Launching an iPhone App on the Cheap

At Hello Baby we have recently launched our own iPhone app, which has been extremely successful and I’d like to share how we did it.

The Idea

My 2 year old daughter loves my iPhone and so I got the idea to develop an app specially for toddlers.  Toddlers aren’t terribly sophisticated when it comes to software and so got the idea for an app which would show a picture of an animal when it was shaken or the screen touched, and make the animals noise.

The app is free to download but branded Hello Baby with a link to the store.

Development

Being cheap I found a developer via eLance to develop the application.  In case you are not aware of it, eLance is a an international marketplace for services and I have used it in the past for blog development and link building to great success.

My developer, Qiu, lives and China and certainly knew his way round iPhone development.  My advice with offshoring work is to work out a tight spec for the product and give this to the developer along with all the collaterals.  I had some design work done in the UK by Maria Fung and used additional materials from iStock photo.

Publicity

I wrote a press release for the iPhone app which I distributed using Daryl Wilcox publishing and journalism.co.uk.  I’ve used PRWeb in the past but these two platforms (especially DWP) seem to have a network of UK journalists who actually read the press releases.  The distributed press release got us coverage on Mac world and family friendly working.  I also emailed the press release to the major baby magazines an got coverage in three of the nationals.

Results

As well as generating some great PR, the app is now contributing 80-100 unique visitors to the site a day and has had around 11,000 downloads.  Not bad for about £600 outlay.

Incidentally, field tests with the target audience (2 year olds) have been mostly positive!