Funding An App On Appstori – Interview with one of the creators of Trivi.al
Crowdfunding
November 30, 2018
(The Trivi.al app is not available on the App Store anymore – it was sold. And Appstori doesn’t exist anymore. The story remains of interest though, so we’re keeping the post)
Since we wrote on how to get funding for an app, we wanted to give real insight on why you’d want to do that and how to do it right. We got a chance to ask a few questions to Matt Hudson, one of the creators of the Trivi.al app, that funded an update with $2010 collected on Appstori.
Thanks for answering our questions, Matt. For starters, can you tell us a few words about your app and your team?
MobileFWD was a mobile social gaming company here in Arkansas. We released our first game 6 weeks ago called Trivi.al. Trivi.al is a social trivia game, picture Words with Friends with Trivia. Trivi.al has done very well in the iOS app store. We’ve had about 35k downloads in the last 6 weeks and have had a lot of coverage in the media for our first app.
Why did you decide to start a campaign on a crowdfunding platform? Why AppStori?
When we first started talking to AppStori we were excited about the opportunity to get our name out in the community. AppStori really allowed us to share our story with people all over the country. We were able to raise $2k for an update to Trivi.al. We got valuable feedback from AppStori followers and we have a nice list of Beta Testers that is outside our friend set that can provide an outside perspective on our app.
What kind of benefits did you come up with? Would you change anything, and what would be your advice to other developers regarding defining benefits?
We had several cool benefits like a custom Lavish Longboard, credits in the app, and an autographed 6 ft tall poster drawn by a comic book artist. We found that most people were more excited about being apart of the app and providing feedback than anything else. People want to be apart of something great. There was a lot of excitement for t-shirts and stickers though! We’ve had several people email us and ask us to mail them stickers.
What would be your advice regarding creating a project on AppStori in general? How important would you say was the video?
I would tell developers to spend time crafting your story. Dig deep into what makes your app and your team unique. People who contribute to your app are people that relate to you and your app. It’s important to give contributors a story that they can relate to. Make it personal, make it interesting, and people will follow your story up to launch.
The video is important because it lets people see you and hear you talking about your app. The passion comes across much better in a video than in a text article.
What did you do to promote your AppStori campaign?
We sent out an email to our email list featuring our AppStori campaign. We also used standard social media to promote our campaign. Obviously we tweeted and retweeted anyone who contributed and we tried to develop relationships with people who contributed to us on AppStori. We blogged about our campaign as well and put our article out on Hacker News, TechMeme, and others. We advocate sharing and teaching. Our blog has been the most effective way of teaching others and it’s what people pick up on and relate to. We also copied our blog postings to AppStori to keep our followers up to date.
What have been the results? Would you start another project on a crowd funding platform, and what would you do differently?
We were able to complete our $2k campaign, so we’d say it was a success! Yes would use a crowdfunding platform again. We see crowdfunding platforms like AppStori as an opportunity to not only raise money, but to also find our fans and advocates.
If we were going to do something differently it would be to pour more into the campaign. We used our network heavily, but if we could’ve run a PR campaign specifically for AppStori we probably would’ve done that.
What are the next step for the Trivi.al app?
We’re working on a new version of Trivi.al with a full Facebook Open Graph integration, an updated UI, and significant performance improvements. We’re also excited about a super secret stealth project which we are only sending out to our AppStori beta testers. If I told you what it was then it wouldn’t be a super secret stealth project. 🙂
Thanks again to Matt Hudson for answering our questions and giving some tips on how to get funded on AppStori. If you’d like to share your own experience or comment on Matt’s, leave a comment below!