Whitepages – Morgan Belford
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About the Episode
The holy grail for us app developers is to be featured by one of the App Stores, but it seems like a black box to me. Well today’s guest talks about the elements of an app that Google Play looks for when deciding who to feature. Also, listen to his lessons from being a founder and losing his first mover advantage.
Morgan Belford is the Senior Mobile Architect at Whitepages.
Show Notes
How to Get Featured by the App Stores
When the Whitepages social caller ID first came out, they were featured in Google Play for two weeks and this easily boosted their downloads from 10 – 20 folds. Having a business development executive or a resource who has relationships with these stores helps but functionality, being popular, and using the platform’s features are also significant in getting featured.
Regrets of a First Mover
Storm Cloud was Morgan’s first company after he left Microsoft and was lucky to be a first mover in the web application space but he was not able to move quickly enough to stay ahead of his competition. He was not able to gather enough business talent and was not able to raise the money to compete. Not being able to keep pace with his competitors and take advantage of his being a first mover had always been one of his regrets as an entrepreneur. A lesson learned from the experience is knowing that you cannot ignore fund raising and the realization that you should not expect your products to make you successful all by itself.
What advice would you give to anyone looking to build a mobile app?
Just because there arehundreds of apps out there, doesn’t mean that you can’t do better. If you don’t know how make your app stand out, it is not worth doing.
Show Mentions
– Fav app: Dropbox: (iTunes | Google Play)