Discovering that patronage isn’t new

Patrons exist for all sorts of people who find it hard to earn a living doing something that is of benefit to everyone. For example, Galileo depended on the Marchese del Monte and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II de Medici, for support during his life as a mathematician, scientist, and inventor. The paper at https://escholarship.org/content/qt94q0q1gq/qt94q0q1gq.pdf describes Galileo’s system of patronage in detail. This paper by Mario Biagioli is enlightening because it explores the full effect of obtaining patronage, which goes well beyond physical means in the form of monetary support. For Galileo, patronage affected his social status, focuses of learning, and a great many other aspects of life. His patrons, in turn, received social status and knowledge from having supported Galileo.

The concept of patronage need not apply simply to one person performing what will be their life’s work. It could apply to a one-time event or a one-time application. For example, Farm Aid (https://www.farmaid.org/) provides an annual event to help farmers experiencing hard times (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/farm-aid-weaves-blues-country-rock-tapestry-at-jiffy-lube/2016/09/18/b12cd414-7db5-11e6-ad0e-ab0d12c779b1_story.html as an example). Your app designed to help people locate assistance in the aftermath of a hurricane can certainly be patron supported, even though the app is a one-off project. You won’t get people to buy such an app; you need patrons to support it.

The most interesting aspect of patronage is the work it requires of the person seeking the patronage — not the same amount of work required to earn a living and pursue interests such as art and science at the same time, but an entirely different kind of work. Galileo must have been charismatic in a manner that attracted the attention of his patrons, and such charisma is necessary today as well. When viewing modern artists who rely on a system of patronage, it becomes obvious that they have a certain something. You might have a certain something, too.

Considering crowdfunding

Modern patronage can occur in the same way as it always has: You connect with individuals who are especially well endowed financially and willing to share it for a good cause. The more common route nowadays, however, is to use crowdfunding, with large groups of people taking the place of a single patron and contributing through websites such as Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/). When you visit the Patreon site, you see a listing of the main categories of individuals who use it to help support their work. The list doesn’t include Android app developers specifically, but you do find niches that can apply to apps:

• Gaming: https://www.patreon.com/c/gaming
• Education: https://www.patreon.com/c/tutorials-and-education
• Other: https://www.patreon.com/explore

Defining why you should use crowdfunding

The app store has made using the shrink-wrap model of single software sales less viable because there are so many offerings to choose from, and developers often see users go to other products rather than invest in pricey upgrades. Using the crowdfunding approach has these significant advantages:

• Subscriptions cost less: When a user sees a small price for an annual subscription, it’s more likely that the user will continue to support the app.
• Establishment of a relationship: Rather than do a poor job of trying to please everyone, a developer can focus on doing a great job of pleasing a group that is actually interested in the app.
• Cash flow: The issue that plagues developers most is inconsistent cash flow. A crowdfunding solution provides incremental, but consistent, payments that the developer can rely upon to keep the lights on.
• Alignment: Because the developer focuses on fewer people who provide incremental payments, it’s possible to deliver the kinds of updates patrons want at a rate that’s acceptable to the patrons.
• Stable development environment: Creating a stable development environment enables the developer to explore functionality that would normally prove difficult or impossible to fund. For example, if enough patrons want a particular analysis feature, the developer can add it even if the feature would normally not appeal to the market as a whole.

Keeping things in perspective is essential. You should use crowdfunding if it works for your app, but you must also consider these potential pitfalls:

• Subscription fatigue: Even if you have the most devoted and joyous group of supporters in the world, you need to continually create something interesting or the users will wonder what they’re getting for their subscription. As users grow tired of their subscription, your revenue stream falls.
• Implementation details: Rather than a single release, you now have a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) model that can prove difficult to implement. You can read a good overview of the process at https://www.infoworld.com/article/3271126/what-is-cicd-continuous-integration-and-continuous-delivery-explained.html.

Understanding the development angle

Patreon is bristling with apps of every kind. The starting point is the Patreon app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.patreon.android) that many people who rely on Patreon use to communicate with their supporters. Then there are the pages of support information that talk about interacting with various Patreon app features, such as https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005429546-Will-my-podcast-benefits-work-with-my-favorite-podcast-app- and https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005666886-How-do-I-post-in-the-mobile-app-as-a-creator-.

You can find a page specifically designed for Fledgling Developers at https://www.patreon.com/fledglingdevelopers. The goal is to create free apps without ads but with Patreon supporters. As you look down the page, however, you see that a great deal more is involved than simply creating apps. For example, one of the current goals at the time of this writing is to buy a new laptop for one of the members, and you can see a progress bar toward obtaining it. When you become a member, you gain access to private blog posts that aren’t available to the general public, among other incentives. Here are some other groups that you might want to check out:

• Imagination Overflow: https://www.patreon.com/imaginationoverflow
• Sketchware Team: https://www.patreon.com/sketchware

Just in case you’re wondering, strong support also exists for creating apps that help other Patreon creators work with their patrons. You can find them at https://www.patreon.com/apps. So, you don’t necessarily have to be creating the next super app; you can do something a bit more mundane.

Determining the trade-offs

How much of the crowdfunding money makes it to the developers? Currently, Patreon takes 5 percent for itself and another 5 percent for transaction fees. The remaining 90 percent actually makes it to the developers. The developers don’t have to sign a contract with Patreon, so developers keep 100 percent ownership of their work and full control of their brand.

There are alternatives to Patreon, with Gumroad (https://gumroad.com/) being one of the top options among them. When choosing a crowdfunding provider, you need to consider precisely what the provider wants in return. Most providers need a certain percentage of what you obtain from your patrons as a starting point. Some also require contracts that require you to give up a percentage of your ownership and perhaps some control over your brand as well, so it pays to be careful in making a selection.

Creating podcasts

A podcast is a type of presentation that many compare to radio talk shows, with a presenter discussing one focused topic in a specific time frame. A single presenter can provide podcasts in a range of topics in an episodic format. The length of a podcast varies, but articles like the one at https://blog.pacific-content.com/how-long-is-the-average-podcast-episode-81cd5f8dff47 seem to indicate that podcasts are statistically about 43 minutes in length, which, oddly enough, is about the same amount of time as someone spends watching a television show. Obviously, this television show, podcast, radio talk show, or whatever you want to call it is about your app.

When you try to look for advice on creating a podcast specifically for Android users, you normally find are lists of apps that provide podcasts or techniques for building a podcast app, neither of which is helpful. Podcasts follow a variety of formats, with the most successful presented by charismatic people with a great online appearance. The least successful are those unscripted types with a mumbling, fumbling presenter whose five minutes of presentation seem more like an hour.

Allowing the viewer to see you isn’t essential, but podcasts that reveal someone with a smiling face at some point during the presentation seem a lot more approachable. You should also ensure that people can actually see your app as you work with it, and you want to go through your demonstration slowly enough to allow people to follow along. Practicing the podcast before you film it is a good idea, but everyone has their own way of getting the job done.

A disoriented, nonfocused set of app musings doesn’t do anyone any good. Having a strict focus in your presentation is essential to being successful. Of course, trying to figure out what people want can be difficult, but you can usually find plenty to present in these topics:

• How-to: Step-by-step procedures to perform a specific task or perform a configuration. A how-to can help sell your app by showing the user what it can do to solve problems the user is having.
• Common issues: As people write in about your app, you notice certain patterns in overcoming issues that you can talk about, saving you support time and the user frustration.
• Tips: A set of usage tips specifically designed for a tightly focused group of users can help sell your app and give users ideas. It’s often surprising how a set of good tips will get users thinking about your app in new ways, and you may suddenly find users working with your app in ways you never imagined. The point is to make the tips specific to a group as well as tightly focused.
• App updates: Updating your app doesn’t mean that users will automatically notice the new features. In fact, the law of inertia generally dictates that the user will do everything possible not to notice the new features. Getting users to see the advantage in employing new features helps sell new copies or subscriptions, or simply grow your user base by making your app more attractive to a patron.
• Community focus: If you find that your users are especially adept at interacting with and talking about your app, you may want to use that buzz to your advantage. You can create a tightly focused podcast created from user interviews, list group/chat submissions (those messages people upload to a server and other people answer online, such as Medium.com, https://medium.com/, and Stack Overflow, https://stackoverflow.com/), or other sources to show how other users are working with your app. This sort of podcast gives your app a real-world feel.

Creating a podcast about anything other than your app is a bad idea. The worst sort of podcasts make comparisons to the competition, saying, “We’re better because …” You want to maintain a positive spirit and keep your focus solely on what your app can do for the user. The user community needs to make its own decision on how your app compares to others. This focus on the positive doesn’t mean that you can’t encourage users to provide reviews or other positive feedback about your app.

Developing YouTube videos

Finding YouTube statistics online isn’t hard. Not all these statistics agree, and the statistics that look reasonably accurate are bound to change quickly. One thing, however, is certain: YouTube is incredibly popular, and ignoring this venue for promoting your app is ill advised. With this idea in mind, here are more YouTube statistics to consider (based on the amalgamation of statistics from several recent sites):

• It’s the second largest search engine after Google.
• It has more than a billion users each month.
• Twenty-five percent of all content on YouTube is viewed on mobile devices.
• One billion views come from mobile devices each month.
• It appears in 56 countries.
• Seventeen percent of all Internet traffic flows through YouTube.
• Users watch six billion hours of video each month.
• YouTube content is accessed by hundreds of millions of devices.
• One hundred hours of new video is uploaded every minute.

Regardless of whether you believe all these statistics, the fact remains that you need YouTube to help promote your app because someone, somewhere, is likely to see it and like your video enough to tell others about it. If you’re lucky, a good video will go viral and you won’t have to worry much about promoting your app in the near future. Of course, luck goes only so far, so pursuing other venues is still a good idea.

At this point, you’re wondering why everyone isn’t investing heavily in YouTube content. It’s because, as always, there is no free lunch. (You’ll likely hear this phrase more often than you’ll ever want to, but it’s important.) To obtain the benefits of YouTube, you must make a significant investment, as outlined here:

• The cost of producing a video, unless you do it on your own, is significantly higher than other forms of interaction, like a blog post.
• The learning curve for producing videos is quite steep, and not many people can produce a great video.
• Your video is apt to get lost on YouTube unless the right person sees it and helps make it viral.
• Making changes to a video is not nearly as easy as making edits to a blog post.
• Building a following of supporters on YouTube is about as difficult as building supporters for an app.

Even though the costs of creating a video are high and you’ll need to put a great deal of effort into producing one, the benefits are definitely appealing. However, even if you produce a great video, it’s relatively easy to miss the target anyway. Consider the following when putting a video together for an app:

• Keep the video short and targeted to a particular aspect of your app, such as performing a task that isn’t easily demonstrated through other means. Most people use videos to present these types of content:
  • Tutorials on how to use the app
  • App interaction strategies with the larger world
  • Education on a specific topic that the app addresses
  • Demonstrations
  • Product reviews
• Make sure to tell people about your app at the end of the video and provide links to learn more about it.
• Presentation is everything in a video, so hiring actors who can provide that bright, cheery smile is a plus.
• Create a fun, memorable video because otherwise no one will watch it.
• After adding the fun, don’t forget to keep the professionalism in place as well.
• Ensure that the video is actually targeted to the audience you want to reach. Generic videos seldom succeed.
• Present visual cues such as the organization logo, app icon, and other memorable visual elements as often as possible.

Avoid confusing a YouTube video with a podcast. You use podcasts for more informational and detailed needs. A YouTube video is for lighter content meant to promote your app. According to Statista (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-category-average-length/), the average length of a YouTube video is only 11.7 minutes, compared to around 43 minutes for a podcast. Consequently, you have far less time to make your case in a YouTube video and have to hope that your audience actually stays through the whole thing.

Employing social media

Most people recognize the value of word of mouth when it comes to making anything popular, and social media is today’s word-of-mouth avenue for many people. Social media can provide an effective way to promote your app when managed correctly. In fact, 33 percent of the people who download your app will do so because someone else recommended it.

Statistics show that around 52 percent of people discover apps through their family, friends, and colleagues, and most of those conversations happen on social media today. The paper entitled “Mobile App Marketing Insights: How Consumers Really Find and Use Your Apps,” at https://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/mobile-app-marketing-insights.pdf, offers all sorts of interesting statistics on just how people interact with apps and how they promote them to each other, but you quickly find that social media is king in many respects with respect to promotion. Interestingly, 68 percent of the apps used daily have something to do with social needs and communication.

Before you go off and make your first post on Facebook about your new app, however, you want to make sure that you have a separate Facebook account for your app. No one wants to hear about last year’s fishing trip while trying to discover something about your app, and forcing them to do so says that you’re not a professional. Your app social media account should also have a formal appearance compared to your personal account. In addition to providing a presence on the social media apps of your choice, you can also contemplate these approaches to making social media work for you:

• Consider using paid ads. Some social media apps, such as Facebook, make it relatively simple to provide ads.
• Rely on influencer marketing when possible. This marketing orientation includes choosing the right venue. For example, 80 percent of all micro-influencers rely on Instagram to post original content. Contrast this with Snapchat, which accounts for only a little less than 40 percent (most influencers use multiple content channels).
• Create a channel for User-Generated Content (UGC). According to the Nielsen article at https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-releases/2012/nielsen-global-consumers-trust-in-earned-advertising-grows/, 90 percent of customers will listen to peer recommendations, but only 33 percent will listen to an ad.
• Promote your best reviews, no matter where they appear. About 60 percent of people think that ratings and reviews are essential when deciding to download an app.
• Use the right platform for the correct effect. For example, Facebook encourages community building, so this is the social media venue you use to build communities of users. Instagram, on the other hand, helps users gravitate toward a well-rounded aesthetic. Twitter is great for creating the buzz that generates new users.

Answering questions

Getting on community support sites and answering questions might seem like the least likely way to generate sales along with a great way to waste a lot of time, but answering questions really does help. When you begin providing answers to user questions, the users begin to see you as a trusted source of helpful information. Also, users start to know you as a person (at least, to a noncreepy extent), which builds a personal rapport. This rapport makes users trust your app offerings as well.

However, if you take this route of answering user questions, be sure to follow these guidelines:

• Answer questions only when you can be sure of providing a correct answer.
• Never offer opinions.
• Maintain strict professionalism and don’t take the bait to argue with a heckler.
• Keep advertising out of your answers.
• Provide links to other resources, including your apps, when specifically asked.
• Take off-topic conversations to email.
• Include all needed resources with your answers, including graphics and code when the site supports them.
• Keep answers as short as possible without leaving out important details.

Creating a blog

Blogs can work well because they feel more personal than the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages used by many organizations today. A FAQ feels cold and impersonal because it’s meant to provide information without any sort of feeling. On a blog, you often see some opinion mixed with the author’s personal style that looks more like an article than a FAQ.

A blog can put you in contact with people who might be interested in your app long before you actually build it. By providing updates on app progress and then reading any comments on the updates you’ve given, you can make small tweaks to your app before issues become major causes of user distress. The updates also build excitement for your app and can help you gain some level of investment money through prerelease purchases.

After you release your app, the blog can serve as a means for pointing to app-specific resources, such as YouTube videos. Many blog platforms natively support podcasts, so you can make the podcasts available in a venue that allows some level of monitoring on your part for potential customers. Each blog post should contain pointers to any social media you support, along with an app-specific website for additional information and downloads. In short, blog posts can act as a means to advertise all the avenues you use to support your app.

In addition to promotion, a blog can provide a written record of updates you have made and propose for the future. You can use it to help provide support for your app for those people who would prefer written support to something like a podcast. In fact, you can make some blog posts by simply cleaning up the script you use to make your podcasts or YouTube videos, so you get dual usage from a single effort.

Blogs also offer the possibility of guest posts. If you can convince someone with industry name recognition to provide a quick post, it will definitely attract attention. Of course, you can do the same thing with podcasts and YouTube videos, but a blog offers the potential of allowing the substance of the interview to sink in through the written word. The point is to stop yelling about your app yourself and get someone else to do it for a while (after all, you’ve become quite hoarse in your efforts).

People also like stories, and the story of your app can prove interesting to users. When people understand the motivations and goals behind an app, they’re more likely to support it. This is actually one area in which a blog has a significant advantage over other media because you can carefully hone your written version of the story to present a specific aspect of you without the usual downsides that a video presentation would incur (including voice intonations that tend to be distracting rather than helpful).

Answering your email

How you handle email can be tricky. If you choose to support email, the email should actually address the user’s questions and not simply provide a form response that will tend to frustrate and infuriate your users. Nothing is worse than sending out a form email that tells the writer to visit your website where your FAQ sheet answers all questions, even though it doesn’t. Making the response a no-response sender makes things worse because the user can’t even write back. Here are a few tricks that you can use to make the process of answering your email faster and yet keep it personal:

• Use form paragraphs. If you find that users ask some questions often, you can create a form paragraph to answer that particular element of the email.
• Rely on blog posts. One reason to write blog posts is to provide a personal and friendly response to common user questions. If a question will consume more space to answer completely than an email can comfortably accommodate, provide a friendly reference to the blog post.
• Create scripted fill-in-the-blank responses. Some questions follow a pattern that readily adapts itself to a fill-in-the-blank response. The basic answer is the same in every case but the details differ, and customizing those details also customizes the email.
• Develop a list of question-answering volunteers. Community support works because well-informed users help users with fewer skills and less experience. To maintain this group of well-informed users, you need some sort of incentive, such as free subscriptions or access to special app features.

It’s essential to use humans to review the incoming emails and choose the correct response. Robots can go only so far in providing support functions. At some point, you likely need to provide a time-consuming, custom response. Keeping individual users when you first start out is essential to your success, so shortchanging this aspect of product support will mean that your app is less likely to succeed.

While you’re answering the user email, make sure to take full advantage of your email response. Here are a few things to consider including with it:

• Promote your latest product and provide a link to it.
• Encourage the user to review your product online.
• Provide a link to the various resources that your organization supports.
• Detail a good reason to buy a subscription or app update.
• Make a memory (help the person remember your app by associating it with something) with a quote from a happy user or simply something of interest.

Looking for awards in all the right places

The truth is, getting Google to recognize your app if it isn’t already receiving a lot of exposure in other ways is a long shot at best. Fortunately, you can submit your app for possible recognition to a number of sites. If you can submit your app, you’re at least in the running. Most of these sites have requirements that you must meet, such as a submission fee or a time to submit it by and only new apps need apply. Here are some sites to consider for submitting your app for recognition:

• Apple Design Awards: http://developer.apple.com/design
• Best Mobile Apps Award: http://www.bestmobileappawards.com/
• DICE Awards: https://www.interactive.org/
• Global Mobile Awards: http://www.globalmobileawards.com/
• Independent Games Festival: http://www.igf.com/
• International Mobile Gaming Awards: http://www.imgawards.com/
• Media Excellence Awards: http://mobilexawards.com/
• Mobile Premier Awards: http://mobilepremierawards.com/
• Webby Awards: http://www.webbyawards.com/

The list doesn’t include the Appsters Award or AppCircus because there are no current links for them. If you have links for either of these sites, or have additional sites you feel are essential to add to the list, contact John ([email protected]) or Barry (f) with the required information.

The list in this section may not provide enough opportunities for you or may not have categories that match your app. Oddly enough, there is actually a site devoted to helping you find the right place to submit your app for a potential award: Awards Finder (https://awardsfinder.com/). If your app has the right criteria, this site will help you find one or more places to make a submission. You obtain very basic information about the award and a link for finding out more. The links aren’t always recent or relevant, but you can usually find an updated link by searching for it.

Strutting your stuff

After you have an award, or two, or three in hand, you want to be sure to proudly display it everywhere. Doing so may seem obvious, but you can easily find examples of an award that appears on the app’s support site but nowhere else, which means that hardly anyone sees it, and those who do are looking for support, not an award. Here are some other places you should put notifications of your award:

• The app’s splash screen (the screen that you see flashed before the main app screen appears)
• The app’s About screen
• The app’s main site
• At the end of any video or podcast
• In your correspondence
• Every public venue where your app appears
• On promotional items