Dan Burcaw is Co-Founder & CEO of Nami ML. He built a top mobile app development agency responsible for some of the most elite apps on the App Store and then found himself inside the mobile marketing industry after selling his last company to Oracle.
It looks like 2020 is shaping up to be quite different than most of us thought. With public health experts predicting that social distancing protocols could be in effect for a year or more, we at Nami have felt the need to do something to help people affected by the pandemic. I would like to take this time to share with you two things that we are working on currently to support our community.
Volunteer-Driven Coronavirus Relief Projects
After speaking with our colleagues in several developer communities, we have compiled a list of volunteer-driven projects related to solving problems caused by this crisis. Currently, there are many groups of people working tirelessly to manufacture masks and ventilators for those in need. However, we are a software company with no manufacturing capabilities. Therefore we have come together to find seven community software projects helping problems like vaccine research data mining, elder outreach, and healthcare system capacity. We encourage all software engineers and app developers to take a look at the list of projects and contribute if they can.
Supporting Independent App Developers
Born in 2008, the App Economy has become very large. Just one of the ecosystems— the Apple App Store— has paid out more than $155 billion dollars to developers.
Unfortunately, during this challenging time many developers are seeing a drop in revenue. Just as we are all trying to help support our favorite local cafes or restaurants during this challenging time, let’s all try to support independent app developers who depend on a robust App Economy.
To do our part, we want to celebrate independent app developers that we admire. Some of these are Nami customers, but many of them aren’t. Either way, we want to use our audience to give them exposure during this challenging time.
Follow us on Twitter at @HelloNamiML for our daily #SupportIndieDevs shoutout. We’re tweeting by way of a list of indie apps from our public GitHub repository. If you would like to be on the list, please submit a pull request or let us know.
We are all in this pandemic together, let’s do everything we can to help each other out.
With the global mobile application market size to reach $407.31 billion by 2026, it is no surprise at how the enormity of this technology touches all facets of our lives. There is no better time to be an app publisher, whether it is in mobile, desktop or streaming services.
Streaming Services
2020 is an opportune time for independent publishers to be a part of the streaming service economy. The driving forces behind this development have been the convergence of new technologies with internet penetration and a major increase in mobile users outside the United States. As the statistics for streaming services shows below, there is a continued upward march of worldwide revenue growth in the steaming services industry.
It isn’t just movies that are breaking ground, audio services (e.g. music streaming, podcasts, audio books) are on the rise as well. In a recent study, mobile devices drove 79% of total global internet usage. That said, new streaming apps that provide in-demand content and ease of use are most likely to be adopted.
Immersive Technologies Becoming an Increasing Share of App Development
Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) all continue to command consumer attention for 2020. These technologies not only represent a large market, but that market continues to grow quickly.
VR has been the standout, extending far beyond gaming and entertainment. Both VR, AR and to a certain extent, AR technology are finding niches in disparate applications from large companies like Walmart to military applications with the US Army.
AR seems to have found solid footing lately with respect to enhancing the shopping experience, creating a more immersive and interactive adventure. Many large eCommerce’s companies use AR to enable customers to try products before purchase, such as displaying furniture in the home to check “fit” before purchase.
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Demand is on the rise for smarter, more intuitive applications using ML or AI within their platforms. Sectors like, Education, Healthcare and Manufacturing are providing a lots of opportunities for app developers. In the enterprise sector, there is growing demand for apps with machine learning that can run analytics alongside CRM platforms to reveal more information on how better to serve repeat clients and customers. Chatbots in retail is one early example of widespread ML usage that continues to grow.
Final Thoughts
There is no end in sight for the demand for app development and no better time than now to be an app publisher. This space continues to expand at a rapid pace. During the first generation of mobile apps, every product was either free or had a price. At Nami, we believe that there is increasing demand for apps with freemium offerings, subscriptions and in-app purchases.
Nami helps developers focus on profitability and recurring revenue streams. We want to empower developers to to create engaging experiences that users will happily pay for. Start your free trial today.
Nami co-founders Dan Burcaw & Joe Pezzillo will be at CES 2020 talking about how to build a smarter subscription business in the App Economy. If you’re like to meet with them, use the scheduling widget below.
Comprehensive Platform Laser Focused on Helping App Publishers Make More Money
Nami ML, a new startup transforming the use of on-device machine learning for in-app purchases (IAP) and subscriptions in mobile apps, has introduced support for enterprise analytics in their Mobile Revenue Automation platform.
Specifically, the new capabilities empower enterprise customers to leverage the Nami SDK with their existing Adobe, Google or other third-party measurement tools to gain more valuable insights into the performance of their mobile revenue campaigns.
“Nami is laser focused on helping app publishers make more money and we’ve heard from our enterprise customers how important it is that they be able to track and attribute revenue with their existing systems,” explains Dan Burcaw, Co-Founder and CEO.
“Nami is laser focused on helping app publishers make more money...and attribute revenue with their existing systems” — Dan Burcaw, Co-Founder Nami ML
Nami ML’s platform and SDK empower mobile app publishers of all sizes to tackle the challenges of making money with apps by growing in-app and subscription revenue in three key ways.
First, Nami makes it easy to integrate with the mobile app stores, starting with Apple's StoreKit, dramatically reducing the amount of time developers need to spend coding and testing.
Second, the Nami ML cloud-based platform gives marketers newfound capabilities to manage product offers and creative elements in their apps using a hosted service, instead of requiring constant developer updates.
Perhaps most importantly, Nami’s pioneering use of on-device machine learning to identify revenue behaviors in apps unlocks the promise of growing app revenue automatically in a way that protects end user privacy.
“Adding support for these enterprise analytics features will help solidify our emerging leadership position.” — Joe Pezzillo, Co-Founder Nami ML
“Nami’s groundbreaking revenue automation platform is at the forefront of the app economy and adding support for these enterprise analytics features will only help solidify our emerging leadership position,” added Joe Pezzillo, the company’s other Co-Founder and Chairman.
For complete information on the Nami(tm) platform and how it can help app publishers grow revenue, visit the website at https://nami.ml to learn more, request a demo and sign up today.
Nami is a trademark of Nami ML Inc., all other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
Nami Co-Founder & CEO Dan Burcaw joins Moving Fast Technology - Boulder for a panel discussion about bringing AI + Machine Learning to life in products from MVP to production.
Topic: Machine Learning + AI
Your task is to deliver usable, multi-platform software with limited or no budget in weeks. Mission impossible? Learn what others have done and the helpful new technologies and tools they've used to successfully deliver POCs and MVPs in short time frames. Get 3 different perspectives from people in the trenches who are moving fast: a CEO, CTO/VP Engineering, and Developer.
Panelist
Sara Bates: CEO & Co-founder of MamaMend (Techstars '18), Data Scientist, Engineer, Machine Learning Advisor, Co-organizer of Boulder Women in Machine Learning & Data Science (WiMLDS) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarabates/
Diana Pfeil: Diana is a data scientist with a passion for building useful data products. She is currently a data scientist at Honey, and has worked in machine learning in various roles for 15+ years, including as a startup CTO, an adjunct at CU Denver teaching predictive analytics, and as a software engineer in the machine learning group at Amazon. She received a PhD from MIT, where she focused on machine learning and optimization. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianampfeil/
Dan Burcaw: Dan is the Co-Founder & CEO of Nami ML, a company at the intersection of mobile and machine learning. Before Nami ML, Burcaw led mobile product for the Oracle Marketing Cloud. He joined Oracle via the acquisition of Push IO, a leading mobile messaging provider, where he served as Co-Founder & CEO. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danburcaw/
Join us!
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
6:00 PM 8:00 PM
Galvanize - Boulder, 1023 Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302 United States (map)
A hyper growth mindset has infiltrated every aspect of the App Economy. As we explored in Part 1 of this series, The App Economy and The User, growth metrics such as monthly active users (MAUs) have created perverse incentives for app publishers to the detriment of end user experience. In Part 2, we dissect how app publishers are growing their user base.
Houston, We Need to Grow
Your boss comes to you and says, “We need to get to 100,000 MAUs in 6 months.” What do you do?
This is exactly the situation that Sara Cole found herself in on her second day as Marketing Director for Eyecon Global. Cole’s challenge was exacerbated by the fact that she was working at a bootstrapped startup with significant resource constraints.
Cole met the challenge and was not only able to reach the initial growth goal, but exponentially surpass it - over the next 24 months, Eyecon achieved 11 million downloads.
How did she do it?
Organic Growth
Cole’s first step was to work on growing organic downloads. That is, new users who cannot be directly attributed to an advertisement. For instance, if a user installs your app after browsing or searching the App Store, they would be considered organic.
A user is consider organic if they install your app without first interacting with an ad.
App publishers can cultivate organic growth by honing keywords, tweaking marketing language, and making other improvements under the umbrella of app store optimization (ASO).
App store optimization (ASO) is the process of optimizing mobile apps for the purpose of achieving a higher rank in the app store search results and top charts rankings. Due to similarities with search engine optimization (SEO) for websites, app store optimization is also referred to as app store SEO, app search optimization, and mobile app SEO. (Source: Meatti)
With the abundance of apps available, if a user simply downloads your app it is a meaningful signal that they are interested in what your app offers. Additionally, since these users aren’t gained from an advertising campaign they likely cost less to acquire.
Optimized app store listings have carefully tuned keywords, creative elements, and marketing text.
While someevidence suggests that organic downloads are often better than other methods at retaining users, the industry has shown an unwillingness to depend on on organic growth alone.
With this in mind, ASO wasn’t the only approach Cole used. There was more she had to do to achieve her growth targets…
Paid Downloads
Increasing organic downloads through ASO and other marketing takes time. Due to this reality, purchasing app installs has become a generally accepted practice used by app publishers to generate growth.
Called cost per install (CPI), app publishers pay whenever an ad results in a new install of their app. Major CPI vendors include the usual suspects including Twitter and Facebook.
Twitter enables marketers to surface app install ads based upon various targeting criteria.
Silicon Valley firm AppLovin is another major leader in the paid download space. In 2016, a Chinese private equity company agreed to pay over $1.42 billion to acquire the firm - proof that the CPI market is big business.
Ad networks often serve low-quality install ads which often don't articular what the app is or why a user should both to download it.
Apple even participates in paid downloads by selling Apple Search Ads which feature prominently in the App Store.
Apple's App Store Search Ads tend to surface highly relevant results based upon search keywords.
According to Growth Bug’s Deepak Abbott, however, marketers boast about optimizing CPI (e.g. paying less per install), while not fully appreciating that doing so may lead to difficulty keeping such users active.
Abbott recommends app publishers use smarter metrics including cost per active user and monthly retention to inform how to focus resources.
Sara Cole confirms this approach. At Eyecon, she used A/B testing to strike a balance between keeping CPIs low and retaining users, but…
Churn and Growth Whack-a-Mole
Relying heavily on paid downloads or the wrong type of paid downloads can quickly turn problematic. It’s a bit like eating sugar. A little is not bad, but too much will deliver a short term kick followed by a very hard crash.
Imagine your boss walks in one day and says, “We need to grow faster!” A typical solution might be to up your advertising spend because it generates more installs. The growth manager immediately gets to work and is excited to start executing campaigns that achieve a low CPI.
Installs increase. Crisis averted! - Reverse that. You’ve just arrived at churn. New users abandon your app as quickly as they installed it.
What’s the prescription for churn? Most of us have experienced apps that send way too many notifications reminding (read: begging) us to visit the app.
The solution for the user to rid the annoyance is to turn off notifications, right? Many of us have experienced the onslaught of emails that follow, pleading for our return to the app.
To compound the issue, app publishers often do not differentiate messaging for actively engaged users (low churn risk) from users who are less engaged (high churn risk). Instead, they panic and blast all users with one-size-fits-all messaging.
I experienced this first hand from a well-known meditation app. After a much needed meditation, I left the app and within minutes was disrupted by ‘re-engagement’ messaging. It was infuriating, not calming. Not only was the notification patronizing and counter to the entire point of meditation, it felt like an act of desperation by the app publisher. This wasn’t a one time occurrence and (so far) has resulted in less frequent use of the app.
The problem with over messaging is simple - Best case: Users tune you out which negatively impacts your monthly active user metric. Worst case: Users delete your app and you get churn.
This cycle is hard to break, especially in an ecosystem that is addicted to hyper growth based upon metrics that don’t account for quality of engagement.
"90% of our daily growth comes from organic and viral downloads." - Sara Cole, Marketing Director, Eyecon Global
Ultimately, Eyecon’s Sara Cole ended up with a healthy organic growth story, meaning her company was well positioned to focus less on retaining low quality installs.
Until Next Time…
In Part 3, we’ll explore how to build a healthier relationship with our users by focusing on selling your app, not your users.
