Winning the battle of 140,000+ apps

There you are, putting the final touches on an amazing iPhone application. It’s useful, straightforward, and appealing - and a dead-on match for the magical confluence of your business goals and your users’ wants, needs, and desires. And then you submit it to the iTunes app store, where it disappears into the void among the thousands of IQ tests, flashlights, and fart apps.

So how can you make your app visible among 140,000+ others? We headed up to San Francisco last night to the Mobile Monday Developer Secrets - Increasing App Store Sales meetup to hear the latest from TripIt, AdMob, Flixter, Flurry, and Booyah. Here’s a recap combined with some thoughts from our own customer research:

Problems

• There are over 140,000 apps in the app store, and most people discover apps by browsing the Top 25 or Top 100 on their iPhone
• 90% of people are finding iPhone apps through the App Store on their phone, rather than on the desktop or via other websites

Solutions

• Spread the word: use any touchpoints with your customers to drive them to your app: your website, order confirmation emails, even call center hold recordings
• In-app conversion: provide a free app with basic (but useful) features, and in-app up-sell to advanced functionality - especially recurring monthly payments
• Share the data: provide data to other apps within the app store - even those that compete directly with yours - and take a percentage of their revenues: ”We couldn’t solve the shelf space problem, so we offered an API for other developers to use” - Will Aldridge, VP Product at Tripit.com
• Transition from mobile web: when people browse your website with an iPhone, make it easy to directly download your iPhone app; 82% of iPhone visitors to Flixter do this
• Social media integration: boost visibility by allowing people to share via Facebook or LinkedIn; have their shared media point back to the iPhone app
• Advertise: marketing bursts with vendors like AdMob or MobClix - such as $10-50k over a 3-day period - can boost an app into the top 25, with a typical net cost of about $2-3 per install
• Get media attention: presenters said they got the highest boost from mentions in Ars Technica, Daily Candy, TechCrunch, and mentions by Walt Mossburg - depending, of course, on the target audience

Here at Create with Context, we’ve done several iPhone-related projects including one-on-one lab-based customer research as well as the development of Windspire Me, an app which helps people see if wind power is right for them. We’ve collected our findings into our “How people really use the iPhone” report, a free download.