Loqheart – David Ngo
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About the Episode
This special episode is a course that David Ngo did on AppMasters.co where he shows you the step-by-step process that he used to build an email list of over 400 subscribers for a game that he’s still working on and isn’t even live yet. Also, listen to how he surveys his users to find the ones that will actually provide useful user feedback.
David Ngo is the co-founder of Loqheart.
Show Notes
Marketing Your Product the Right Time, the Right Way
David’s main advice is to do your marketing from the very beginning and get people excited about the game even as you are just developing them. Some people would think about marketing a month or two weeks before but that’s not the way things should be done. With that in mind, you should get people to sign up for them to know how the game is developing and to get as many beta testers as you can to check if many people will like your game. Here are steps which David used in his own games to get a head start:
Step 1: Have a ‘coming soon’ page. Beta-test your messaging by sending out different formats, text or images and send it to different forums to be able to determine which one gets the most impact.You automatically test the market this way.
Step 2: As soon as people sign up for email, place an automated survey in your response email. Fill out a free Google survey, place in questions which will profile your users and it will automatically place all responses in a in a spreadsheet. Remember to balance your questions – enough to gather the data you need but not too much too make them lose interest. These responses will let you know which ones really fall under your target market to determine which feedback you should focus on the most, get to know them better and build more relationships with them. Place an option to share the link to their friends as well and give rewards if they do.
Step 3: Set up social media profiles. Marketing is all about building relationships and developing a mutual give and take, and Twitter and Facebook are very good vehicles in doing this. Have a presence in social media by following the important people and other developers, post quality messages and which are relevant to your followers and engage in conversations.
Step 4: Find your target audience. If you’re a game developer, know about RedditGamedevSubredditas it is a great forum to meet other developers and to market whatever game you are working on.When you are starting off, Reddit has Feedback Friday and Screenshot Saturday where you can give a short pitch of your game, show screenshots of it, and place a link where they can find out more about the game.For David, he links it to his social media accounts for a good possibility of gaining an additional follower.This is a good venue to get more eyeballs on what you are developing, to test out your pitch and get feedback from other developers as well. Also, don’t post things for the sake of posting. It would be a good strategy to save them all during Feedback Friday and Screenshot Saturday.