You only have one chance to impress an investor. Make it count with a startup business plan by ThinkLions. We write custom plans that deliver your vision to angel investors and venture capitalists effectively.
You only have one chance to impress an investor. Make it count with a startup business plan by ThinkLions. We write custom plans that deliver your vision to angel investors and venture capitalists effectively.
You only have one chance to impress an investor. Make it count with a startup business plan by ThinkLions. We write custom plans that deliver your vision to angel investors and venture capitalists effectively.
You only have one chance to impress an investor. Make it count with a startup business plan by ThinkLions. We write custom plans that deliver your vision to angel investors and venture capitalists effectively.
What is Mobile App Advertising? The Value of In-App Advertising to Marketers Should You Offer Ads In Your Mobile App? Best In-App Advertising Platforms Making A Decision Mobile app advertising, or in-app advertising, has become one of the most successful monetization strategies for app entrepreneurs. For marketers, it is an effective method to reach targeted customers and drive new sales.…
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This week, our founder, Mike Sims, was interviewed by Harshit Bluja of BloggersIdeas. In this interview, he details his entrepreneurial journey, tells about his journey in writing winning business plans, and gives advice to up-and-coming entrepreneurs. BloggersIdeas is an awesome platform aimed to help bloggers & SEO’s who struggle to understand the concept of Internet Marketing. The following is an excerpt of the BloggersIdeas interview: First of all thanks a lot for coming on my blog Mike, you made my day by accepting my interview request. Tell me something about yourself & your entrepreneurial journey. My pleasure and I appreciate you having me! Honestly, I’m just a regular guy – a dad, a jokester, and someone who really loves seeing the beautiful things that the world has to offer. Just so happens, I have a knack for entrepreneurship as well. My entrepreneurial journey started in grade school. I stumbled upon a new website (at the time) called eBay, and began buying cool stuff and reselling to my classmates at school for a profit. Well, the school didn’t like that very much, so instead of getting expelled, I started a lawn care business. As an adult, I fell in love with technology and started a social media network for musicians which never took off. After a few other entrepreneurial attempts, I launched ThinkLions and I finally found my pathway to success. There were a lot of failures along my journey, but each one of them introduced solutions that made success possible today. Click Here To Read The BloggersIdeas Interview by Mike SimsMike Sims is a passionate startup consultant and the founder of ThinkLions and PitchLions. He enjoys helping tech entrepreneurs bring their startups to life through strategy, business planning, investor funding, and product development. Mike has written for Foundr, StartupNation, Launch House, YFS Magazine, Young Upstarts, and more. Connect with Mike on LinkedIn and Twitter! Join the Newsletter Receive Tips On Building Outstanding Tech and Succeeding As An App Startup. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *Email *CommentSubscribe Now Need Seed Money? Pitch your startup virtually to an audience of progressive investors. Raise the money you need to bring your startup to the next level. Find Out More Share this post:
The 3 Elements of a Great Brand Story How To Promote Your Brand Story Three Examples of Great Brand Stories Your Brand, Your Story Behind every business is a story, but knowing how to create a brand story that sells can be challenging for entrepreneurs. In his popular TED Talk, Simon Sinek constantly mentions, “People don’t buy what you do - they buy why you do it.” And he’s not wrong. In many studies, research has shown that customers don’t use logic to buy products and services. Rather, emotions are the primary influence on a customer’s purchasing decision. Need Funding For Your App Idea? Download Our FREE eBook now! Learn the expert secrets behind building successful apps that attract invertors and get funded! DOWNLOAD MY FREE EBOOK If there’s anything you can learn from the film industry - nothing evokes powerful emotions inside of a person more effectively than a great story. This is also supported by science. When we are captivated by a story, our brains release chemicals called cortisol and oxytocin - the former which helps our brain focus more on the story and the latter which produces ‘feel-good’ emotions inside us. That’s great and all, but how does this help your business or company? According to Harvard Business Review, here’s how: ‘With both oxytocin and cortisol in play, those who had the higher amounts of oxytocin were much more likely to give money to someone they’d never met.’ Great marketers are aware of this, and as a result, they use great stories in their advertising to promote their brands, attract more customers, and make more sales. However, just having a brand story isn’t enough. You need a great one. In this post, we’ll give you the tips you need to bring your brand story to life. The 3 Elements of a Great Brand Story Creating an awesome brand story for your company isn’t rocket science, but there is a formula to it. Let’s take a look at the three most important factors of an effective brand story. The First Element of A Great Brand Story: The Plot In every story, there is a plot; or, a structured format of each major event that takes place in the story. Just like a novel or a movie, the structure of your plot is more important than anything else. Even great scenes lose their impact if they are delivered in the wrong part of the plot without the necessary context. At its core, the job of a brand story is to tell consumers why your company exists, and clarify the value it brings to the consumer, the industry, or hey, even the world (you have to think big sometimes). Unfortunately, most companies don’t do this. Rather, they squander the opportunity to connect and instead, simply state who they are and what they do. Their story becomes a one-sided “me, me, me” story, without considering the needs and demands of the consumer. Since these types of brand stories are so common,…
What Is A Growth Strategy? Startup Growth Strategies for Establishment Startup Growth Strategies Startup Expansion Strategies The world is full of great app ideas – unfortunately, very few of them will ever reach the App Store. Even with a great business plan, the vast majority of new apps are bound to fail. And for the very few that do manage to survive the first year after launch, only a small fraction will ever reach financial success. According to Gartner, less than .01% of consumer apps that were available in 2014 were expected to become a ‘financial success’ by 2018. Some apps die because they are simply just a bad product-market fit; but often, app startups fail due to the lack of a sustainable startup growth strategy.Everyone makes a huge deal about apps that made millions in profit, but we rarely hear about the tech companies that are barely surviving. Ken Delaney of Gartner said, “…of paid applications, about 90 percent are downloaded less than 500 times per day and make less than $1,250 a day. This is only going to get worse in the future when there will be even greater competition, especially in successful markets.” What does this mean for you as an app entrepreneur? It means that to become a dominating app today, you basically need to be a unicorn; and to succeed at all, you must have a strong startup growth strategy that allows you to rise wayabove the competition. Need Funding For Your App Idea? Download Our FREE eBook now! Learn the expert secrets behind building successful apps that attract invertors and get funded! DOWNLOAD MY FREE EBOOK What Is A Growth Strategy? Let’s start from the basics. The definition of a growth strategy is a game plan for capturing a wider share of the market. For a more established business, this means diversifying product offerings, expanding into new regions and etc. A new startup however, must take a different approach to growth, first ensuring that they have built the right product and then identifying how to get even the first few users to their app. Another difference is, startups must rely mostly on internal growth strategies while established businesses that have enough resources can tap into external growth strategies for even quicker growth. What is an internal growth strategy? An internal growth strategy refers to techniques that grow your business by relying on resources from within the business.These methods involve activities such as improving staff, optimizing marketing, and further developing theproduct offering. What is an external growth strategy? An external growth strategy relies on external measures of growth such as acquiring another business or building a strategic alliance with another brand. External growth strategies can allow businesses to grow rapidly, but in the beginning, startups typically don’t have the resources needed to successfully implement these techniques. Acquiring technology takes money that startups don’t typically have, and strategic alliances often require a strong brand awareness and a highly-defined product – other attributes that startups don’t typically possess. Instead, startups must implement the right growth strategies at the right time to first acquire early adopters; then to establish the business within the market;…
When Should You Track App Metrics? Launching With The Right App Metrics Tracking The Growth Of Your App Using Metrics To Scale Your App The great baseball legend Yogi Berra once said,“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” While this lesson is applicable across almost any area of life – it’s especially critical in app development. Here’s the caveat; while an end goal is of critical importance, what is equally as important is being able to track the performance of this goal so that you clearly understand whether you are actually moving closer to that goal or pushing further away from it. While tracking performance for most businesses can be challenging for many businesses, app startups have an advantage – tracking app metrics is quite simple if you know what to track and what to look for. Unfortunately, many apps fail and there are definitely more failures than successes. Successful startups heavily assess the metrics associated with their application so that if something isn’t performing as expected, they can catch it quickly and bring it up to par. For many ‘failed’ apps, only a few numbers are given consideration – especially traffic and revenue. While these factors can give some insight into an app’s performance, high traffic and revenue alone doesn’t mean your app is succeeding. Consider these scenarios and whether they truly identify a successful startup situation: Need Funding For Your App Idea? Download Our FREE eBook now! Learn the expert secrets behind building successful apps that attract invertors and get funded! DOWNLOAD MY FREE EBOOK App “A” receives 50,000 new downloads every month, but only 1% of them visit the app a second time. App “B” earns $100,000/month in revenue; more than most app startups. However, they spend $110,000/month on advertising. App “C” has a download rate of 20,000 users per month to it’s free version, but almost no subscriptions to it’s premium versions. Are these apps successful? They are if you only consider traffic and/or revenue, but when considering other variables, it is obvious that neither of these examples are sustainable over the long term – and maybe not even over the short term. The key to ensuring that your app is performing successfully is to track the right KPIs; constantly checking them to make sure that you are reaching the right objectives. Why are app metrics important, specifically? They can help you identify opportunities to improve your software or strategy. They can help you identify when your strategy is not performing up to par. They give you a historical representation of whether you are experiencing growth over a specified period of time. In the following article, we will take a look at which app metrics are most important over each stage of the software development and launch process. When Should You Track App Metrics? There are many different types of app metrics that can be tracked, but knowing when to track each metric is as important as knowing which metrics…
How To Advertise An App – The Must Do’s Mobile App Advertising – Establishing Authority How To Advertise An App Through Communities Creating Media Relationships through PR Establishing Great Feedback – Reviews Advertising Apps By Thinking Outside The Box Advertise Your App Like A Marketing Master Developing an awesome app is hard work, but when it’s finally launched into the market, that’s where the real work begins. Many app developers and app entrepreneurs know how to create an app, but they have no idea how to advertise an app. The truth is, the mobile app market is highly competitive and advertising apps properly can be extremely difficult – especially when you are competing against established players with huge marketing budgets. It’s easy to envision the end result – millions of users downloading the app and telling their friends about it; but how to do you get there? How do you advertise an app? Even knowing where to start is a challenge, especially when your marketing budget is low or non-existent. In this post, we want to explore exactly what it takes to advertise apps the right way; getting your idea in front of the consumers who will most benefit from it and persuading them to download it. To get the best advice possible, we turned to several experienced app entrepreneurs, app marketers and marketing experts and asked them – what is the key to marketing and advertising apps? Need Funding For Your App Idea? Download Our FREE eBook now! Learn the expert secrets behind building successful apps that attract invertors and get funded! DOWNLOAD MY FREE EBOOK How To Advertise An App – The Must Do’sIt’s always nice to try out cool marketing tactics like contests, giveaways and other out-of-the-box ideas – but none of these methods are effective if a few app marketing basics have not been established. More specifically, every app startup needs to: build an associated website, optimize for App Store rankings (ASO), and optimize for Search Engine rankings (SEO). Andrew Glantz, founder of GiftAMeal, suggested the following – “There are several ‘must-dos’ when marketing apps. You need to ensure that your app is easily discoverable with valuable keywords, have preview appscreens that accurately capture the value of your app to potential users, and provide a compelling app description.”The way your app performs in the App Store is extremely important. Apps that are featured receive considerably more downloads than those that are not; and those that show up first for related keywords receive considerably more downloads than those that are ranked in lower positions. Not only does your app description need to be written with a persuasive and consumer-forward tone – it also needs to cover ASO basics to ensure that it is visible to potential users.Stav Tishler, Head of Marketing Communications at Lightricks gave the following advice, “SEO – that’s how people find your apps online. If you’re buried all the way on page 13 of a Google search result, will anyone ever find you? Does anyone even click to the second page of the SERP? I don’t know if I ever have.” SEO is competitive, and…
How To Make An App Go Viral – The Psychology Techniques To Make Your App Go Viral Does Going Viral Mean Instant Success? Winning The Viral Game From the offices of app startups to the boardrooms of multinational corporations, going “viral” has been a huge topic of discussion over the last several years. Viral traction is organic and quick acting, and if taken advantage of, can put your product or service in front of millions of eyes in the matter of days or even hours. These days, every app entrepreneur wants to know how to make an app go viral. With traditional routes, app developers may take years just to establish an initial base of a few thousand users. Those who go viral on the other hand, may be able to attract thousands of downloads within a matter of a minutes. From the outside, app virality seems like a stroke of luck – a cool app gets released at the right time and people love it so much that they want to tell all of their friends about it. It seems that the only difference between the overnight success of an app like Pokemon, and your new mobile app or game, is mere chance. However, this just simply isn’t the case. Apps go viral for the same reason that anything goes viral – and it’s more a matter of psychology and positioning than anything. If you’ve ever wondered how to make an app go viral, you’re in luck; in this guide we’re going to give you what you need to know to generate and maintain viral success for your mobile application. Need Funding For Your App Idea? Download Our FREE eBook now! Learn the expert secrets behind building successful apps that attract invertors and get funded! DOWNLOAD MY FREE EBOOK How To Make An App Go Viral – The Psychology Have you ever considered why some things go viral and why some things don’t? Consider this – a brand can spend thousands of dollars promoting a contest with the offer of a great reward and get no traction at all; while an individual can spend zero dollars pouring ice cold water on themselves – spurring the #IceBucketChallenge and generating engagement from hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of days. Social media especially, has given brands the opportunity to interact and attract consumers instantly; but with so many brands vying for their attention – consumers are in complete control of what they choose to read, view, download and share. Brands spend millions and millions of dollars creating content that consumers like, but ‘liking’ something doesn’t compel them to share it. What makes users share something? According to a study by The New York Times Customer Insight Group, there are five main reasons why people share things online : To bring valuable and entertaining content to others. To define ourselves to others. To grow and nourish our relationships. Self-fulfillment To get the word out about causes or brands. In other…
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