Put your app up for pre-order so thousands download it on launch day

Caleb DeanPretty much 90% of our stuff was organic, being like Instagram and then a little bit of TikTok. And what was also super valuable for us, which I have only seen one other app like on Twitter ever do and it's not talked about ever really, and I think it was a perfect sort of situation for us, but I'm not sure if you're familiar, but you can put your app up for pre-order.

Caleb DeanSo when we were in the stage of like I just finished design, I had got a developer on board, my number one objective was to get like a V1 of the version approved from Apple. So we had like a two-tab, no onboarding, like the bare bones of what a running app would have to be to be approved to then actually get on the App Store, and that allowed us to put our app as pre-order. So whilst I was actively marketing the app and we were building it,

Caleb Deanwe had people like downloading the app, like pre-ordering it, and to just clear up what that actually means is they'll pre-order the app and when we decide to launch the app, it will automatically download to their device, and on top of that, they'll get an email from Apple saying, "Hey, like Runify's just launched. Here, go check it out." So we had 3,000 downloads like. I think we only had the pre-order up for couple- maybe 2 weeks, but through that we had 3k downloads,

Caleb Deanand it also meant we had 3k downloads the second we hit launch, which was really valuable for us because we had a leaderboard in our app. That was one of our biggest concerns, like launching an app having no users at day one and they go and download this app, they check the leaderboard, and there's no one on it. Like it just is a big turn-off from the user perspective. But through this, like the leaderboard filled up to like 1,000-plus, which was our limit, which you could see, in like a matter of an hour.

Joseph ChoiThat actually is like not talked about very much, especially for social. I could see how that would be extremely helpful when there needs to be some sort of like user seating, like social graph where the app becomes more valuable the more people that are on it. So having 3,000 people be on the app all at the same time in the first day, that probably helps long-term retention a lot as well because

Joseph ChoiOh. So you accidentally released the pre-order because you you weren't able to like push the release date like you wanted?

Caleb DeanI could I could have pushed it back, but it was just a matter of like I the way I was doing it is I was pushing it back like every 2 or 3 days, and I just completely forgot. Like I was just like so focused on building the product, I forgot to push it back one day, and then it launched. So yeah, I had to deal with that, but in terms of actual launch day, we had a couple strategies. So like obviously we had Instagram. We I think we had probably almost 2,000 followers on Instagram,

Caleb Deanso like we really like leveraged the like the story like Instagram Story feature um to build kind of like what you would see in like a info sort of like approach to how you might offer like a course or something like really building the scene. And then we we pretty much did everything. We posted on Reddit, I posted like a launch video on my personal profile, which was like a demo on Rotato, which I made on Rotato, which I actually, again, got off …