In March, AppFollow made its ASO Tools mobile app optimization tool free. In this regard, we talked with her co-founder about the history of the company, about how Russian business incubators differ from foreign ones, as well as, of course, about working on ASO and a new tool.
I answered the questions Anatoly Sharifulin, CEO & Co-founder in AppFollow.io .
Alexander Semenov, Senior Editor App2Top.ru Questioner: We will start with business. At one time you were responsible for the mobile direction of the “Island”. Then he suddenly left and launched his own startup – AppFollow. Why didn’t I do the project within the framework of the company where I worked?
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Anatoly Sharifulin
Anatoly Sharifulin, CEO & Co-founder in AppFollow.io : I had no idea to launch something of my own within the framework of the “Island”, as this would be a focus for the company, plus my main experience is about mobile, not travel and hotel reservations. After the “Island” I received several job offers from other companies, but I quickly realized that none of them would allow me to open up 100%. The most interesting offer was from Wargaming — a pre-production producer at Blitz.
As a result, I decided to do something of my own and the most obvious was consulting in the field of mobile applications, the main request was for a newfangled ASO at that time, as well as competitive analysis. In addition, I have lectured several times on the promotion and analytics of mobile applications.
Working on ASO and application analysis, I was constantly “steaming”, many data had to be collected manually, and they tend to become outdated quickly. Most of this work turned out to be possible to automate and make life easier not only for yourself, but also for customers. The services that existed at that time did not meet my needs. That’s when I decided I needed to do something of my own, and that’s how AppFollow appeared.
At that time, the service consisted of only two simple scripts: the first collected reviews for a given list of applications, the second allowed you to view a matrix of search queries for all these applications. We wrote a script based on reviews at an internal hackathon for a day with Pavel Vlasov (co-founder and CTO in AppFollow). We had 20-30 testers, mostly acquaintances from the mobile market. One of these was Evgeny Kruglov from MobiGear, he sent me feedback every day and, in a good sense of the word, “tormented” me with his “wishlist”. A little later, I invited him to become a co-founder in AppFollow.
AppFollow is a participant of two business accelerators. Domestic FRIA and Finnish Startup Sauna. In general, why did you go to accelerators, what can they give? And why at once at two?
ANATOLY: In fact, the AppFollow company started its activity in FRIA. In a short time, we wanted to make a product out of a prototype, get the first customers and build a business that could be scaled. We were refused several times at the selection stage, as there was no finished product and no first sales. But we persevered, and we managed to convince the analysts of the FRIA that we would cope with the program and show a multiple growth.
During the acceleration, we got an excellent experience, conducted hundreds of interviews, rethought the approach to development and started earning with the help of the service, beating off the costs of servers and accounting services. By the way, we were launched as “competitor application analytics”.
At that time we had only Russian-speaking clients. We wanted to make a global service for mobile developers and marketers from all over the world, so the personal account and service mailings were immediately in English. But none of the team had any experience launching products to the world and, as a result, a simple translation of the site from Russian into English did not give us the desired result.
That is why we decided that we needed an accelerator either in Europe or in the USA, within which we could repeat everything that we did in the FRIA, only in English.
According to the recommendations of friends, we decided to go to the Startup Sauna, the recruitment of which started a few months after the end of acceleration in the FRIA.
At Startup Sauna, we got a good experience of presenting the service, talked to a large number of mentors and potential investors, and all this in English, plus we got the first English-speaking clients and founded a parent company in Finland.
After the acceleration in Startup Sauna, we made a small pivot, AppFollow became a service for monitoring applications, and competitive analysis became only a special case, since there is not much difference between tracking your own applications and competitors’ applications.
What was the difference between accelerators?
Anatoliy: In short, each accelerator is about its own. At FRIA, we were taught to survive and develop a company based on key metrics, and at Startup Sauna — to be able to quickly and clearly tell about ourselves, market positioning and communication with customers, so that the experience gained in each of the accelerators complemented each other.
Which incubator turned out to be more useful in terms of experience, connections and, of course, money?
ANATOLY: At FRIA, we learned how to work according to the Customer Development methodology, count metrics, experiment with HADI cycles, and also got acquainted with the venture business in Russia.
In Startup Sauna, the main focus was on pitching, positioning and delivering value to users. We also learned how venture works in Europe, what are the differences from Russia and the USA.
In terms of connections, we got more in Startup Sauna. I was surprised by the speed with which we were introduced to Rovio and Supercell, and we found out why at the current stage such large gaming companies cannot be our customers. Together with Startup Sauna, we had a road show in Silicon Valley, where we met American investors and mentors. As far as I know, a similar program has appeared in the FRIA this year.
We closed our first round after two accelerations, I think it was a cumulative effect.
You raised the investment and you were valued at $3 million. What did the money go for and how much is the company worth now?
Anatoliy: The main goal of our round was to get funds for further development of the service and hiring a full-fledged team. It seems to us that we have more or less coped with this, although it was not easy. During the year, we have established work within the team, consistently release new features and work with clients from all over the world. Now there are more than 10 thousand users in the service — we have grown 10 times in a year after the deal.
As for the evaluation of the company, we believe that it has also grown, and we will be able to confirm this when we assemble the next round, the purpose of which is even more active international development of the service.
It seems that we haven’t heard much about you in the last six months. And there is a subjective feeling that you have become more active only this spring. What is the reason for this? A new round?
Anatoliy: This is partly true: last fall we slowed down a bit in promotion, since the development of the company required a lot of time and resources, but since the end of last year we have started to actively talk about ourselves again. However, mainly on foreign sites, as we actively attracted customers from the USA and Europe.
From a marketing perspective, we regularly announce new AppFollow features. So, last September we launched version 2.0, collected 1300+ upvotes on Product Hunt, and in December we got into the nomination “Best Bot of the Year” on the same site. In February, we launched free ASO Tools, and more recently announced the ability to respond to reviews directly from Slack. So that life inside the AppFollow is boiling.
We also try to actively participate in conferences and meetups, at the end of last year we visited Slush in Helsinki again. This year we took part in the Startup Grind in San Francisco, got into the #NordicMade selection, and also visited the Slack Workshop in Berlin, held an ASO-meetup in Moscow and performed at the Product Camp in St. Petersburg. We plan to attend several more specialized events and conferences in the fall.
Perhaps such a subjective feeling arose because we do not have a full-time marketer, we do everything on our own in conditions of limited resources. By the way, we are open to suggestions.
You just mentioned that you recently made ASO Tools free. What for?
Anatoliy: Look, AppFollow itself has been free for over a year. However, with reservations. In March last year, we launched the second version of the product, in which a new tariff plan appeared — tracking 2 applications in 2 countries and 20 keywords for free. This was done because we changed the model from a hard trial to a freemium. Due to this, we received a strong growth in the active audience of the service, which, among other things, influenced the growth in the number of paid customers.
And in March of this year, we added ASO Tools to this free tariff. This is a specific product that is still understandable to a rather narrow audience, which should not only know all the terms, but also understand how such tools work. By attracting professionals to our service, we hope to popularize the main functions — application monitoring and working with reviews.
In general, ASO helps us to “keep up with the topic”, develop our own expertise in optimizing applications, understand the client and his needs. That’s why we have a team of ASO specialists who work with our clients’ applications every day. Last year, we developed several tools for ourselves that simplified our work. We started showing these developments to customers, and everyone spoke positively about them. As a result, we decided to expand the capabilities of our service and launched ASO Tools for everyone, and due to the fact that they are free, anyone can try them, and if they like it, then start using the whole service.
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Well, since we have already touched on it, let’s discuss the topic of ASO in a little more detail. Usually, for what purpose do companies start doing it?
Anatoliy: A lot of good apps are invisible to users in the App Store and Google Play, so you need to choose the “right” keywords and make a good page so that anyone can easily find and install the app.
But it’s not always easy. The way users search through a mobile phone is very different from how it happens on a computer. Knowing this, you need to optimize the name, description, icons and screenshots so that it is your application that appears first in the search query, and its icon and pictures attract the attention of as many users as possible. Simply put, ASO is SEO for apps in the App Store and Google Play.
You yourself wrote that a sensible ASO setup can increase downloads by 50% or more, but it turns out that this is not a universal medicine. If you don’t have money for traffic, will you just get 100 downloads a day instead of 50?
Anatoliy: Firstly, ASO is not a panacea, but just a channel for receiving installations. Sometimes even a small increase in conversion to installation can give a noticeable increase in the long term or help save advertising budgets when purchasing paid traffic.
Secondly, ASO is a constant work on optimizing the application, as new competitors are constantly appearing, creativity is “burning out”, ranking algorithms in app stores are changing, and so on.
Third, the same optimization approaches work differently for different applications. And it is not known in advance exactly how optimization will affect, given the competitiveness of the application.
That is, the sooner the application developer learns to influence it, to know what works and what doesn’t in his particular case, the easier it will be later.
Regarding 50 and 100 downloads per day, let’s look at an example — to test the product hypothesis, cohorts of 1000 users are needed, if you do not perform ASO optimization of the application, then you will have to wait 20 days to collect the first cohort, taking into account the outflow, then even longer. If you can replace text and graphics in the app store, and this will reduce the waiting time by at least half, what could be better? But it doesn’t end with one test, in six months or a year, 100 downloads per day can turn into 400. It is only necessary to start.
Usually, an individual is taken into the team under the ASO setup, as it was with SEO in its time, or is everything easier here?
Anatoliy: In different ways, it all depends on the scale of the company. If the application is launched all over the world and you need to keep 35 languages up to date, then you can’t do without a dedicated ASO specialist. For indie developers, it is enough once to understand how to optimize applications, then they will be able to repeat this with each release or release of a new application.
Usually, ASO is understood as setting up keywords, testing icons for conversion. All this can be done by hand, then why do we need AppFollow or similar services?
Our service helps to collect data, generate reports, notify about important events in applications, and so on. If you have one application that works only in one country, then you can certainly cope without additional services. But as soon as the number of countries, applications or tools that are used in data analysis increases, it becomes more difficult to do without the help of third-party solutions.
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Well, let’s talk about the plans. What to expect from you in the near future?
Anatoliy: Most recently, we launched feedback responses for iOS and Android apps. Now you can communicate with the user in the form of a dialog (chat). Accordingly, we plan to make a number of integrations with popular ticket systems such as Zendesk, Freshdesk, Helpshift, HelpScout, Intercom and others so that you can respond to reviews as to a regular letter.
At the end of the summer, wait for the announcement of version 3.0 from us, prepare your likes and upvotes.
A few words about the new accelerations. We are pleased with the experience we have gained in the FRIA and Startup Sauna, we have changed and grown a lot in a year after the accelerations. And at the moment we are ready to “accelerate” again. That is why we are constantly applying to Y Combinator — it is the top accelerator in the world. For us, this is a great exercise to look at ourselves, at our growth and understand that we are doing something wrong or have started to slip. Last time we got to a video interview with a partner from YC. Who knows what will come of it.