Castro – Oisin Prendiville
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About the Episode
How do you get the big reviewers and key influencers to write about your app? Well today’s guest talks about the strategies he used to get mentions on Lifehacker, iMore, Daring Fireball and much more. Also, if you’re thinking about localizing your app, listen to the one thing you have to watch out for.
Oisin Prendiville is the co-founder of SuperTop, creators of Castro Podcast Player and Tokens.
Show Notes
Getting influencers to write about your app
Getting influencers to write about your app needs planning and preparation so when Castro was getting to a stage when it was ready to go through beta testing, they took the opportunity to reach out to their press list who expressed interest in joining. This is for them to ensure that the app gets to the hands of the press even at that early stage. By the time it came out, they have already established good contacts as people in the press had already been using it for a while. They had hoped that they would post reviews and surely enough, they did!
During their earliest contact with the press, they sent them screenshots, teasers and clips of small parts of the app to build up interest even without showing the actual app. They were confident with the unique look of the app and sure enough the demos got their attention.
Some of the journalists who featured them are those that they have already built relationships with through Tokens. They reached back to them and due to the existing connection, were able to write about their new product.
Some of them attention they got came out of cold emails as well. Oisin notes though that they did their best to make the emails personal, such as adding a screenshot of the recipients’ podcasts, and they only reached out to those that they felt would be genuinely interested in their app.
Localizing your app
Localization has not led their products to huge spikes but it is one of the things that they did that made their base at a healthy level. During this process, you had to let go of control, such as how you phrase things or of the tone you want to convey, and hand it over to someone else. It’s very tricky to judge so they ran into some negative experiences. Another problem was it was handled by 6-7 people and when you release even the smallest update, they had to get in touch with a lot of people. Oisin shares though that in making decisions in localization, it would always be great if has a human touch.
What is the #1 thing you’d like the listener to walk away with from this interview?
Building a great app isn’t necessary enough anymore, promotion is most of the game. You can be focus on design during the development phase but as early as possible, you need to think about what is going to happen when it gets released. You need to show the app as early as possible and start building connections with press as soon as you can. Plan for making the biggest launch possible and be ready for the realities that come after that.
App a Gram
Can you guess the name of this app?
Ram Be Mint
Show Mentions
– Fav app: UnRead: (iTunes)
No time to solve that anagram right now, got to go cut down a tree.
Hi Steve,
Let me shoot! Timberman? 🙂