Awesome. And congrats, this made me want to check you guys out. I wish you guys had a case study that's easier to find though. I think there might be a few in the articles section, but having one up front would really help me understand how exactly it helps me grow my business. A lot of this search and keyword stuff is hard to grasp for some of us initially.
We've been working on a similar idea for a few months now, and have some pretty solid data and sophisticated algorithms which are now giving us quite reasonable insights. We support iOS App Store and Android Market. We want to really focus on how to get better at organic distribution within the app stores (e.g. what keywords should I focus on based on my competition and, most importantly, where the search volume is in the app stores).
App Store Optimization (ASO) is a big deal today, and is going to be a HUGE deal shortly. The growth of mobile is just too much, too fast for search not to become massively important. You can see Apple bet on this fact with its acquisition of Chomp recently.
Even more broadly, there are too many players in the mobile app ecosystem who are searching for ways to help app marketers get distribution through various paid means, but not enough (virtually none) who are searching for ways to help app marketers get distribution through organic (unpaid) means. Yet this is exactly where the vast majority of downloads come from.
We want to focus on the organic side of app distribution: search, rankings, social/sharing, earned media, web landing pages, etc. All things that help app marketers promote their apps without paying per download. Marketing channels that really scale. It's the SEO/social/viral channels for mobile.
Thanks for the reply iseff, it's always nice to hear from the competition :)
I totally agree that ASO is going to get huge. There is also an interesting "fight of tools" coming up, as there are many ways to organize the whole process, and no "right one" discovered yet.
For example our tool (http://www.AppCod.es) has a totally different interface from yours, and we offer a different set of functionalities (like for example the prediction tool and the keyword guessing module), while of course there is plenty that we can learn from you :)
What I also think is that a good tool should not only track your position in the store, but also help - at least a little bit - with your PR actions. Suggest & teach you how to get the word out about your app.
We tried to integrate with PayPal's recurring APIs for three weeks, scrapped it when we found Stripe, and had it completely ready to go in 24hrs.
Not to mention their customer support is absolutely fantastic. I get responses within seconds in their Campfire chat room and hours if I send an email, anytime of day.
That's a really nice feature, though it's surprisingly hard to find on their site. I wonder why they prefer to promote their Tour rather than the Live Demo (found via a small link in a list on the right rail of the Tour page).
Would be interesting if a Live Demo doesn't convert nearly as well as a Tour.
I've been thinking A LOT about App Store Optimization recently. It's a big problem for app developers and, as someone who loves making tools for app developers, is something that I'd like to help fix.
We're (AppStoreHQ) thinking about creating some App Store Optimization tools, but we need more input from more app developers. If you'd like to learn more, please sign up (it takes 2 seconds and I'll keep all info private):
And for those who want to hear more about what I've been thinking, I've been writing on MobileDevHQ about App Store Optimization (and will continue to add more to the series):
There's also OneWed (http://www.onewed.com) which has a directory of all types of wedding vendors as well as their sister site, Nearlyweds (http://www.nearlyweds.com), which makes beautiful wedding web sites. I highly recommend them (disclaimer: I'm also friends with them. :)).
We might have been able to get away with raw SQL, but because of some of the complexities and dependencies on this same code, I felt like it wasn't the prudent choice during a fire. I wouldn't have had time to properly test it.
As for moving the inserts to an async job, that was one of our thoughts, too. Really it's what we did, but we just have the intermediary step of MongoDB. We wanted that step (rather than just immediately returning to the user and having the client not know when the inserts actually occur) because we wanted to keep the user experience great. Our app immediately sends you to personalized recs. We didn't want the initial experience to be: open the app => sent to a blank page of "recommendations."
An async job that didn't wait for any sort of confirmation would have left us in this position (or we would have had to implement a poller to check if the inserts were complete, which seemed wasteful and would need a push to Android Market which seemed less feasible.)
Funny, for me it's the opposite. I've taken to kind of _enjoying_ folding laundry since I started working on AppStoreHQ. It's the mindless release that I need every once in a while.
