Rob Conne was the CEO and co-founder of Scouts Military Discounts, which is an app that gives veterans and active duty military a place to find discounts for retailers, restaurants, and other businesses. What I liked most about his presentation was that it was focused heavily on his app and how he made it for the user and not try and blow it up into something that was super huge.
Rob talked about how when they first started the company how they had planned to go national and try and get as many downloads as possible. What ended up happening to them was that all the people who downloaded it found out that the deals were on big company brands and it didn't really change all that much. This meant they could download the app, get the information, and delete, which is not good for business as they can't make money off of one time users. So Rob decided to shift from national to small focused areas with a high concentration of veterans for better app retention. So they move to Tacoma because of how many veterans live here. They then cataloged all the shops and small retailers in Tacoma in their app, making it a lot harder to memorize what all the deals where and to not want to delete the app after a one time use.
The shift for the app worked, and they saw continuous growth in their app and more retention. So they could do more with marketing and advertisements. I found this interesting as one of my apps has a banner ad in it, and it hasn't done very well. Mostly because I don't care to much for it as it was just a fun project to learn some stuff. However, listening to how Rob was able to get more money out of it made me realize how much ad revenue could be made if you understand your user database and change the way apps are monetized. I never would have thought of doing something like, it seemed to be a great move for them and gets me thinking on how my app for the business idea could also do something similar like that and make more revenue.
One last thing I found interesting about the speaker was the way they got their database for discounts. Because Rob said he hired some friends to call every place in Tacoma about discounts for the military and catalog all the information they got into their app. I thought they would have a more sophisticated way of doing this but it seemed to work. Shows that sometimes you just got to brute force things in order to get them working and going.
No comments:
Post a Comment