I’m developing an app called Escape The Room — AR. Its a multiplayer augmented reality escape room. Personally I think it’s going to be pretty cool… But how do I get other people to understand that?? What are the goals of my app? To have as many people as possible buy it, and absolutely love it. What does that have to do with marketing? Much like a rocket, for an app to take off their needs to be a massive amount of energy expelled at the start to get it off the ground. From there, it’s smooth sailing (sort of).

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

Why Market?

You could have the most amazing app or game but if no one has heard about it, what’s the point? To be succesful you need two things: attention and a great product. I’ll talk about the focus on having a great product in another post, right now let’s talk about attention.

We live in an unprecedented time. Never before has it been easier to connect with the entire world. The ROI of your time has never had the potential to be higher. You can build a following that will galvanize your app, provide you valuable feedback, and spread word about your hard work to the world!

You must be saying to yourself, “Wow! That sounds great, sign me up!” Unfortunately, its not that easy. In fact, its really hard and can make you feel pretty crummy sometimes.

Get Used to Screaming Into The Void

This is what starting a social following feels like on a micro level

Everyone started with one follower. All the biggest social followings were grown one person at a time. We only see the tens of thousands, or millions, of people following an individual after the fact. We never see the struggle that got them to that point. You might have great content, but at the start you’re only getting a few likes every post. It can feel pretty discouraging. I can empathize, I’m going through the same thing right now.

My latest Instagram post… at least there is some self love.

My above post didn’t get that much love, even though I thought it was one of my cooler posts. As I’m making assets for my game, I always make a render of it to post on social media feeds.

The aforementioned post

Some posts do better than others, but that’s okay! At this point every post doesn’t need to be a grand slam, you just need to keep putting out great content, the success will come eventually. Bamboo spends five years growing underground, then launches 90 feet in 6 weeks. If you’re just getting started like me, we’re still underground. The only thing we can do is keep going forward.

Getting Over Fear

I try to post on Twitter a few times a week, and Instagram at least one time per week. I’m going to start posting here more about my trials and tribulations as an AR Developer trying to make their side project big!

One of the emotions I certainly feel is fear. Am I working on the right project? What else do I need to be doing? Is all of this silly and embarrassing? I’m not going to lie and act like I don’t have these thoughts. But I’m also not going to let these thoughts conquer what I do. I’m going to start posting videos on Youtube to discuss where I’m at in my AR journey, and what I’m working on. Why? Because it’s something that I would have loved to have seen when I started my journey. Is it scary? Yeah, definitely. It’s going to be a lot of work, and it’s intimidating to have a camera staring you in the face. My channel is totally empty right now. I’ll start posting by the end of the week, so subscribe if you want to see what I’m working on.

Also, send me your channels and pages to subscribe to! I’d love to see where you are on your journey. Whether you’re in the AR/VR space or not, I’ve setup a Discord channel so we can discuss what we’re working on. Come join the conversation!

Some Final Inspiration

Stardew Valley is a game created by a solo indie developer Eric “Concerned Ape” Barone. There is a great article on his 4.5 year quest to make the game here.

The game ended up selling 5 million copies and was a massive commerical and critical success. I was curious about where this gaming journey started, so I went way back in Eric’s timeline (@ConcernedApe on Twitter) and found what he was tweeting about in the very early days.

That tweet was from May of 2013. The game didn’t officially release until January of 2016. And at the time, that tweet only got eight likes. It’s important to put out content to build a following. Even if you’re not getting much reception, just keep doing it. The worst thing that could happen to your app is that it’s absolutely wonderful, but no one has heard about it.

That’s it! Follow us on Twitter and here on Medium to stay connected, and happy developing!