Day-to-day Product Management #2: 2 months after launching an iPhone game

Since the last month post on this topic, I did 2 actions for promoting the iphone app I developed:

• ask people I knew to provide feedback on the game on the App Store: The game is now 5 stars and has 3 comments.
• put some links (5) on French news websites comments section for relevant articles and relevant audience

The impact is very limited since in one month I got only 11 more downloads :(

For the coming month I will try the following advertising platforms and let you know about the results:

-Facebook ads

-Google Ads

-iAds

Chinese Hanzi Mnemonics #6: 电 (Benjamin Franklin involved :))

Today's Hanzi mnemonic is for 电(Diàn) that means electricity.

Look how the 电 hanzi looks like a kite. To associate it with electricity, just remember how the famous Benjamin Franklin's experiment turned out.

Chinese Hanzi Mnemonics #5: 车(Chē)/car

Day-to-day Product Management #1: 1 month after launching an iPhone game

Today, I want to share with you my day-to-day experiences on distributing an iphone app.

In my previous product management roles at HTC, distributing and advertising mobile apps was handled by dedicated marketing teams. Therefore I want to enhance this part of marketing skills , the P of promotion :).

In order to do that, I chose to do a very soft launch (almost secret one!) to have a reference point of what happens when you only share the link with your friends on Facebook and talk about it around a beer.

As you will see in a bit, there is no free lunch and miracle did not happen!

Firstly, I chose to do a copycat of the successful Flappy bird game because from a product perspective, millions of users have shown interest in it and copycats have been downloaded thousands of time. So why not use it as a basis and add a funny twist to it?

As a French, I have been amused by the affair our President had earlier this year and I used this funny story as a basis for the game.

So after developing the game, I pushed it in iTunes Connect, which is the tool you need for publishing your apps on the App Store. Once released officially on the 29th of May 2014, I shared the link on several channels (and did again after a minor update on the 13th of June 2014):

• 2nd of June 2014: 
• Twitter share:

Look! I scored 0 points in Flappy President! http://t.co/S80PZmoPDG pic.twitter.com/q39mmNWbNu
— PA Antonini (@pierreantoine) June 2, 2014

• Facebook share:

                                     

• 11th of June 2014: I posted a brief article on the game on this blog and shared the article on Google+ account (but who cares, no one uses Google+ ;))
• 13th of June 2014: I asked for help on Facebook for translating the game description for iTunes

• 16th of June 2014: I shared a score on Twitter

Look! I scored 11 points in Flappy Prez! http://t.co/S80PZmoPDG pic.twitter.com/5D5E950wUp
— PA Antonini (@pierreantoine) June 16, 2014

19th of June 2014: I share updated version on Twitter and Facebook

Iphone4 bug solved https://t.co/tlLuIIIXhX
— PA Antonini (@pierreantoine) June 19, 2014

To help you visualize my network, I mainly use Facebook (around 500 friends) and I am not a big fan of Twitter (around 150 followers and use it mainly as news feed for tech and entrepreneurship).

So what are the results? Wait for it.... a stunning 123 downloads in one month!!! Youhou!!!

As you can see on the graph, main downloads are around the 13th of June 2014 (when I asked for help on Facebook on this project).

It appears that sharing update on the new version had very low effect (if any) on the 19th of June and after. Since then I have not communicated at all on the app.

So with this, it appears that with no clear promotion strategy, nothing really happens!

From this point on, I need now to test several other channels to measure their ROIs and see whether I can reach the 10K target :)!

So the plan is (and you will soon see the reports):

• Facebook ads
• Google ads (since it's a mobile app, not sure it really makes sense)
• Links in newspapers and forums
• Landing page for the app with a well-formated SEO
• iAd campaigns
• Linkedin share

Stay tuned, more to come soon!!

--Pierre-Antoine Antonini

Chinese Mnemonics #4: 唱 (chàn:to sing)

Today's mnemonics is the one for 唱 (pronounced chàn and meaning to sing)

As you can see, the 3 squares can make you think of 3 open mouths. That's convenient because when you sing you have the mouth wide open but why 3 mouth and why 2 with tongues in the middle (you see them, right?) and 1 without?

My personal way of remembering it is to use St-Augustine's quote: "To sing is to pray twice".
So now, I have one mouth wide open on the left that is for "to sing" and two mouths with tongue on the right that come closer to talk twice and in our case "to pray twice"

Chinese Hanzi Mnemonics #3: 人(rén:person)/大(dà:big/tall)

Today, 2 simple hanzi:

The first one 人 (rén) means a person, people. The first time you see it, you may think directly of a man walking from left to right (without arms, don't ask me why :)).

The second one 大(dà) means big,tall. For me, it's like someone telling you the story of his fishing party and telling how "big" was the fish he caught by extending the arms : "Look, this was an enormous fish, I promise, Big like that!!!"

My HEC MBA interview presentation: "The Long Tail"

During the HEC MBA application process, I was asked to do a presentation on a topic I was interested in.
In this presentation, you will find a summary of the long tail concept coined by Chris Anderson and some contradictions to it (superstar effect for example).

My HEC MBA Interview presentation (2008): The Long Tail from Pierre-Antoine Antonini

Chinese Hanzi Mnemonics #2: 一二三/123

一 yī: 1
二 èr: 2
三 sān: 3

Well, this one is pretty obvious :), think of Latin numerals rotated 90° and you are all set!

Chinese Hanzi Mnemonics #1: 买/Mǎi => buy

Thanks to HTC who offered me some Chinese classes 2 years ago, I have decided to continue learning it even though my department closed down.

Since I have always been interested by Chinese culture (especially their literature classics), I am quite dedicated to it now and have even taken the HSK2 test 2 weeks ago (a kind of TOEIC).

While learning Hanzi (Chinese ideograms) is very difficult, I have come up with some Mnemonics to help myself remember them better.

Since my Mandarin teacher find them funny, I decided to share them with you. Please be aware that I am only learning simplified hanzi and not traditional ones. Please also don't be shocked if I am not always using the Hanzi keys in the right way, sometimes it just works better for me another way. (Native/Advanced Chinese speakers will understand what I mean).

So here is my first one:

This is the Hanzi 买 (pronounce Mǎi) that means "buy/purchase" ("acheter" en français).
When I see this hanzi, I see a hand holding a chicken and since buying chicken to prepare chicken curry is one of my most frequent purchases, you can imagine how holding a chicken means "buy" :D

Recruiting via Facebook: The Work4 business case

Hereafter is a small business case I recently did, hope you find it interesting.