Ep. #981 - How to Market Your Mobile App

Matt Watson 00:00
And we’re back for another episode of the Startup Hustle. This is your host today, Matt Watson; excited to be joined today by Zino Rost van Tonningen from TyrAds. We’re going to be talking today about mobile apps and marketing. You know, I’ve always wondered how these mobile apps get millions and billions of users. And how to create a mobile app and launch it in the App Store. If anybody really cares that I do that and download it. So hopefully, we’re gonna learn all about that today: about how to market a mobile app and get billions of users. I think this is gonna be a good one today. So today’s episode of Startup Hustle is sponsored by Double. A flexible assistant service for busy executives that match you with an experienced assistant. Double handles all of the upfront, time-consuming items, such as interviewing, matching, onboarding, invoicing, and training. Go to withdouble.com today and get 50% off your first month when you sign up with the code HUSTLE22. Zino, how are you doing today?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 01:01
I’m doing great. How about you?

Matt Watson 01:04
Just living the dream. Although I would rather be where you are today. I know you’re a world traveler. And your company is actually based out of Singapore. But did you say you were in Bali today?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 01:16
Yeah, it’s actually right now. I’m in Bali. I’ve been living here for about two and a half years. But Indonesia is about three and a half years in total. So yeah, I absolutely love it here.

Matt Watson 01:29
Well, I’ve never been there, but I’ve been to Singapore. And it’s one of my absolute favorite places I’ve ever been. And we could talk all day about Southeast Asia and travel, but I don’t think anybody cares. So my question for you then is to tell us about your background. And I know you said you’re actually Dutch and you lived in California. And somehow or another, you ended up in Southeast Asia. So I would love to hear about your background and how you started your ads.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 01:58
Yeah, cool. So I actually studied in a very different area. I actually studied automotive business management. And I made car sales for about a year, but then, I didn’t really want to do this anymore. So eventually, I started into mobile app marketing. About seven years ago, I had a company before this with my brother in the Netherlands. And after about three or four years there, I chose to go to Asia and leave the company over to my brother. And then start up something new in Southeast Asia because I thought that it would be a good market to go into. And ever since then, I’ve been in Southeast Asia, really. So it’s 219. I’ve been here and doing mobile app marketing for apps in Southeast Asia. And after two years, we also went back to Europe and the United States. So basically, globally, we’re doing app marketing across the board.

Matt Watson 03:03
Okay, so do you guys have a certain specialty? What does TyrAds do like if I sign up for TyrAds? Who’s your target customer? And, like, what kind of services do you provide them?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 03:15
Yeah, so we mainly help apps that want to promote when they’ve already got their foot in the door a little bit with their initial users. So what I mean with that is like they’ve already started with their Facebook campaigns, their AdWords campaigns, you know, they already know what the funnel looks like. And what they’re really looking to go for is like breakthroughs and really scale up. So our company really helps app developers that want to go from like 100k downloads to 10 million plus downloads. So really, they need to scale quickly. They need to get that done. They may be venture capitalists or anything like that that needs to fuel that growth, and they need to show growth numbers. And our company is really there to help them support that growth and get it done in the timeframe that they need it.

Matt Watson 03:59
So these are all primarily B2C companies, right? They’re consumer-facing. Right. Yeah, mainly consumer-facing.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 04:05
They’re also some b2b apps in Indonesia. Because it’s a very large market. It’s like merchants, like that they have local merchants so that the app isn’t a mega merchants app. But that’s less of the number of apps. It’s like 10% of the apps. I would say it was even less than 5% of the apps that would be what we promote, but mainly b2c apps. Yeah.

Matt Watson 04:27
So do you have customers from all over the world? Or do you focus primarily on like US market in Southeast Asia?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 04:36
Or do you have customers all across the board? We have a wide range of different types of clients, actually. So in Southeast Asia, we have a big, big presence. So the majority of the team is in Southeast Asia. But we also have them in Europe and the United States. We also have team members of ours and clients as well. And our clients are from China to Singapore. Indonesia, the Philippines, Europe, most countries of Europe and the United States, and all over the place, basically. Yeah.

Matt Watson 05:07
So if somebody has a mobile game or something like that, and they’ve got 20,000 People that have downloaded their game, they turn to somebody like you to figure out like, hey, how do we get? How do we acquire new customers for 50 cents, or $5, a user or whatever it would be like, that’s, that’s your guys’ kind of sweet spot is to help them figure out how to do that.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 05:29
Yeah, so usually, like for games and non-games, it’s very different. So, a game is going to be like, Okay, I want to get new users, but I want ROI after 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, they have some kind of fun on that. Whereas a non-gaming app is more like, they want to achieve a certain event within the app, right? Like a subscription, right, like a purchase or some loan submission, or like a deposit or something like that. That’s what the main KPI is that the client gets an app to be looking for.

Matt Watson 06:00
So for a US-based company, you know, a US-based app, what is it usually cost to acquire a new user? I mean, is it if I’ve got millions of dollars to spend, like how many, how many customers can I acquire this way?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 06:18
So it really depends on your goals. You know, if you’re just looking for installs and tech cheap, you can get very, very cheap installs, like maybe 10 cents the download, but then the user won’t really do anything, you know, so they’ll just install the app and delete it right away. So you don’t really want that. So it really depends on, like, what you want the user to do, and how high of quality you want to have it? So it depends if you get a user that wants to deposit and isn’t like an active trader, for example, a finance app, right? That is a very valuable user. And people will pay a lot more for that type of user. So the US can go ranging from $2 all the way up to $10 per install, depending on how active such a user is.

Matt Watson 07:07
So if it costs, says, 10 cents in the United States to get submitted, download my game, or whatever, I would guess to get somebody to do that in like the Philippines or Indonesia or some other countries like, it could be a lot less than that, right?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 07:20
Yeah, you can go a lot less. Yeah, you can go for two cents if you really want it. So there’s the four in the Philippines or in India, for example, you can maybe run campaigns for one cent, just for installs. It’s crazy. You’ll just get nothing else installed.

Matt Watson 07:36
Yeah. That’s crazy. And so you guys are able to do that primarily through Facebook advertising, Google advertising, or one other channel.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 07:46
Everything outside of Facebook and Google AdWords. So usually, every app developer knows how to do their own Facebook marketing and their own marketing to get started. But they’ll hit a certain limit where they can’t really scale any further. Right? There’s this, they’ll only be able to get 30,000 downloads a month, maybe 20,000 downloads a month. God, what they come for us, is they are looking for the entire advertising ecosystem, which is very, very big, where you can promote your app in many different ways than just Facebook or AdWords.

Matt Watson 08:19
So what are some of those other ways? I’m intrigued. No.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 08:23
Yeah, so there are a couple different ways that are there. It’s like one is like OEM advertising. So Oh, EMF Dyson stands for original equipment manufacturers. So these are like some Sue, right? Some Sue has their own app store. Show me is a Chinese device manufacturer. They have their own app store. Same for Vivo oppo trenching, but you also have telcos like T Mobile. These have what’s called pre-installed campaigns, or they have their own app stores where you can actually promote your apps within these app stores. And you can actually promote as well, on getting your app pre-installed on your phone or when they open to buy a new phone that the first thing that they see is that they’ll be able to select the apps that they want to choose. So that’s one of the ways that you will be able to do that.

Matt Watson 09:18
So if I’m an app developer, and I want to take advantage of that, do they have to change their app? Do I have to change my Android app to work on these other marketplaces and things like that?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 09:27
No, it’s actually not. Not needed. The only thing is that you have to upload it into these app stores. Our company actually has a very good relationship with all these OEMs. So we’re actually able to upload it for our clients. But there are also solutions that you can automatically upload into all the different stores for you. Just using one platform, for example. So that if you upload it to the Google Play Store, it gets uploaded into all these alternative stores for you as well, and you don’t really have to make any changes, so it doesn’t take that much time.

Matt Watson 10:00
That makes sense if a lot of that for non-US markets is that even applies in the US.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 10:05
So for the US, it would be the assumption that a store, for example, Samsung, has a high penetration. So, it really depends on the market that you’re looking at and what the penetration of the phone manufacturer is, right. So Europe, for example, shows me as actually having a quite high penetration, who away actually has a high penetration. And a couple of these OEMs actually have good penetration. So it really depends.

Matt Watson 10:32
American thing, everybody has an iPhone, but if you go outside the United States, that is not the case. As I know, in the Philippines, very few people have iPhones because they’re insanely expensive. And everybody’s got Oppo phones.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 10:46
OPPO phones, yeah, OPPO in America, and nobody will know nobody.

Matt Watson 10:51
Yeah, that’s the thing. Most people don’t realize there are different brands and phones around the world. And, you know, in the Philippines, the average person, you know, makes $300 a month or whatever, they’re not going to spend $1,500 for the new iPhone, like, not gonna end up. So you have other markets that are dramatically different. So. So, you know, you hear a lot about love, talk more about advertising on mobile, and the changes that have happened. So, you know, Apple made a big change over the last couple years that I thought I heard cost Facebook, like billions of dollars, love to get more of your insight into some of the how that mobile advertising is affecting things. And some of that would affect, you know, app developers, right? Like, if I’m developing an app, and I’m gonna rely on ad revenue in my app, you know, all this matters to me too. Right? So curious, your insight into the changes that Apple has made, and some of these other changes that are coming down?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 11:49
Yeah, that has had a huge impact on on the whole apple developers really, what we received, like the amount of advertising that is done on Apple is actually diminishing, quarter over quarter. So the Android advertising axes increasing in terms of the one that has done on iOS. And they’re trying to make a solution with this is something like called SK ad network that’s like Apple’s way of doing marketing, attribution. But it’s very inefficient, still, you’re not really able to do a lot of things on that side to actually track the downloads very correctly. So a lot of people have a lot of marketers have actually been taking their marketing budgets and putting it into the Android ecocentric ecosystem. But the problem there is that there’s something coming up that’s called Google Privacy sandbox. And Google Privacy sandbox is basically, the removal of the Google advertiser ID, that is, what happened with the IDFA, right is that they give you consent to either you want to give your ID to an advertiser or not. But with the removal of the Google advertiser ID that basically that consent is not even there anymore, it’s just going to be gone off completely. And Google is going to be coming up with their own solutions to basically remove that and depreciate that.

Matt Watson 13:14
So let, so let’s back up for just a second and help explain to people what that really means. So Apple did something very similar, right? And I’m gonna take a swag at what I think this really means. And you tell me if I’m right, so if I’m an app developer, on iPhone before, in my app, I wanted to show ads, I would have been able to potentially get some IDs that would have better linked my, my anonymous user, I don’t know who they are back to their Facebook profile and things like that they’re in, I would have been able to show them more relevant ads. Right. And I would have got more ad revenue, because I was showing them more relevant ads. Is that my understanding? And then the changes they did made it so now that person is more anonymous. So when I show them ads, I’m not making as much money because they’re just more generic ads?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 14:03
Yeah, so the main thing with advertising really with that ID is that it connected to a lot of things that you’ve done. For example, the apps that you’ve downloaded, the apps that you use are the things that you like.

Matt Watson 14:18
And that allows advertisers to target you with something more valuable.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 14:22
You’re more valuable with that ID there because we know exactly okay, this is my user. This is the user I need to show the ad to. Now it’s more of, okay, I don’t really know if my ad is actually being shown to the people that actually want half my app. Right? Right. It’s shocking to be honest, as a consumer.

Matt Watson 14:39
I don’t really like that either. It’s like me watching TV ads. And I’m seeing TV ads for Viagra. Like I don’t really need to see that I’d rather see a TV ad about something I care about like that I would actually be interested in right so same thing if I’m if I’m watching a mobile ads I’d rather or at least be an ad that I would be care about than just be something that’s just totally wacky and stupid.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 15:15
So to some degree, I understand that protecting consumers, but I almost feel like it almost makes a worse experience for consumers to do that. You’re seeing a lot of irrelevant ads now. So yeah, it’s basically a lot of ads that are just being shown just to show whatever they can sell you. And most of the time, it’s really just not what you want to see at all. So yeah, that’s the experience for the users actually not benefiting.

Matt Watson 15:35
I’ve seen ads that actually, like so much cool shit that I want, you know, tell me that, you know, Tommy Bahama is running some big promo and click here and save 20% on a new pair of jeans. And like, I’d rather learn about that than just some like, really generic crappy stuff that makes no sense.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 15:52
That’s the way it’s going right now. So with the Google Privacy sandbox, that’s up and coming, that’s basically just going to become even worse, but then on the Android ecosystem, right? So it’s the same thing that’s going to happen on that side. And that’s going to also cause a lot of issues and make it very difficult for a marketeer to be able to target the right user.

Matt Watson 16:14
So ultimately, that’s going to make mobile app developers like if I’m developing a mobile app, and I rely on ad revenue, I’m gonna get less ad revenue now. Right? Yeah, dramatically. Yeah. And if I’m a big brand, trying to advertise to people, I can’t, I can’t put enough money to work, I can’t get the right audience anymore. And I can’t advertise enough. So to some degree, this, it seems like it’s bad for everybody who was just good for who what was the problem that we’re trying to solve?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 16:44
So this is actually a very big thing in our industry, with a lot of people talk about and then they actually say that the one who wanted the most from all of this was actually Apple.

Matt Watson 16:56
Apple, screw everyone else.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 16:59
No, they actually started doing their own advertising products, because the Apple App Store was not, not a lot of advertisers are actually promoting in the Apple App Store too much yet. And the moment they switched, one of the best ways to track downloads and track performance campaigns on Apple became their own solutions. And one of the things that they’re developing right now is basically a marketing stack from Apple.

Matt Watson 17:27
So they basically created their own little monopoly and said, screw everyone else.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 17:31
Exactly. And Google thought, like, looks like a good idea. Let me try that as well.

Matt Watson 17:38
So Google is now doing the exact same, like they’re going down the same path, like so we’ll still be able to mark it. But you can, you’re really going to have to pay Google to do that marketing, instead of maybe being able to use other ad marketplaces or whatever, like, it’s going to be much more. I have to give my money directly to Apple or Google to do these ads.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 17:57
Yeah, unless you’re smart about it, really. But basically, that’s the way that it’s coming up to it. So basically, Apple and Google are both really trying to centralize that, in my opinion, right? They won’t bring it out, like, Oh, this is what we’re trying to do. But it might be and that’s what they’re trying to accomplish. So unless you’re smart about it, we prepare for it, right? And there are ways for you to prepare for it, you can actually get ahead of the curve. And if you’re prepared for it, well, all those are not, that’s going to give you a huge opportunity for you to be able to effectively market your app and also monetize your app really effectively.

Matt Watson 18:33
So I’m excited for you to tell me how to prepare for that. Before we do that. I do want to remind everybody that as a reminder, today’s episode of Startup Hustle is brought to you by double the experts in pairing founders with remote executive assistants you can trust, everybody needs one of those Startup Hustle listeners can go to with double.com, use code HUSTLE22 and unlock 50% off your first month. Or you can just click on the link in the show notes. Everyone needs a great assistant. We love double assistants. I love having an assistant. It’s very helpful. So how do both advertisers and app developers prepare themselves for these changes? As you’re saying, what do they need to do? To kind of I don’t know if I’d say take advantage of the changes because it sounds like theirs was just like a crappy deal all around. But to survive the changes, maybe that’s the term? How do they survive these changes?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 19:31
Well, if you really prepare for it, well, you can actually benefit hugely from it. Because if you are at first to market it first to market basically. Yeah. So what I’m seeing a lot is that there are new initiatives coming to make IDs that are outside of Google advertiser ID and outside of the IDFA, really, so that are also at the same time focus more on not sharing any personal information. between two parties. So that’s basically a private ID. There’s an initiative called UID 2.0. That’s from the trade desk. This is from this programmatic advertising. And basically, what they do is they have a hashing protocol. And what hashing protocol is that you have a phone number or an email address that you have from your users that are very good users that you like. And you can, you can incorporate that into the hashing protocol and get hash ID, that hash ID will be something that if it matches on both the advertiser and on the publisher, which is the one that shows the ad, so the app developer and the one that’s wants to promote the brand, right, and they have that idea that’s match, you can still be able to target the exact user that you’re looking to target. So if you’re able to do that, right, you’ll be able to monetize at a much higher level than you would be able to do today. Because that will be such a commodity that a lot of people will be looking for to be able to target exactly on.

Matt Watson 21:15
Was that kind of similar to how it used to work, though.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 21:18
Yeah, exactly how it used to work. It’s basically a way to get around Google in a way around Apple, because most of the marketing industry is like, Okay, well, we don’t want to be dependent on these two parties. We just want to be able to target users without having to need these parties and their solutions.

Matt Watson 21:38
So a lot of this was done in the cover of data privacy. So how does data privacy affect all of these things? And the new, you know, the new stuff you’re just described there? How is that all going to affect data privacy?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 21:54
Yeah, so the Google advertiser ID and the depreciation of that, right, and the IDFA, in their appreciation of that was Apple and Google’s initiative to really try to give user privacy back to the user, right. So when we have such a hashing protocol with the UID, 2.0, right from the trade desk, what you can do with that is, you can still be able to target users if they give consent, right? So if you’re able to get consent from your user from, from the publisher side that they have, say, Okay, I give consent to give my ID out, then you’ll be able to still be able to target that. So it’s all about consent nowadays. So if you don’t get consent from your users that you’re able to do these kinds of things, you’re not not going to be able to do any kind of marketing moving forward, as in the past, you know, it was all very out of sight, right? They will take a lot of data from you without you even knowing and now it’s really going to be more focused on having the user’s consent, that they’re okay with it, that we’re actually going to be using their data or not. So it brings them back to the same point that you brought earlier. Right, that you said, like, I want to see ads that are more targeted, because I don’t want to see Yeah, weird ads, right. This will allow you to also give consent, and we’ll make it possible. So yeah, there’s some good things on that side as well.

Matt Watson 23:23
So is that going to be as simple as, when I install an app, it asks me like, can it use my camera or use my storage or whatever? Is it going to kind of prompt the same way and say, do you agree to receive ads or whatever? How would they do that?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 23:35
Yeah, something similar in that, that area? Yeah. So be some kind of consent that or in the privacy statement that says, okay, hey, are you okay with us that we use this? ID? And then if they say yes, then it will still be something that they’ve given consent on Apple or Google will probably want to have something very explicit that you ask for some kind of prompt like the contact, like, are you allowed to give access to contacts or anything like that? So it’ll be similar in that range?

Matt Watson 24:04
So how does the privacy changes that are coming out also affect app developers in regards to just how they collect customer information? Like they sign up? You know, and I get their email, people’s email addresses and all these different things? Like, how does, how do all these privacy laws impact that part of it to have just like having consumer information?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 24:27
So like I said, it’s all about consent nowadays, right? So you really need to explicitly ask for consent from the user now. And that’s going to be very important for anything that you keep in mind, if you don’t ask for the consent of laws like what happened with GDPR in Europe, for example. And with the privacy laws in California, they’re actually you explicitly need to ask for consent, and you need to make the user aware of what type of information you’re getting, and what you’re doing with that. And if you do that correctly, right. You’re still going to be fine in everything that you do. You just really need to be clear on what you’re doing.

Matt Watson 25:03
So for the customers you work with, do you do a lot of long term campaigns with them to kind of always, you know, supplement the growth of their, their apps? Or do a lot of people come to you when they’re launching a brand new app?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 25:19
Yeah, so most of the clients that we work with are long term clients. So we’d like to work with clients that we can have long term partnerships with, because it takes a lot of energy from us in the beginning when we’re starting up a campaign, because we really need to look at it because every app is different. We’ve tried to make a tailored approach for every single app like okay, what channel what traffic source will work well, does this traffic source work well for your app? Or does that traffic source work well for your app, and that takes a lot of time and initiative. So once we start a campaign, we usually tend to want to run it for a very long time with the client. And it really depends on their KPIs what they’re looking to achieve, right? So if you’re a gaming app, right, you want to achieve 100% ROI, right? Make sense, you put in $1, you want to get $1, back and some extra, right? That’s the goal of what you want to get back from your marketing campaigns. Whereas a finance app, for example, or an investment app, what they want to have is they want users that deposit and then trade a lot so that they can earn from the fees. So every app has their own KPIs and their own settings and like, what is their business model and how they can make money. And once they make money. There’ll be a long term client in our perspective. So we just focus on how do our clients make money? How can you actually grow your app and actually make money from that. And that’s the channels that we focus on that will actually make our DAP developers money as well.

Matt Watson 26:48
I’m curious what your insight is like for these companies that have created some kind of mobile app, and they’ve had at least a certain amount of success? How fast do they grow? Versus like, is advertising almost like a complete necessity for them to grow? Right? Like, I imagine most apps have some small network effect and referrals. And maybe they’re doing some other kinds of advertising. But I mean, is it almost a requirement that they do this, this kind of advertising for customer acquisition, for them to really be successful?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 27:20
No, it’s not required, I would say, it really depends on how quickly you want to grow often, like if you’re just a small developer, and you’re okay with earning a few 1000 extra a month, right? You can do it by yourself. Like, you don’t need a company like ours, but or any marketing company or any marketing campaigns, really. But if you’re looking to really get a lot of users in a very short amount of time, or if you’re looking to continuously grow your app, because you’re making it into a full business, right, then you always want to have some kind of user acquisition going on. That’s just a must. Because you’ll have users that don’t want to use the app anymore, or that usually come after, might reactivate after a year or something like that. So there always has to be some kind of branding or performance marketing going on to keep your brand up to speed. But yeah, that’s really what we see that works well.

Matt Watson 28:23
So I’m curious what other kind of tips you have for mobile developers that are, you know, for long term success, like long term growth and success of their apps, if you have any, like specific just kind of tips for them?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 28:37
Yeah, so the main thing I would see that I see a lot with app developers, is that when you build your app, and when you launch your app, have a clear vision of how you think you want to monetize it. So I have had many app developers that build an app, they get a very nice app out there. And then they get a good amount of users, but they have no idea how to monetize it. And if you don’t combine a good app, and monetization together, you’re not going to have a sustainable business model. So that’s one thing that I see a lot of app developers have this great idea of how to build the app, but then they don’t really focus on okay, how am I going to make money with the app, those two needs to go hand in hand. It’s no longer the way it was in the past, you just need a good app, and then you’ll get funding and then you’ll, you’ll sell the app eventually, that doesn’t really work that much anymore. It’s really about making it a sustainable business model. That’s really the main point.

Matt Watson 29:40
So I’m curious. Is there a certain kind of minimum budget that people need to work with a company like yours? I mean, do they just need a few $1,000 a month in ad budget or is it, you know, take a whole lot of cash.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 29:54
Yeah, so usually starts around 2000 Okay, usually, we usually start with around 2000 than on budget. And if everything goes well, in terms of the KPIs that we achieve, and you’re happy with everything, then we should go up from there. We don’t want to put any commitments on that side, your marketing needs to be profitable for app developers, right? And if it’s not profitable for them, then they don’t want to continue to be as simple as that.

Matt Watson 30:19
So do you have customers that spend millions of dollars a month on advertising?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 30:24
Yeah, with six figures is definitely something that goes very quickly, especially in the gaming side. So gaming, advertisers are very, very big on spending. And they are, they’re always looking for new ways to get more user acquisition done. So gaming is by far the biggest area, and also the one that we see growing the most. Finance was very big in the beginning of the year. But of course, like most of the finance markets, not that good anymore. So the finance apps, I will say have stopped promoting a little bit. And we see entertainment apps and social apps like Tiktok, similar apps like Tiktok, that are doing a huge amount of promotion. And it’s a very competitive market.

Matt Watson 31:06
Well, that’s what’s interesting, too, if most people don’t realize this, of course, but it’s a global world. And it’s a global market. And you’ve got competitors to a lot of these things, and in other countries that are totally different, you know, Americans and so I’ve never heard of, you know, it’s like Uber common here, but I go to the Philippines, and it’s, you know, grab or Uncas or other apps, like totally different things. And so there’s a whole different world out there that most people just aren’t aware of.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 31:34
Yeah, every market has its own, like, local apps, right. So like, if you go to Korea, you have Kakao Talk, I think, and you have one store, that’s our own app store completely separate. See one of the things that has that, yeah, so very funny. And then everything by themselves, they just chose to do everything by themselves. And then if you go until Apple uses that to or what, no apples, but most people buy Samsung phones there. It’s like Samsung’s 90% market share is Samsung. Right? It’s it’s they’ve very high penetration because they’re green, but that’s a Korean brand, right? Yeah, exactly. So they’re all buying that just because I don’t know, maybe some nationality thing that like, okay, it’s because it’s a Korean brand. We’re all going to buy it. But they have very high penetration there.

Matt Watson 32:20
Well, I guarantee all of them know somebody who works at Samsung also. Right? Like, yeah, must be the degrees of separation that have got to be very small. I mean, at the end of the day, South Korea’s, you know, mostly Seoul and a couple other cities, like it’s not it’s not, you know, hundreds of millions of people that live there. So I imagine there’s a lot of, you know, close networks supportive of Samsung, and everybody knows somebody that works there.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 32:46
Yeah, it’s interesting. See, like, every industry, individual market has their own local touch, right? So Japan has a line, the goat, if you go to Indonesia, and as go Jek, it has our own whole suite of apps, right? So if you’re marketing an app, right, and you want to look into the Southeast Asian market or anything like that, it’s like, understanding that it has a completely different mentality around certain apps is extremely important, especially if you’re going into these kinds of markets.

Matt Watson 33:19
Well, I think I think that’s a great question there that I wanted to ask you about is, you know, what, if I built an app or a game, and I want to take it internationally, is that something that you guys help with of like, oh, the language part of it and the currency part of it and understanding the nuances of the world market? Is that something you guys kind of consult around as well? Yeah, we help with getting everything onto all the alternative app stores.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 33:39
So if you want to get any app on any alternative App Store, we can help you out with that translation part we don’t really help with. But we do know which markets, you can start testing out with, like in for example, if you want to get a bit of an idea of like how the Southeast Asian market works, right, the Philippines is actually a great market to start, because there’s a very high penetration of English so that you can start in that market, and then get a little bit of an idea of like, okay, what are what should I pay per download? What is the ROI on those downloads? Like, what should I expect from it? And then once I see that, yeah, then once you see that you can make the investment into doing the translation. So we always start with the Philippines. That’s one of the first markets that we start with, we say, okay, if we get good success there, then we can start helping you with maybe finding a translation agency or anything like that, that can help you out there. Yep.

Matt Watson 34:34
So what other I’m curious if you have any other kind of growth hacks or suggestions for mobile app developers?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 34:42
So yeah, if you’re a mobile app developer, you really want to grow heavily. I would say like getting featured on the Google Play Store, or the iOS App Store is one of the ways that we see the highest growth coming from app developers. So sometimes there are companies that are specialized in helping you get featured. So if you want to, if you have an app and you really need to grow a lot, one of the ways that you can get that done is getting featured by Google Play Store. And that is just going to be an increase of like 500,000 downloads to a million downloads just by being featured. So wow, that’s, that’s one of the best ways really to get a lot of users. So would even perform better than us, right? Because there’s just a huge amount of downloads in a short amount of time. But next to that is also app store optimization. App store optimization is also very important. Because any paid promotions that you do, if you do app store optimization, you know, you’re just going to the paid promotions are just going to make those app store optimization results get much, much better. So you’re going to get higher rankings for keywords, you’re going to get better rankings for your overall rankings. And that’s also going to have a huge impact for you.

Matt Watson 36:02
So do you have to pay a lot to become featured? Or is that more like bribing somebody at Google? Or how did that happen?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 36:08
So in the past, it was forever in Apple was like who was in the cafe at the the main Apple compound that they have there. If you were new, anybody there and you said, Hey, I have this app, you’ll just come there as a developer with your app. And then maybe they’ll feature you. But now it’s a lot more structured. So there are whole teams that actually help you to get in contact with someone from Google or get in contact with some of them from the app app store. To get them to review your app and see, okay, hey, maybe we can get your app. Featured, it’s not really a pay, and you couldn’t get featured. Now. It’s just that they’ll consult you on actually getting featured. So it’s all about connections on that side.

Matt Watson 36:58
I’m looking at my phone here. I was just kind of curious what the top-grossing apps are on Android, and it just kind of surprises me after all these years, like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans are still on the top of the list.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 37:10
Yeah.

Matt Watson 37:11
They still do great. Deals with my mind.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 37:15
Yeah, they also do a lot of marketing. So they also always make user acquisition. They have an always-on campaign. And they’re very aggressive about that. So they want to be on top of the spot there at all times. So there are actually a lot of similar smaller apps that tried to do the same thing, but they just don’t. They’re not able to get towards that tap top ranking, which gets organic users.

Matt Watson 37:35
Yeah, there are a lot of knockoffs of those apps. Well, once again, today’s episode of Startup Hustle was sponsored by our friends over at Double. Double is a remote executive assistant service that can help you with everything. From email calendar organization to expense reporting, database management, and a lot of different tasks, find your perfect assistant today. Head over to withdouble.com. Use code HUSTLE22 and unlock 50% off your first month. Even easier, click on the link in the show notes. While you’re there, make sure you hit that subscribe button, so you never miss a daily dose of the Startup Hustle. And thanks for joining us today. So, as we round out the episode here, I’m curious, do you have any other, you know, final tips, you know, words of wisdom for mobile app developers out there?

Zino Rost van Tonningen 38:22
Yeah, we’ll just say get prepared right now for the upcoming changes for the Google Privacy sandbox. And if you’re well prepared now, you already get towards a solution that you can actually monetize with these different solutions for targeting users. You will actually be able to benefit hugely from that. So I think right now, the main message, I would say, is to prepare now and be able to profit from it later by way of me being one of the only ones that were able to do it.

Matt Watson 38:56
All right. Well, today’s episode was with Zino Rost van Tonningen from TyrAds. And if your company does mobile apps, I’m sure his company can help you with your advertising and expansion, and growth. So definitely check them out. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Zino Rost van Tonningen 39:17
Awesome, man. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Matt Watson 39:19
All right. Take care. Awesome.