When we just got started with email marketing, we didn't know what we were doing. Blasting out 150,000 emails to an unsegmented audience was just one of our early mistakes. This episode is all about our experience with email and what we learned along the way.

Topics covered:

- Why bother doing email marketing for mobile apps?

- Our email marketing journey and lessons learned

- Tools we have used and recommend for email marketing

- Strategy we use to improve retention and sales via email

Links mentioned in this episode:

Zoho Campaigns: https://www.zoho.com/campaigns/

Sendy: https://sendy.co/

EmailOctopus: https://emailoctopus.com/

Mailchimp: https://mailchimp.com/

ActiveCampaign: https://www.activecampaign.com/

Last week was Black Friday! We run our first campaign ever using landing pages, ads and email promotion. It was a big success thanks to the joint effort of many people: marketing team, developers, POs, and designer.

Today, we talk about

- How we run our first Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions

- How we created landing pages and sales tracking

- How we promoted the pages via email marketing and ads

- Lessons learned and what to improve next time

In today's episode we talk about our favorite books, which include fiction and non-fiction.

We cover

- Our yearly reading goals

- Goodreads, our favorite book platform

- Eric Ries - The Lean Startup

- Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

- Nelson Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom

- JK Rowling - Harry Potter

- The Three Kingdoms

- Jared Diamond - The Third Chimpanzee

- Will Durant - The Story of Civilization

Let's talk about increasing your downloads! This week, we share 5 free tactics to increase your downloads:

We share

- How we utilized Facebook Groups to drive early downloads

- Apps Gone Free strategy for 3000 free downloads in a day

- Post your app on Product Hunt

- Seeding on boards like Quora, Reddit etc.

- Instagram automation

Links mentioned in this episode:

App Advice: https://appadvice.com/

Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/

Quora: https://www.quora.com/

Reddit: http://reddit.com/

Jarvee: https://jarvee.com/

Customer support is a very important part of our business. Today, we do a deep dive into our customer support process.

We'll cover:

- How we did customer support when just starting out

- How we transitioned from doing it ourselves to delegating it

- What software we use to do effective support

- What's our current process

- How we classify our tickets and templates

- How we ensure good service quality

Links mentioned in this episode:

Ling App: https://ling-app.com/

Zoho Desk: https://www.zoho.com/desk/

Slack: https://slack.com/

In this episode, we lay out our strategy that we use to get backlinks for our apps and websites. Backlinks are an important factor to rank your site on Google.

Specifically, we cover...

- Why do we want backlinks as app developers?

- Outsource or do it yourself? 

- How do we identify high quality backlinks by spying on our competitors?

- How to get leads?

- How to reach out via campaigns?

- Are backlinks free? Is it worth to pay for them?

- How to close the deals.

Links mentioned in this episode:

https://ahrefs.com/

In this episode, we share our top 5 tools for testing our mobile apps.

Discover how we use

1. AWS Device Farm: Amazing tool for uploading your apps to one of 100s of real devices and simulators. It lets you either manually run your apps or run automatic scripts. It also has a very generous free trial, so there is no reason not to try it today.

2. Firebase App Distribution: We use this to test our features immediately after pushing the changes to Git. All testers who installed the App Distribution mobile app will get the new builds instantly. It's like Testflight on steroids. And best of all, it's 100% free.

3. Smartlook: Watch on video what your users are doing in your mobile app. This is great for improving the UI/UX, finding bugs, and get inspired about the next killer features. 

4. Firebase A/B Testing: Another free tool from Google/Firebase. This one allows you to A/B test anything you want in the app. We regularly use it to test new buttons, shop screens or even entire new features. You'll need a developer to set this up but boy, is it worth it.

5. Bugsnag: A great bugtracker. While there are many of these out there, Bugsnag integrates very nicely with React Native. It has a very good interface and allows for breadcrumbs, release monitoring and many others.

Today we talk about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). At Simya, we have half-yearly meetings with all employees where we review past KPIs and set new ones. KPIs are for tracking performance but also about giving and getting feedback, as well as setting effective goals for personal development.

In this episode, we talk about

In this episode, we talk about how we share feedback within our teams. An important part of this are the Retrospective meetings. They are extremely useful for reviewing the past teamwork and improving for the future.

Learn how we

- What is the Retrospective team in agile?

- What are purposes of the meeting?

- Examples of how to run a Retrospective successfully

- Schedule of a typical Retrospective

- Best Practices of good feedback

- How to take action based the Retrospective

This episode is all about goal setting. In our company we do this with OKRs (Objectives & Key Results). It's a modern goal setting framework used by Google, Twitter, Amazon and others.

We will cover:

Resources mentioned in this episode:

John Doerr - Measure What Matters