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About the Episode
Are you trying to raise money on Kickstarter for your app? Well, today’s guest raised $80K not for his app idea, but instead for himself so he could continue building his apps. Also, he shares all the strategies that helped him generate 4M downloads for his Spaceteam app.
Henry Smith is an Indie Game Developer at Sleeping Beast Games.
Show Notes
Raising $80k in Kickstarter
Henry’s first Kickstarter campaign failed and when he launched a second one, there was little difference in the outside such as the page and the like, but he did go out of his comfort zone and made changes on the backend. He started sending emails to people and organized global Spaceteam tournaments to try and promote the app by making people talk about the game throughout the months that the Kickstarter campaign was going on. The momentum from the first campaign plus the behind-the-scene stuffs contributed to the 2nd run’s success which ended up funding him for 2 years.
Strategies to Generate 4M Downloads
As soon as Henry turned indie, he immediately started a blog and built a Twitter account to document his progress. It was useful as he used it for his own documentation and he gained support from his industry connections through these channels. When the first version of Spaceteam came out, Henry didn’t know what to do he did bunch of stuff: he contacted his industry connections, cold emailed the press, entered competitions (where he got nominated and won awards) – some of these strategies worked, and some didn’t but it did garner enough interest for the word to spread. Some of the biggest spikes over the years for downloads are two things which he didn’t have control over:a Reddit post which he had nothing to do with and a YouTube celebrity that he wasn’t familiar with.
Show Mentions
Fav app: Severed: (iTunes | Google Play)