideas and things, and then checked their keyword rankings, and then just picked the most high-value ones I could to fit into my title and top.

Kyle FowlerSo, we had like the whole thing is is Cardstock Sports Card Scanner. So, because "baseball card scanner" doesn't fit in the keyword amount. And then it was like, "find value for baseball cards," I think was our thing. And so, we had that high-ranking keyword for all so long, and it it brought us in like all all of the rev for like like it got us from like 10K recurring forever. Yeah, you can see the find value. Like, it's still the same thing.

Kyle FowlerLike, I spent like a week or two weeks like really researching and diving into what it meant, ASO. But then, the rewards we reaped were insane. And now, like there's a lot of competition in the keyword space now or in the space now, so like or most things, but like especially if you're in a smaller niche or you're like in a novel, new idea, like optimizing ASO can be such a big win because it it brought us in like I was making like 14K, I guess not recurring, like probably like 9 or 10K recurring revenue, but for a long time without any marketing for like a couple of years, all through college when I was growing.

Joseph ChoiThat's insane. You're making like 9, 10K a month for 2 years straight [laughter] while you Yeah. from passive App Store volume.

Joseph Choi… out you broke out from 10K a month. You did find some other revenue stream or some other marketing channel. But let's go back for a second. What were the keywords that you're doing before you kind of discovered the high-value keywords of basically like "find value for baseball cards" and "baseball card scanner" and then "sports card scanner"? It sounds like those are basically the keywords that you try to optimize for, but what was it before?

Kyle FowlerDude, I'm almost certain I had what I didn't even have keywords in the title. I'm pretty sure it was just Cardstock, and then find like I don't even think I had a subtitle. [laughter] I think it was just Cardstock. So, before before I found the optimization, we weren't really getting that much passive at all. It was just if people searched it, 'cause I had no idea that's even how it worked. [laughter]

Joseph ChoiYeah, I feel like people like to complicate ASO or make it sound like mysterious, but it sounds like you just did the bare minimum research, just went on Sensor Tower, just uh did like the free audit thing that the App Store gave you, and then you just chose like ones that seemed good and then you just put them in your title.