App Masters · B2B · app marketing agency
Pick app ideas from overlooked keywords in categories where people pay
Unknownpositioning-nicheasomarket-selection
What they did
To avoid paying for traffic, Steve builds new apps around organic keyword downloads: look at categories where App Masters has seen the highest conversion rates (mental health, health & fitness), build painkillers rather than vitamins, and find keywords few competitors are paying attention to.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · App Store Ethics, Dark Patterns, and Rule-Breakers — Steve P. Young, App Masters“I'm letting the keywords tell me which app to build, and I want to stay in a field where I know people are willing to convert.”
“So how I'm building my apps moving forward is looking at the categories where I know there's high conversion rates and looking at the keywords and really figuring out, all right, what are some keywords that a lot of people are not paying attention to?”
Related topics
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New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from App Masters
All 17 App Masters tactics- Label sign-in buttons 'Continue with' instead of 'Sign up with'10% better in the host's A/B test
- Pick 6-10 keywords for the title and subtitle; revise every two weeksHost says his apps now rank #1 for many keywords he worked on for months
- Build a small app around one side feature of a big app, like green noiseHost says his portfolio since ~2020 was built this way; only 10-20% of apps hit
- Find a keyword you can rank #1 for, then build the app for itOwn app now #1 for its main keywords; no revenue shared
- Add Spanish (Mexico) keywords to rank in the US storeBeat Vietnamese, Korean and other extra localizations in their tests
- Grow an Android-only app with Google ads, then add Apple ads and MetaHost says Google alone hit revenue milestones; no figures; Meta not yet profitable
More from this episode
- Pay for searches-then-installs on one quiet keyword until the app ranks #1#1 for both keyword spellings and stuck there; ~$5K/month mostly organic
- App Masters: Buy App Store reviews that mention your target keywordsOne or two keyword reviews moved rankings; stopped because stores punish it
- App Masters: Have friends mark your best 5-star review as helpful so it shows first
- Show the paywall's close button only after 5 secondsIncreases revenue, per the agency founder; no numbers
- Launch a simple one-feature app with a paywall that has no close buttonGrew $1K to $10K/month; 35% trial-to-paid; fell to $5K when Apple forced a close button
- Test a hard paywall against giving away one free puzzleHard paywall raised revenue; follow-up test vs more locked content, result not given
- Ask for a rating during onboarding or right after the paywall, not after 10 usesSeen to work really well across apps; no numbers
- Rootd: Show the paywall during onboarding, with a close buttonRevenue doubled
- Weather Up: Pull Google AdSense ads and move to a hard paywall with a 7-day trialAds caused bad reviews and complaints; app lost money for ~a year without them
- Launch Center Pro: Ship a big release that rides the home screen customization trend~$20K that month, then lost the lead by not iterating
- Ask web users to pay $1-$8.75 toward the trial's cost, then charge the saved cardHost was charged ~$70 by accident and did a chargeback
- Earning under $1K a month? Try a hard paywall to see if people want the appTrial-to-paid under 10% suggests no fit; 10-20% means people find value
- Change one icon on a freemium app's main screen to get more paywall views+57% paywall views
- MyFitnessPal: Show a closable paywall each time a returning user opens the appHost resubscribed at times; no numbers