How to Find Winning App Ideas ft. Steve Young

[Music] hey code crew what's up it's chris here so today i am so excited to be talking to steve because a couple of days ago he reached out and he wanted to see if you guys would be interested in hearing about how to come up with the winning app ideas and i was like well this guy's reading my mind because as you guys know we're gonna start doing monthly app challenges and i've been racking my head about what sorts of apps i could create and i was kind of shooting in the dark i was thinking about what would i want but i didn't really have any sort of data or any sort of way to validate the idea and so i know steve's the guy to talk to when it comes to that sort of stuff he's got the number one app business podcast he's interview people director of shazam creator of color switch podcast is over hundreds of episodes long but as i understand today he's got a presentation for us to tell us exactly how to go through that process and not you know shoot in the dark and waste our time really figure out is my app idea does it have the potential to rank up there you know compete with the other apps in the space and at the end of the day generate a nice and healthy passive income for us so steve hi hey chris thanks for having me on we're close to seven or over 700 episodes now that is a lot yeah yeah man hey i wanted to provide my on your audience with the the tools and the step-by-step process on how to find winning app ideas i'll tell you a quick story why this i feel like it's so important i had a friend of mine who we ended up working together to help grow his app it was a game really well designed it was a scrabble meets solitaire game i thought everything was awesome we drove tens of thousands of downloads on a very limited budget he even spent more money on this we got it featured by apple like we did phenomenally well with this app yeah guess what happened chris well shut it down because it was not engaging enough it was not retaining its users and it wasn't monetizing enough and this was a game that he spent lots of time on and so he went through this exact process that i'm about to show you and it completely turned his company around because he had three months of cash runway left and he was like look i gotta figure out what's working in the app space and kind of make similar apps and when he did that it totally flipped his company around and he was able to save his company that's a great story that's amazing should i go into it then yeah yeah i'm excited i'm waiting let's do it because i was in a similar boat you know in 2011 i started making apps and i was like this would be cool and so right now i'm going to show you the step-by-step process and you're going to find that there are some apps out there making hundreds of thousand dollars a month and you would be like what this simple thing i can do this in a weekend using code with chris all right here we go chris all right guys so here's the tools app annie these are all free tools and i'll go into some of the paid options if you guys want to go more advanced but these are all free right now all right i'm in my app banning account here's what you're going to do you're going to sign in you can sign up for free and then you're going to go into the top charts here now obviously because of the things that are happening right now you're going to find that zoom all these other apps are doing pretty well and you're going to want to see what you want to see is what types of abs are grossing the most so the main column that you want to focus on is this grossing tab you're going to see the the more popular ones right fortnite tinder clash of clans all this stuff and so what i like to do is these are going to be the obvious ones so that you can see all the way to the top 100. what i like to do is let's say chris like do you have an idea like is there a certain category that you would want to focus on yeah i wanted to focus on health and wellness i'm really interested in that i think that's a huge part of our lives that are lacking especially um in the i.t space and so you know like meditation type of apps um home workouts that sort of stuff yeah and it's very telling so what you can do then is go into this category and then you can sort it by health and fitness and you can see which ones are the top grossing apps and you can go down as far as you want so maybe the most popular ones are gonna be the obvious ones and so i'm gonna scroll down fast and you slow me down if you need me to but you're gonna just look through some of these and you can sort get to 500 right and i found that you want to probably stay within the first 200 because once 500 they're probably not making as much money as you want okay so it's a great way to kind of look through everything and here's what you're gonna do you're gonna try to find an app so i found an app for you guys that i think is super easy to make i personally like the entertainment space sure because you know like you'd be surprised because i find that a little bit easier to make and like there's a celebrity voice changer app that is making three hundred thousand dollars that i found wow and i did a little analysis on this and so i found entertainment apps are pretty easy to make and so i like to explore that category right so here's an app that i found for you guys it's called find hidden objects in picture super simple app and here it is so it just says can you find all the hidden objects in this main picture my daughter has a book exactly like this no way for me yeah it's like where's waldo right yeah exactly super simple idea okay so here's what we're gonna do you find this app you're gonna go into a tool called sensor tower you're gonna sign up again free absolutely free or just send it for a trial if you need to and then i found this app so i clicked on it just to make sure we don't have any loading problems can i pause you there for a second steve so just to recap for for anyone as and also from my own understanding app annie was where we looked at kind of the top grossing charts basically to get an idea of what's making money what's working in the app store in terms of generating revenue but then now we're jumping over to sensor tower to look deeper into a specific app correct and why is that why we can't do that in app annie or it's a different tool yeah app annie won't expose those numbers because unless you pay essentially i see yeah yeah yeah that's absolutely right sorry then here's where it is right it's number 30 under top grossing and i i just scrolled right like i was just scrolling and then i was like what is this hidden find hidden objects in picture like that's a cool name for it and so i clicked into this and then i'm gonna go into why you might need this screen but here we won't see any revenue numbers so we'll need another tool to give us that okay great question so i'm interested to hour now what i did essentially was just look for that app and i just said find hidden objects in picture and then awesome i clicked on this and it brought me to here and here is the app page and this is where you can see the revenue numbers so they did in february 2020 they did about a million downloads and then 300 000 in revenue and obviously when you get these huge numbers they're going to be doing some advertising but just imagine if you don't obviously if you don't want to spend any money on marketing if you can just get a piece of the pie of that 300 000 and make a similar app just think like we as indies we probably just need to make a tenth of that and be like that's pretty good money right and so just think about that the value that's where you see okay here's an opportunity for me so maybe now i can spin it right now that now your wheels should be turning maybe i can spin it for kids or maybe i can have different animations or their hero characters or different graphics so you should go check out the app and figure out what's what it's doing and then figure out how you can easily create a similar app to it but one thing i want to note here is that it's hard to determine if maybe the advertising is completely driving the revenue like without the advertising that they'd have zero and so i just want to point out that you could keep scrolling down the list right there's 500 entries over on the app annie side and you can try and find an app that might not be doing zero like you know doing zero advertising so that you can model it after or get a better idea of what no advertising would look like true and i'm going to show you ways where you can you can still drive growth without advertising too and chris you brought up a good point too here's all the top in-app purchases so you know they're they're you can figure out are they making money off of ads on their own like is it ad generated or is it a subscription and mostly you're gonna find that a lot of these top grossing apps are subscription based and it's surprising the number of people that are in the weekly and i'll get into some of the things why you may not want to do weekly but you'll also find that a lot of these high-grossing apps are charging on a weekly basis wow okay so you're like wow this is great so easy to build we're gonna hop back into app annie and here's what you're gonna do you're gonna go into the review section right okay and then what you want to really look for are what are people loving about the app and then what are people not liking about the app and that gives you ideas on how you can improve upon an existing successful app idea and maybe things that you can keep in the app and so i'm in the ratings section and you can go and sort by the most critical right and here's why i'm telling you maybe you don't want to do a weekly subscription because the first review we see it's like this does not tell you that it will charge you weekly this app is a joke stay away right so be careful that's why i'm like you might want to do monthly you don't want to trick your users into it but you can start reading through what people hate about the game and how you might be able to improve upon it and so maybe they hate that they have to pay but look most people hate that they have to pay so i would i would probably like take that with a grain of salt but you can start reading through and you can sort this by english as you can see there's other languages up here you can sort it by english if you want worldwide you know there's a little filter here sorry my computer's getting stuck and it's crazy to me that it's got a cumulative rating of 2.6 but it's making 300 thousand dollars a year i'm sorry a month yeah well i think look i think if you do yeah totally right it's got tons of ratings and it was just the the thing is it was just launched may of 2019 so you can see that within center tower hop back that it was launched towards the end of may 2013 2019. so again you can start reading through these and figure out what is good about the app what is bad about the app how you can improve upon the app and start building a different version of this app now my friend that i told you earlier in the story early in their interview that's exactly what he did he created a similar app to what he found that he said i can do this i'm going to create this and create a very similar type of feel and he remixed it right he built a community to bond it without revealing what the app is he built he added some features that he thought would be more valuable than the existing app as well cool any questions here chris i mean this is just great like i can't believe this is free like this is a free account right yeah this this is definitely a free account my sensor tower is paid but you can get it for free because in one of my articles um around generating app ideas i i talk about this too and i talk about how you should look through in apps reviews but i told people to literally go on the app store and scroll through those reviews but this makes it so easy right yes yeah right and you can start really totally through critical and the favorable and so you can make it if you just want to see one stars you can do all that right here yeah this is gold this is time savings yeah and then here's the trend if you wanted to see that all right the next thing we want to do is look maybe you don't want to spend money on advertising totally understandable so how do you get growth one of the ways is through app store optimization which is essentially seo for the app store right having the right keywords in your app title your subtitle your keyword fields you can get in depth on this but i want to give you sort of a little taste of how you can start thinking about what to name that particular app now you have an app idea you know it's successful it's been proven you're going to build upon it you're going to maybe remix some things well you're going to go to another tool called app follow again this is a free account so everything you're seeing is from my free account you're gonna go into this traffic score section and then you're gonna put in the app that you just found so here's what i did chris i feel like this is like a cooking show you know like okay put these flavors and then boom it's done this is what i'm doing hey if we could automate all of this into a workflow and just you know have it pop out uh gold app ideas for us that'd be brilliant totally so i put fit in or find hidden objects in picture again right i put this app in this tool and this is what i love about app follow is it gives me all the keywords that they that apple is actually suggesting so if you put this app into apple search ads which you can do for free you're gonna get apple suggestions on what people this app should be bidding on the keywords that they should be bidding on so that's why i love this tool is because this is literally from apple's tool right like hey this is what apple's suggesting and what i found here is a lot of different keywords now it won't give you the difficulty but give you the popularity and so if you want to pay for some tools or maybe sign up for a free trial what i typically do is hit this little button right here to copy and then i put all these keywords into a pay tool so i can get the difficulty scores and what i've found are sometimes you'll get some misspellings you'll find oh these keywords have good traffic but low difficulty and so for you on a limited budget if you're not going to get any paid advertising well you're going to want to try to find those keywords with i would say anywhere from a score a popular score of above 30 and that has a lower difficulty score anywhere from 80 and up depending on the aso tool you're going to use okay you want that like because sensor tower will give you like a difficulty score similar to the popularity and so the lower the better there so i would say anything 30 and under from a difficulty score some other scores are chance so it's like the higher number is better but like lower difficulty would be three and under or if it's a chance score 70 above okay so just to see if i got this straight um this app follow doesn't tell you what the difficulty scores are but you take this list you pop it into your own keyword tool and there's just a whole number out there and usually keyword tools will have a difficulty score for you so you want to target can you repeat can you go back and which one should we be targeting the the lower difficulty scores and i i don't know how to explain the lower typically because it all depends on the aso tool you use yeah anything that i would say is below let's say a 30. so if it's on a one to ten scale yeah right three and under would be the ones that you want to target okay cool so below half below a third yeah all right and this is these keywords you're working into your uh your app title your description and that sort of stuff yeah okay i'll tell you exactly where you want to put them you want to put the most valuable keywords so let's say you found a gold mine you're like this keyword that's high traffic lower difficulty you definitely want to put it in the app title that has the most weight and so that's why i'm i want to share this with you guys before you even make the app is because then you can start thinking through let's say you find here there's one that i found here that i thought it was pretty valuable like puzzle right that's misspelled now i don't know what the difficulty is yet and i can kind of figure this out for you on the fly but this becomes like an interesting right like keyword because it's misspelled and it has decent traffic 35 is not too bad and so it might be a way that you start thinking through oh i might be able to incorporate this this keyword somehow and search without the e and without the vowels like that might be interesting i think it might be another app but these are now it gives you ideas on what you might be able to call that particular app okay okay make sense right okay because some app names you know they they spell things funny it's because i was about thinking you wouldn't want to literally put a typo into your app description that doesn't sound very professional but some app names are finally spelt like hexa right well actually chris so i had a client and it was a let's say it was puzzle app right without revealing too much either but let's say it was a puzzle app and we found a keyword like this puzzle now this has a higher difficulty so this is what i was referring to right sensor tower is going to give you and this is a paid one but 8.3 which is really high because since you want it to be low so this wouldn't be a keyword that i would want to target but we found one that was a misspelling like this and it had a very low difficulty with similar traffic scores and we didn't use it in a prominent place because obviously you don't want a misspelling there but we did put it into so there's a trick where you can use the spanish mexico there's a spanish localization within the app stores and you can put english keywords in there so rather than putting spanish because it's really meant for the mexico mexico market but if you put english in there it's indexed by the us app store and so what we did chris we put that particular misspelling into the spanish mexico title or you could put in subtitle and we were able to rank number one in two i think it was top two for that keyword and that dramatically helped us grow downloads for this particular app wow that's a ninja hack right there it's like doubling the space you have to put your keywords and your descriptions and stuff right and so what i really want to show with this was thinking about ways that you can sort of use different keywords on how you might be wanting to name your particular app so whether it's hidden objects in a picture obviously this app title is going after a ton of keywords right find hidden objects in picture that is right i am trying to optimize for a lot of different keywords and you know i mean this exercise is really helpful right now because this is the process where you're thinking about your app idea you haven't created yet you haven't named it yet but let's say you have and then you're doing this after that are you able to just change your app name maybe rebranding inside the app might be difficult but in terms of an app store listing can you just go ahead and change the title yeah so before we move on to that and i'm going to answer that question i do want to show one last thing so within app annie you can go to this other tab so you saw the reviews right and you can go into keywords and what i like about app annie again this is free your app and is the only tool that will give you the keywords that this particular app ranks well for so then it'll give you ideas on oh now you don't know if this has traffic unfortunately unless you pay but it will give you ideas on what keywords are driving growth as long as there are there's traffic for these particular keywords what keywords are driving growth for this particular app and so it's a great way to start obviously doing more keyword research and figuring out what keywords to use within your app and title okay great so back to your question about i've already launched it steve i watched this a little bit too late it's out in the app stores but what you can do is change the title so you still want certain keywords within the title and you can still use these free tools to figure out what those titles are going to be but you can change that you just need to upload a new build and from a code perspective that build could be the same thing but you do need to upload a new build got it so the the other thing i would say chris if you start thinking about icons are very important screenshots are very important you want your screenshots to have a little bit of social proof or talk about the benefits i think too many times developers and i follow you on instagram the they just put the screen of the app right so you want to put certain keywords not keywords but here's this is a simple way like can you find all the hidden objects i immediately get what the game is all about yeah based on this so if you just put this screen that just shows you a screen of the actual gameplay it's not helpful add some screens in here you found it well done challenge yourself win a trophy i mean these are simple screenshots and this this app is making 300 000 a month right but like you can add more stuff like compete with your friends or harder than you think so these are there are ways and you can going back to sensor tower you can see what ads are performing well for them and that can give you inspirations on what kind of screenshots because you know if they're running they're spending money on this this is probably a high performing ad right so this will give you some inspiration on what types of words that you can use because they're running this as an ad for your screenshots that's brilliant yeah i mean so that's mainly it i don't know if you had any other questions yeah just a couple of comments on on the screenshot front because it goes back to the whole don't make me think philosophy right so make it really simple um anything that people are spending brain power on there's the chance for them to just hit that back button right totally totally i'm so glad you brought this up because i was reading this book too and i'm a big believer in this we've we've a b tested a bunch of this sometimes we try to be too clever for our own good right and you came up with a brilliant youtube channel code with chris i get it and i think it's the clear titles the clear app names the clear messaging that wins over and over again rather than you trying to be too clever yeah yeah right now i'm going through this book without going too far into a tangent but it's called story brand and it's dude i'm doing the same thing yeah all right let's chat about it later but anyways it's clear messaging is the main pitch of that book but going back to the app stuff um this is gold this is brilliant because it's a data driven way right to get some proven app ideas but one thing i'm sure are on people's minds are okay we're modeling our app idea after something that's successful but inherently then you're thinking that you need to beat them or are you just trying to get a little bit of that success unless you have the biggest budget and you want to try to beat them look i'm all for it but i think what you want to try to do is figure out what's already working and then just improve upon it and as an indie developer out there who's just getting started well too many times we all have this very similar story of our first app and being so beautiful and spending so much time on it and then checking the app stores every day and being like oh i'm gonna see a million dollars right after launch right and that doesn't happen right and so it's a proven model that helped save my friends company who's already made apps was making money just didn't couldn't find a way to sustain that growth it's a proven model to do it that way and so as a startup as an indie you just want a piece of that pie of a proven model and i i think it's it's almost like um i think a lot of people approach this when they want to build an app they have their own great idea maybe something that it doesn't even exist right there right and so you're you're putting it out there and you want to take a chance i think that's cool because it's your own creative idea and it's like a labor of love right it's something that you want to see out in reality but what you want might not be the thing that particularly sells i think it goes back to authors right some people just want to write what they want to write and some people need to write or maybe movies right like indie films versus blockbusters there's a certain type of book or film or app that works and sells right and so what would you recommend for someone i guess it really depends on their goal right if they're trying to make money from the app store or not yeah i think you know and i think building a a new brand or a completely different app idea is going to take a lot of investment and so if this is going to be your first couple of abs then start small start with a proven model and then you can always level up right and so there are friends of ours that have built an app that's very successful now they want to take it to the next level right and so i think if you're just starting out that journey you want to find something that's proven because too many times we all have this energy that we want to learn something we build it and we get it out there and we just don't see it and it becomes deflating and we just don't get motivated and so i think that's the way i see life is i can start this now it's going to be popular or i'm going to get it to a certain level and then if it's making money great i'm going to move on to something bigger and now i have a story that says look i already made a successful app i'm going after a bigger vision this brand new app idea that nobody's ever seen now maybe you need some investors for that too yeah and now you've got some capital to invest into your new idea which is maybe something nobody has ever seen and you have to educate the population on on what this is and why it's good and you know that takes a lot more investment that's a good point right and you know i point to this because i get this question too but i point to this app called hooked where you'll be familiar with it chris it's the stories one yeah it's the chat stories right okay and so very you got to check it out like it is so well done in in terms of the onboarding process like i literally wanted to sign up after going through that tutorial but they sort of created a brand new category right nobody knew about what chat stories were until she created this category and she was a past podcast guest of mine but essentially like that's hard but she came from a company where she created an app that's mule bot right and so now there's some capital now she can try to do something different and she has some experience with it so i think when you're building that first app you don't know the intricacies hey what should i call my app title what should have my subtitles be what should my screenshots and then i didn't know i had to get apple to approve every little thing that i'm gonna build right like and so there's all these little intricacies that you don't know until you actually go through it and going through it with a winning model will give you that motivation to keep going because i know back in the day when i created my app i was like remixing certain things and i was just like oh this would be a great app idea and it launched it as a paid app and back then in 2011 paid apps were still profitable and so that next day i was like hey honey you know trust this watch this because my very first app got like thousands of downloads a day as a free app so i was like oh if i can get like half of that we're gonna be great but it was zero and then i just started implementing more like i added color i started changing some screenshots and then it got to a pretty good level where i was making you know two three thousand dollars a month and i was like pretty happy with this because i was just died right yeah that's awesome yeah so if someone follows that strategy to find you know good app ideas to model after are there any kind of red flags that would say no you shouldn't you shouldn't follow this app idea you shouldn't try to compete with it you know what are the things that should dissuade someone from proceeding great question i think it would be anything that you'd feel like is trendy right okay so i guess you know with the coronavirus going on right now it would be something that you feel like this isn't this doesn't have legs like there's things where it's gonna pop and then it's gonna go down so i think like things like casual games where things are the very their life cycle is very very small right their lifetime value and so that needs a lot of budget a lot of things and what i would look for is how long has the app been out how long are they been doing this is this just a spike a trendy thing that's gonna go away or is this something built upon something else an existing idea like you said with the hidden that app that we kind of featured you said my daughter has a book about this yeah that's a great like aha like it's already existing somewhere else i'm gonna make it even better yeah that's awesome and so it goes back to um looking for types of apps that would be useful you know not just trendy and might go away right um and the other types of apps that are more long-term are content-based ones so i want to get your thoughts around you know apps that are only useful uh because of the content that they provide like spotify and audible because when people ask me about um if i want to make money out of the app store my first thoughts are like i want to create because i mean code with chris is a content-based business i'm thinking content right i'm thinking oh i'll create an app that has a lot of valuable content and i would charge a subscription for it but obviously content-based businesses or sorry apps i think also have downsides so i'd like to get your input on content or not i love content-based businesses i just think it requires a lot like you know because we're both sort of in a content based business you got to keep creating the content so it's not just one of these things like a fine hidden objects thing i have a friend of mine that does a sleep sounds app that does pretty well in the app store like you know above 50k a month in simple designs and he doesn't have to create much more content as long as the functionality is there so if with a content base i think it's a great model i just think it's more of an active income rather than a passive one so if you're looking for a passive one that you can sort of just let it out there and kind of stay back then you know these type of apps are the ones that are better but one of the things to keep users engaged is to create new content so i think i guess i'm contradicting myself at the same sentence but like you're always going to need to create new content regardless but i like the content if you can do it yeah i mean there there's a big difference because a content based business is you're creating a lot of content whereas the other types of apps i i think with it goes without saying that if you just let your app go stale um things change right rankings change competitors pop up and stuff so you kind of have to be staying on top of it so it's not completely passive but it's more passive than actively working for for someone so yeah anyways that's awesome steve i'm so glad that we had this call because i don't have any sort of content like this i don't it's not really my expertise so i'm so glad that you reached out yeah so can you tell us where people can find out more about you where to join your podcast and your site yeah you just go to appmasters.com we also have a youtube channel so check that out as well at masters.com youtube but chris like i want to talk to one last thing is you know i think we try to innovate too much and a lot of times if you do the research kind of like what you and i were talking about before we hit record about like i was just asking about youtube strategy and you're like look i just do research on what people are kind of looking for and i create content around that and so if you can do that if you think about the the main pillars of any business or anything that we need in our life you think about that like habits with productivity these are things that people are searching for so you want to create an app that people actually want and use because sometimes our ideas we think are cool but maybe the market doesn't think it's cool so the market never lies and this is a way for you to kind of listen to the market and improve upon it as well yeah i love it absolutely all right so thank you so much steve and uh i'll chat with you again i'm sure thanks chris all right see ya [Music] pink

Channel: CodeWithChris

Views: 15,359

Keywords: app ideas, app idea, mobile app ideas, proven app ideas, app masters, steve young, appmasters, codewithchris, programming, coding, app development, app annie, sensor tower, app marketing, appstore, app store

Id: PZvVjZTBsIU

Length: 32min 46sec (1966 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020