We’re down here at WWDC, fishing for ProTips. It’s rich hunting ground. WWDC is the world’s biggest gathering of Apple developers, the alpha geeks, experts par excellence. What’s a ProTip? A ProTip is a nugget of knowledge, a little bit of expertise from someone in the know — a pro.
Astro HQ is a two-person indie software company that launched its first app in February.
Run by two ex-Apple engineers — Matt Ronge and Giovanni Donelli — their app was successful. They’re now making their livelihoods from their software. They’re living the dream! Independent app developers!
They’re as rare as unicorns.
Only 0.01 percent of app developers are financially successful, according to a depressing survey by Gartner.
Ronge and Donelli did a lot of things right, including their own app marketing, which they say was key to their successful launch.
They did the app marketing themselves, with no prior experience, and a lot of what they learned was thanks to one book.
The book is The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! by Al Riess and Jack Trout. (It’s available here from Amazon).
“It’s old book but I really recommend it,” said Ronge during an Alt Conf talk entitled “Lessons in app PR: How to Launch.”
“I read a lot of marketing books and most of them are fluff,” Ronge added afterwards. “This was all good, concrete stuff. Very short and very actionable.”
Ronge and Donelli’s app is called Astropad. It turns an iPad into high-end graphics tablet. It mirrors a portion of the Mac’s screen on the iPad, allowing it to be manipulated with a pressure-sensitive stylus. “You can draw on your Mac using your iPad,” said Ronge.
They launched the app in February, and it was an immediate hit, thanks in large part to all the attention and press they generated. They were featured on The Verge, The Next Web, Business Insider and more. Their DIY PR drove a ton of traffic to their site and created wide awareness of their app, which translated into more than 50,000 paying customers.
PR is often overlooked by indie developers. But one of the biggest hurdles in the overcrowded app store is just letting the world know you even exist.
“It was way beyond our wildest dreams,” said Ronge. “We hoped to get that but we never expected it.”
Ronge can be followed @mronge.
Do you agree? Is there a better book out there?
Tune in for more ProTips here. We’ll be publishing them from WWDC all week.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
