Getting Your App to Stand Out: Pure Kitsch
There are a million apps out there and it is hard to get publicity. With the market becoming more and more crowded, it is often times hard to stand out. Unless you are big dev shop (Electronic Arts) or have massive public appeal (Martha Stewart), it can be incredibly difficult to get folks to download your app.
While people have different ideas for trying to get noticed (Assisted Word of Mouth or Building a Marketing Plan and Not Just Immediately Releasing), I have found a way that can differentiate you from the pack: develop something kitschy for an audience that you know well. This philosophy is what led me to create Cascarone.
People purchasing ascarónes in a store.
If you’re in the US and not living close to the Southern border, you probably have no idea what the heck a cascarón is, however, it is something that is very special to me.
Cascarónes are brightly colored eggshells that are filled with confetti and you break them on a person’s head and to get confetti all in their hair. Tradition has it that it is good luck to have a cascarón cracked on you, but for me it is just a lot of fun to smash an egg on someone’s head.
If you come to San Antonio during Fiesta, or visit the border/Mexico around Easter, you will see plenty of confetti on the ground from broken cascarones. Surprising a friend (or random passerby), breaking something, and making a huge mess all tap into our juvenile joie de vivre, which is what makes cascarones so much fun.
When creating an app, I think that it is important to make something that you are excited about and something that is unique. Although Seth Godin’s Purple Cow has become somewhat of a cliché, a developer made a recent post of why this is so important. Having something that is uniquely yours really is the key to being noticed, especially if you are a non-technical person like myself.
By creating something that resonated with my community, I received a good amount of exposure. This included articles in La Prensa, San Antonio Express News, and even the Wall Street Journal. I believe that this good press was a direct result of Cascarone transcending being a mobile app and being tied to the culture and overall fabric of where I come from.
The flip side, however, is that all that press did not translate to a landslide of downloads of Cascarone. In fact, I have had only several hundred downloads which will leave me quite far away from recouping the expenses I incurred for developing the app. I think that this is a common theme of people who do what they enjoy: you win some and you lose some. (I would be curious on anyone’s thoughts on how to have capitalized better on the publicity; please comment below.)
Make no mistake, I did choose to develop something that recurs annually and will be just as fun to a new subset of folks a year from now as it was to the first people who encountered it in 2011. I am curious to see the download trends and if people remember to tell their friends about it a year from now.
This is article is just a single piece of confetti in the great cascarón of opinions on how to get your mobile app to stand out. What are your thoughts? Please comment!
