My side project app Deposur crossed 1,000 Users. How did we acquire the users?

My side project app Deposur crossed 1,000 Users. How did we acquire the users?

Basic tips for acquiring users on the app store.

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4 min read

Deposur reached 1,000 users today ๐ŸŽˆ

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My side project Deposur reached 1,000 users today which is an amazing number for me. We never thought that we will have that many users just 6 months after the launch. For those of you who don't know Deposur, it is a portfolio tracking app and the main vision is to provide as much information about your personal financial situation as possible. Currently, it is just available in Germany.

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In this post, I will go through the top reasons why I think we could acquire the main user base.

We released Deposur on 2021-06-12 in both the AppStore and the PlayStore and could gain about 1,002 users since then. The majority of our users (>95%) are free users.

I want to show this milestone because we could gain that many users without any additional marketing. The main marketing effort so far is some tweets (way too less IMO) and one LinkedIn post. All other traffic comes purely from the app stores and almost completely from iOS. So far we haven't bought any Ads and really didn't focus much on Marketing. We have an Instagram account but are not really super active on it.

Would I recommend doing the same? No, not at all. But the intention of building Deposur was to build an app to analyze our own portfolios in a nice way. And we also wanted to build a product from beginning to end and learn a lot and that is definitely what we did.

Let's go through the reasons why I think that Deposur gained a user base in the App Stores.

How did we acquire 1,000 users?

I have a few (really obvious) assumptions why we could gain a few users that I want to share.

Good App Store Appearance

Appearance matters a lot. Especially in a highly volatile market like mobile apps, people download the apps they like visually. We all know that humans are visual creatures, that is why it was absolutely important for us to have a good and nice-looking AppStore appearance.

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This is fairly easy to achieve. You do some high-quality pictures of your app and add a lot of information and you already have a great layout. The design of the actual product counts of course as well. If your app doesn't look nice, the screenshots won't as well ๐Ÿ˜‰. Just get inspiration from some other really great apps and stick to a similar layout.

ASO / SEO

The equivalent to SEO (Search-Engine Optimization) for AppStores is ASO (AppStore Search Optimization). For App Stores, it is not that easy as with SEO in my eyes because you cannot trick that much with any heads, canonical links, etc. The good thing is that you can purely focus on the text, keywords, and title you are adding. Unfortunately, I can't show you too much because currently, everything is in German. But the process is fairly easy. First of all, think about which problem you want to tackle and write down some keywords. For Deposur it was for example:

  • Portfolioรผbersicht
  • Performance tracking
  • Portfolio tracking

Then try to add these keywords naturally into your text and add them in the keyword sections as well. I know, nothing spectacular new here but this is basically how it works. If I search for "Portfolioรผbersicht" I will find Deposur in the first place.

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Reviews

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We focused from the beginning on customer validation and conversations. Each time we talked to a customer we simply asked for a review when they are happy. Many of them were, so we received about 30 reviews really fast. I am pretty sure that the ASO algorithm ranks apps better than receiving reviews in a constant flow instead of just one-time reviews, so that pushed us as well.

Product

Simply put, develop a good product that people need. We didn't do too much validation at the beginning and simply developed it for ourselves. Somehow there is enough demand out there for portfolio tracking apps. I think especially with the trend of investing more and more into stocks and ETFs we are in a really great market. If your product can solve a small portion of the problem your users have you will have organic growth.

Summary

In summary and retrospect, I think we fulfilled the basic & boring requirements for a good working app. None of the points I've introduced is something special by itself but I think every mobile app should definitely fulfill these basics:

  • Nice appearance on the app store
  • ASO
  • Reviews
  • Product which solves what we promise

There are many ways in how we could further improve the growth and conversion even better. But so far we are really proud of this milestone and look forward to improving the product even more.

If you want to follow my journey, consider following my Twitter ๐Ÿ™‚

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