How to Build a Billion Dollar App Quotes

“Don’t ever listen to people who say it’s good enough, because it never will be. Building a great product is a fluid, ongoing process.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time

“Three key roles need owners: someone must lead the product vision; someone needs to build the technology; and someone needs to be focused on getting users and generating money.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time

“Don’t try to do everything. Don’t try to tackle multiple business problems. Focus on one core problem and deliver one great solution.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time

“DATA AND ANALYTICS. Recent figures show that 48 per cent of app marketers’ greatest mobile-advertising concern is ad tracking and measurement,2 so what you need first and foremost is someone who gets data, who gets analytics and who gets conversion. Without those skills you’re pretty much dead in the water. Make sure this person has cut their teeth at other top tech companies running and managing big app and online marketing teams. BRANDING. A great marketer knows all about brand. That means presenting a single consistent and powerful profile of your app to everyone in the world. This encapsulates everything from the name, logo, visual design and advertising to the tone of voice and the copy used on your website. If you have a great VP of product, then this person and your VP of marketing will work like two peas in a pod to deliver on this vision. INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE. The app world is international. If your VP of marketing doesn’t have international experience then they’re not going to be very useful. International audiences in the app and online worlds behave very differently and in an ideal world your marketing head will have had great exposure to this. When money is tight, you don’t want them to be learning on your dime – they should already have joined you with that experience. TEAM BUILDER. You need this person to know how to build and energise a team. At this stage in your business, your marketing organisation will need to scale, and you need someone in place who has experience of doing this effectively. This means not only the ability to hire great full-time employees, but also an understanding of why and when to hire an agency or freelancers as opposed to full-time team members. AGENCY EXPERIENCE. This is a mixed bag. There are many companies that just don’t use one – and, frankly, agencies are becoming less relevant to startups and more of a crutch for big corporates. Unless they are super-specialised in terms of mobile-ad media buying and optimisation – e.g. players such as Fiksu – then agencies are not much use beyond a bit of creative or PR work. And, anyway, having a good marketer internally usually solves the advertising creative component in the early days. Outdoor advertising for most mobile players doesn’t drive app downloads or conversions, but is good for branding and awareness (if you have the money to burn) or if your business requires it (Hailo used outdoor to communicate more with taxi drivers than passengers to demonstrate its commitment to building a genuine business). Outside the skill set above, you need to make sure your VP of marketing is in it for the long haul and truly loves the brand, the company and your vision. This person will be instrumental in communicating your vision for your app to the rest of the world.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“How to hire a VP of marketing I have been lucky to have hired and worked with two truly amazing marketing guys. The first was Steven Sesar, who joined the team at WooMe having previously led the marketing for Shopzilla (which was acquired for a cool $560 million).1 He was a numbers guy through and through – and a huge part of our success was his ability to cost-efficiently acquire and retain users. Carl Lyons is, at the time of writing, the VP of marketing at Hailo. Before joining Hailo he had led a variety of great digital-marketing teams – namely at Lastminute.com, Capital Radio and the Guardian – but is equally a brand man. Brand is increasingly important in a noisy, highly competitive app ecosystem.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Term Sheet Similar to the seed-funding stage, the first part of putting a Series A deal together is to agree on the major deal terms, which are summarised in a term sheet from the investor. It’s good to try to focus on getting the more flexible investor(s) to produce the term sheet, as it will allow you to bring in other investors on similar terms. In this round, the core elements are going to change a bit. The major term-sheet elements are the following: •   PRO-RATA RIGHTS. This allows an investor to continue to invest money to maintain their percentage ownership. •   LIQUIDATION PREFERENCE. This allows an investor to get their money out first in the case of an exit or other scenario. •   PREFERENTIAL RETURN. Investors will try to negotiate at least a 1x, if not a 2x, return on their original investment before other classes of shares are paid out. Be careful about this provision: 1x is normal; 2x is bad. •   BOARD SEATS. Your lead investor will insist on a board seat, especially if they are investing a considerable amount of money. Remember to select your board members very carefully, and make sure that you can maintain majority control of your board. Investors often want observer rights either alongside a board seat (or in lieu of) as well as asking for information rights (guaranteed updates about the company’s performance on an agreed frequency). •   PREFERRED SHARES. Investors will require that you create a new class of share that has voting (and other) rights above and beyond that of common stock. •   EMPLOYEE OPTION POOL. You will need to formalise an employee option pool (typically 10–20 per cent of the company) to ensure that you have a mechanism by which to attract and retain top talent. •   EMPLOYEE AGREEMENTS. If you’ve set things up properly these will be in place. Investors will want to see that there are adequate intellectual property assignment provisions, confidentiality provisions and non-competition/non-solicitation provisions in place. •   FOUNDER VESTING. Most investors will try to add a guarantee to ensure the founders stay around for at least four years by making their founder shares vest over a fixed schedule. Most investors are adamant about this; some are more flexible. Recall the benefits that I outlined about adding this in yourself, especially if your company has several cofounders, when we discussed the million-dollar app. These are the main elements designed to give you a flavour for what you will be negotiating. It’s by no means meant to be a comprehensive list. Due to the involved nature of startup legals, I’d suggest going through the resources on the Billion-Dollar App website when you want to dig into it more.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“The Clauses that Can Screw You Having worked with a lot of investors over my last few startups, and having completed an exit as well, I can attest at first hand to the importance of understanding all the major legal and contractual details that will directly affect you, the control you have of your company and how much you will earn in the event of an exit. Here is a list of the most contentious clauses, what they mean and what to watch out for. It’s all quite legal – but you’ll be a happy person if you get these negotiated in your favour. •   LIQUIDATION PREFERENCE. This is one of those clauses you don’t need to get stung by. It’s standard for investors to get a 1x liquidation preference. •   ANTIDILUTION RIGHTS. Investors will ask for this in the Series A funding round. Basically it means that an investor has the right to maintain the same percentage ownership of your company automatically if the value of the company goes down. This is really tough on the founders. It means losing more of your company’s equity automatically in a down period. It’s unlikely that you will be able to remove this provision – but you need to be aware of it. •   NON-PARTICIPATING LIQUIDATION PREFERENCE. Liquidation preference determines how the pie is shared in a liquidation (or exit) event. A founder should always seek to have a non-participating liquidation preference for investors. Without going into too much detail, a ‘participating’ liquidation preference allows an investor to double-dip in terms of the slices of pie that they are entitled to. You’ll find a more detailed explanation on mybilliondollarapp.com. •   DRAG ALONG RIGHTS. This provision grants the investors the right to compel the founders (and other shareholders) to agree the sale, merger or liquidation of the company or block a sale, merger or liquidation. As a founder you do not want to be dragged along in this case. Ideally you should be able to negotiate that investors would only have the right to block the sale if the return was below a certain level. •   WARRANTIES. In investment agreements in Europe it is very common for founders to personally give basic assurances that everything the company is doing is proper and correct, these are known as warranties. In other countries, like the USA, founders don’t give warranties at all. Again, do check out mybilliondollarapp.com for more details, because this is definitely a complex area. That said, there are always going to be numerous details that are specific to your company and situation. The best possible advice here: make good friends with a few lawyers so that you always have someone to call on with a specific question.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“There is another metric – or, more specifically, analytical tool – that investors will be impressed to see at this point. It’s called cohort analysis. Since your app is still pretty young, you’re not going to be able to present any long-term metrics. One way around that is to measure – and compare – groups (or cohorts) of users at the same point during their lifecycle with your app. A typical cohort analysis compares the behaviour of all the users who registered in a given month (let’s say that all the users who downloaded your app in January use it on average five minutes per day) with all the users who downloaded it in another month (let’s say that customers who downloaded it in February use it on average six minutes per day). By comparing the January cohort with the February cohort, investors can see that users are using the app more – a great sign. Cohort analysis allows you to present a trend – typically from month to month – showing clear improvements across any metric: from session length, to customer acquisition cost, to lifetime value.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“So why is this clever? It’s worth investing the time in tracking all your advertising and referral in this way because few startups do it well in the early stages. That means that you can take advantage of the situation and grow faster, with a more efficient marketing spend early on. Let’s use a real-world example from Uber – the chauffeur app. It used very detailed referral tracking from the onset. What did this do for Uber? Detailed tracking allowed Uber to see that some users were referring a higher calibre of user; there was a clear segment of high spenders referring other high spenders. So what did Uber do in response? It increased the value of the referral codes for these users. This increased conversion substantially. Uber consistently offers $20 referrals for some users – and $50 for others. This drove better conversions and faster adoption early on – and was replicated across all its cities. It doesn’t cost you anything to get a powerful tracking solution like this in place – so why not do it? It can only give you better visibility.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Attribution for referrals One powerful use of a mobile attribution platform is for referrals. A lot of startups underestimate the power of referrals early on, and exacerbate the problem by not measuring it properly. If you really want to drive referrals, make sure you can measure them from the start. In additional to using systems such as Mobile App Tracking, there are a number of other simple ways to track – and drive – referrals. Let’s start with the simplest one: redemption or referral codes. Generate simple, short and unique codes that users can send to other users. If you design your campaign carefully, and ensure there is sufficient motivation for both the ‘inviter’ to send the codes (e.g. they earn credits or money for each one redeemed and not just shared – remember that!) and sufficient incentive for users to input the codes (get £5 off your first taxi ride with Hailo), then you will encourage existing users to refer your app and new users to redeem codes to use it. The codes make it very easy to then check on the back-end (in your user-management system) which users joined because someone else invited them. You can then figure out who that user is (all your codes should be unique for this purpose). You can also see which existing users are responsible for inviting the most new users, and focus your efforts on seducing them even more, and rewarding them for their effort (or figuring out how to make them even bigger advocates of your app). If you don’t have a way to measure this, you won’t know what your success rate is and you won’t be able to improve it. So the above referral code system works well if the referred user actually puts in the code. If they don’t, you can’t track the referral. That is unless you use a system like Mobile App Tracking in conjunction with the referral code. If you embed in the email or SMS a tracking link that is used to share the referral code, then you can still track the referred user. It’s a pretty powerful system and it’s worth getting your head around.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“New World of Big Channels We live in a world of new, massive platforms. There already are a large number of players in the market who reach anywhere between 100 million and 1 billion people. That is a distribution mechanism like none other in history – and that presents a huge opportunity for your app. Let’s have a look at some of them. In the search market there are well-known players such as Google, with massive worldwide reach; Baidu, which is the leading search engine in China; Yandex, which is the king of Russian search; and such engines as Yahoo! and Bing. All are optimised for desktop and mobile marketing. On the social level, Facebook has more than a billion active users and a very powerful mobile-advertising platform; Twitter has hundreds of millions of users and a growing mobile-advertising platform; Tencent QQ is the undisputed social leader in China with around a billion active users across its services as well; LinkedIn also provides a great platform to reach a professional audience with more than 200 million users. We already know about Apple’s App Store and Google Play, which provide massive reach as well. Getting featured on these sites is a massive boost to downloads, so using any means necessary to get featured will translate into downloads. Media channels such as video (YouTube), photos (Pinterest, Instagram) and blogs (Tumblr) are all proving to be reliable, high-volume user-acquisition channels. Your challenge will be to see how to make those channels convert to valuable users. Messaging platforms are not yet being widely used as user-acquisition channels for other apps, but, as they keep increasing their reach, this will be a monetisation for the likes of WhatsApp, Snapchat, WeChat (China), Line and even Skype. In terms of local advertising, it’s also worth exploring what you can do with players such as Groupon and Yelp, each of whom have more than 100 million users. Other channels to think about include Amazon (and its own app platform) and PayPal, which often partners with companies to help promote various apps and services. Players such as Alibaba, Rakuten, Sina, NHN, Yahoo! Japan and SoftBank are all potential distribution partners. SoftBank was integral to the adoption of the Clash of Clans app in Japan, and eventually bought the company behind it for over $1.5 billion.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Rookie Mistakes PUTTING IN ANALYTICS TOO LATE. Installing an analytics solution before you launch your V1.0 is the golden rule – hopefully you’ve followed my advice back in the section on the million-dollar app. Your website or app is nothing without analytics – you’re going to be flying blind with no idea about how many people are even using your app – so make sure you get the code in there immediately. There’s no debate on this one. RELYING ON A SINGLE ANALYTICS SOLUTION. As we saw earlier, it’s very helpful, especially in the early days, to put in two analytics solutions rather than one. With recent performance increases, having two (or three) solutions in either your app or website is not going to either slow down or overcomplicate things. And, given how much of a pain it is to transfer data between systems, there is very little cost. NOT ATTRIBUTING MARKETING OR REFERRAL SOURCE. This is perhaps the biggest mistake you can make. From the start, you really want to know the source of a user. Did a new user come to your app organically? Did they come from your website? Another app? Or from a PR or partner campaign? Facebook or Twitter, perhaps? Or a specific, paid-for marketing or affiliate campaign? You can get pretty much 99 per cent accurate attribution these days for apps. You can do it by working with a partner such as mobileapptracking.com. So do it from Day One. From the get-go you will have visibility and the ability to invest super-efficiently. NOT PLUGGING IN REVENUE METRICS. Useful metrics such as average transaction value (ATV), annual revenue per user (ARPU) and lifetime value (LTV) can be easily calculated by a number of leading analytics solutions. It’s definitely worth investing the time early on to track this. Otherwise you tend to make excuses, and it can become hard to calculate (and often less accurate) via spreadsheets.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“AGREEING ON METRICS. Companies often have arguments about metrics because they haven’t spent enough time discussing and agreeing on definitions. Metrics are not going to be helpful unless there is buy-in from all the people who are affected by that metric. So, when you’re going through the process of deciding your customer lifecycle stages and the conversion metrics, make sure you bring everyone along for the ride.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“A Few More Killer Metrics Before we get to the mechanics of it, we need to add a handful of key metrics to the mix. AVERAGE TRANSACTION VALUE (ATV). This is a very important metric to keep your eye on. This is the average amount that a user spends via your app. In a gaming app it will most likely be via an in-app purchase and hover around the $0.99 mark. In an e-commerce or marketplace app it will be the value of the transaction (such as a taxi fare) or the basket size. For a SaaS or enterprise company this is going to be the monthly recurring fee that you can charge for users of your service. This is something you will want to validate very quickly because you need to be able to estimate how much your users are happy to spend with you during a given interaction. ANNUAL REVENUE PER USER (ARPU). Although this is sometimes defined as the average revenue per user, I don’t find that precise enough. It’s helpful to associate the revenue with a time period. You will need to adapt the time period that will make sense for your business, since many apps will end up using monthly revenue per user. Right now you’re probably going to have to estimate this – but it will prove to be very useful to model your future revenues. LIFETIME VALUE (LTV). The final killer metric here is lifetime value. This is basically your annual revenue per user multiplied by how long a user stays with you. It’s evident from all these metrics that you want to ensure that a user stays with you for the longest time possible, so that you can maximise their revenue potential. For the moment these are the top metrics you need to keep in mind. Through the process of building an app people love, you’re going to be hunting for new ways to attract users who deliver the highest lifetime value and the lowest customer acquisition cost. The philosophy is simple and logical, but the practice is a lot harder.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“While all apps are created different – and your conversions are going to vary quite a bit – you should be shooting to activate around 80 or 90 per cent of your users. The typical conversion for users who make a purchase on any given day on an e-commerce app is around 4 or 5 per cent – but many apps are able to do a lot better. In a later chapter we dive deeper into conversion rates you can shoot for around referral.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Further down the line, we started using the Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is a very simple survey that you send out to a representative sample of your users to measure how likely they are to recommend your app to a friend. On a 1–10 scale (with 10 meaning highly likely to recommend), people who give you a 9 or 10 are called promoters; those who score 7 or 8 are neutral; and everyone else is a detractor. Your goal is to make your average NPS across all users as high as possible; it’s an ongoing measure of whether you have product–market fit.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“You can track how many times you prompt people via your analytics solution – and you can also track how many ratings you’re getting on a daily basis with app-store analytics tools such as AppAnnie or Distimo. And, second, keep your ratings fresh. While you shouldn’t annoy your users, do make sure that you prompt them to update their rating of your app every six months or so. Again, this should be an automatic prompt that is built into your app. Make sure that you make it as simple and pleasurable for your users to tell everyone how great an experience they are having with your app.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“So what does your app look like at this stage? From Step 1, ‘The Million-Dollar App’, you should have a prototype (version 0.1) of your app that you’ve used to unlock some more investment and get to this next level. You should now be focusing on using the analytics that you’re collecting to iterate and improve the existing features in your app. You should be actively talking with your users on at least a weekly – if not more frequent – basis to figure out what features you absolutely must add. The features you add need to be simple, easy for users to find and unique. You need to keep developing your own unique proposition: why your app does it better than anyone else’s. To try to figure out what users really love, try killing features. Take out a feature. If users scream about it, they find it useful, so bring it back. This is the time to experiment. If your users don’t scream when you remove a feature, it was probably useless. Figure out what your users love. You need to think about the product you will launch with – your Version 1.0 (or V1.0). This is a much more solid version of your app, a refined, robust version of your prototype with a few more features. You should be confident that this version will support thousands of users happily. This becomes an important question: you need to get your name out into the market; you need to open your app up publicly ready for anyone to try via the app stores. You can’t launch with a prototype, but, at the same time, you don’t want to launch with a perfect app, either. You need to get to your V1.0, which you feel is getting pretty close to product–market fit. You need to get to this point as quickly as possible (remember, money is still very tight). You’re going to need to get stuck into the following things.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“In all honesty, there are no shortcuts in building a great product-and-engineering team. You need to be able to build up a truly talented and lean team to deliver a truly loved product. If you can’t recruit the right talent, then that is a reflection on the quality of your current vision, team or market opportunity. Don’t ever become addicted to agencies – they are useful only as temporary stopgaps.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Being agile is about delivering valuable features or improvements within a short, regular period. This period is called a ‘development sprint’, and it typically lasts one or two weeks. The goal of a sprint is to deliver something of value – a specific feature – from inception to delivery to your users. Why is this pretty cool? Well, it ends up delivering usable features or improvement to your users every two weeks. That means every two weeks users are testing new features that you are measuring and evaluating and deciding whether to retain within the product. This is naturally a combination of new improvements from user feedback and new things on the product roadmap that you want to test with users. These usable features or improvements are actually called ‘user stories’ – essentially a piece of functionality outlined in a very user-centric way (as in something a user can do on your app) that is designed to be developed within a 1–2-week period by a single developer. An example would be: ‘As a new user of app XYZ, I would like to be able to tap a location on the map and save it to an easily accessible list of favourite locations.’ For the system to work, it is up to the product team to define the ‘user stories’ in detail – enough detail for the developers to be able to go ahead and implement the feature in code. That means including all the steps required, what all the individual app screens look like, the buttons, the wording, the transitions and then all the required graphics. An agile team is defined as a group of people who can take a product feature, implement it, test it and then deploy it to users in a fully independent and autonomous fashion. This is a powerful concept, and it works really well when you have a small team. But it works equally well when you have 20, 30 or more developers, since the teams can all operate autonomously and therefore in parallel, meaning no bottlenecks in getting product improvements to users.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“It’s worth noting that in some places around the world (these are magical places) there are people who encapsulate all these skills – spanning product management to design to software development. I call them unicorns. Don’t hold out hope that you’ll ever find one – but, if you do, grab them.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Quality assurance (QA) – also called quality engineering (QE) – is tasked with making sure that the app your engineers are building is working as designed and specified. A large part of your QA team’s responsibility is to ensure the app you’re about to release to the public is bug-free – namely that there are no obvious areas where the software crashes or doesn’t act as expected, or that the user interface doesn’t look weird or wonky.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Leading the Product Vision There are two critical roles in your app company at this stage. One is responsible for figuring out what product to build and the other is responsible for how to build it. These two people are going to be joined at the hip, so they need to work extremely well together. The person behind the ‘what’ is the head of product. The person behind the ‘how’ is the CTO, or chief technology officer – the person in charge of building the actual software. In many very successful tech companies – especially app-centric ones – the first head of product is usually the CEO. They have the vision about what to build, and in many cases cofound a company with someone rich in engineering experience to deliver the how. Over time, as the CEO role becomes broader and more demanding, a dedicated head-of-product role needs to be created and filled with someone entirely focused on that mission. It’s tough to lead product development. It’s the role that I have been lucky to hold in a number of companies. The best product people listen to everyone’s vision, assumptions and ideas, and then ensure there is a clear, data-driven process about how to build, test and roll out product improvements. One of the key qualities of this person (besides being laser-focused on testing new product improvements and measuring their effectiveness) is the ability to say no. ‘No’ is a critical word to the success of any startup because it enables focus. Given limited time, money and resources, maintaining focus is the only way to get to product–market fit. Chamath Palihapitiya is a rather outspoken product guy who was part of the team that put Facebook on the path to a billion users.3 He explains the role of the product team very simply: testing, measuring and trying. In order to create a killer product, all you need to do is come up with good product features, build them quickly, test them with a subset of your users, gather the data, and then, if the new feature improves one of your key metrics (how often people use the app, how much time they spend using the app or if they end up spending more money), then you roll out the feature to all your users. If the product improvement doesn’t work, it must be changed or killed. It’s that simple. Since data doesn’t lie, there isn’t much that can go wrong with the process, unless you’re not very good at (i) coming up with product improvements to test, (ii) figuring out how to measure the performance of your product improvements, or (iii) judging from the data whether a product feature is improving core metrics or making them worse.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“1. GROWTH ENGINE. You need a systematic way to grow your user base. You need to reliably generate downloads, convert those downloads into valuable, revenue-generating users and then keep that cycle going. That involves being able to test new user-acquisition channels, test their effectiveness and then figure out what kind of lifetime value (LTV) they generate. If you can figure out how to repeatedly deliver a customer acquisition cost (CAC) for a user that is below the LTV, you have a profitable, sustainable business.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“I’ve tried to make the concept less abstract by offering a specific metric for determining product–market fit. I ask existing users of a product how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. In my experience, achieving product–market fit requires at least 40 per cent of users saying they would be ‘very disappointed’ without your product.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“You can definitely feel when you haven’t quite reached the point of perfect product–market fit. Your users don’t seem to get the value out of your app, there doesn’t seem to be much word-of-mouth growth, usage isn’t growing that fast, and you’re receiving rather flat publicity (no one is getting to the point of wow). You’re still stuck in the limbo world of the ‘me-too product’.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“The concept revolves around the fact that professional investors want assurances that you and your cofounders are going to hang around in the future. A founder-vesting schedule is basically a timeline of your earning full ownership of your shares in the company. Typically this means you will need to stay and work with your own company for four years (a normal period in the United States, in Europe it tends to be three years) for all your founder shares in the company to vest (i.e. effectively become your property), at which point you own them outright.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“If you’re looking for investment, you should be able to show a solid download-to-user-acquisition rate of around 80–90 per cent (always shoot higher). Depending on whether you’ve targeted your users well – and whether the first-time-user experience is compelling – you should be able to activate upwards of 50 per cent of your users. (In the very early days of Hailo this was around 25 per cent until we introduced a first-time-user ‘tour’ that explained how the app worked. The tour shot our activation rate above 50 per cent.)”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“You have caught the entrepreneurial bug. You want to make your app work and take it to the next level. You have your founding team in place. You’ve been testing your prototype app with real users. You have some encouraging data. This is the point where you want to consider outside investment. Why? Investment will help you grow faster; it will enable you to hire more people, spend more on advertising and get more people using your app.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“DO THE LEGWORK. Reach out to journalists yourself. Just like the rest of us, they are lazy. If you present them with a good story, and a personalised email outlining what you’re doing, there is a good chance you’ll be picked up. In the process, pull together a list of blogs in your relevant sector (technology and app news) as well as popular blogs that love reviewing apps (there’s a myriad of those), and then spend a few days writing a lot of emails – and be prepared to reply to a lot (and also get ready for a lot of interviews – it’s increasingly common to do them over Skype and Google Hangouts). So get out there!”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App