Driving business growth with customers as your marketing department!

In my previous post, I briefly mentioned what led me to quit my full-time salaried job with Motorola and jump into the world of entrepreneurship.

The year is 2013 and I was starting off as a Solopreneur. I was skilled in developing Android apps as well as the technologies required to build a backend (server). But to grow the business, more had to be done.

This is what I ended up doing, step by step:

iOS Apps with no skills

By this time, iOS was already a force to reckon with. So expanding the Apps to the iOS platform was the next logical step. For that I initially outsourced the App-work to a consultancy from Pune. After that relationship gracefully ended, I got a freelancer from Romania whom I found via freelancer.com. Interestingly, I was his first client on that website! I believed in his work even though he had no prior experience or reviews to show on that website.

Hiring full-time engineers

A year and a half later, I started hiring full-time Android and iOS engineers and we grew into a team of 4!  This helped us release more features and had more control over our development.

For all my hiring needs, hasjob.co was the goto website!

We also hired freelance UI designers from freelancer.com as well as some local Indian designer from a very Indian website called worknhire.com

Localizing the Apps

Apart from expanding to other App Stores, Localization has given the most boost to the number of downloads. There are sizeable amount of non-English speaking users out there in the world. And Chess being a global game, it definitely made sense to localize the app into other popular languages and this helped us acquire new users.

The way we went about getting the Apps localized is by requesting our existing users who were good with English to help us translate into their language. And they happily obliged!

Customers as marketing department!

I have found that customers are the best marketing department any business can have. You get sticky and good quality customers. The important thing was to build something that users would love, keep the product as simple as possible and treat customers as humans. And the existing customers would automatically tell their friends about your product and help you grow.

We did not have a dedicated customer support personnel and I used to personally reply to each and every issue or email that would pop into the inbox. This helped keep a pulse on what is going on with the products (especially after a new update) and what the end user is going through. Lots of features were also built after receiving feedback from existing users.

I have seen many App developers treat users as if they are a pariah or try to show how dumb or ridiculous their demand is. Instead treat them with empath and see the results.

Some of our 1 star reviews which got converted to 5 stars just by replying quickly and showing genuine empathy:

Quickly resovling the user's issue turned this 1-star review into 5-star in a matter of hours!

"Developer quickly contacted me".. and a single ★ magically changed to ★★★★★

Sometimes I take the opportunity to reply back in the user's own language (ofcourse using Google Translate), so that the user does not need to translate it himself. Saves the user some time!

Even if some reviews are just two words, digging a little deeper always helps to understand more. After all you are cannot expect the end user to calmly jot down all issues he is facing. He is just going to take the shortest path to vent his frustration!

Hope you enjoyed reading. In the next post, and possibly the last I will talk about capturing new ideas and design inspirations.