Gamifying Sunscreen || Part 4: Is this an art project or something more?
The past fourteen days have been uncomfortable.
This is Episode 3, Part 4 in the [Game On] series, where I attempt to design, code, and ship one new app every other month to market and promote an app I recently launched. Stories on launching the aforementioned app can be found at Gamifying Sunscreen. You can also download The Sunscreen Game on the App Store now.
The past fourteen days have been uncomfortable. In fact, just writing this update has been uncomfortable because I’m writing about marketing my app while possessing ZERO marketing skills. Writing “spray and pray” emails (a road I went down for five emails before quickly stopping myself from further embarrassment) is not a skill. Vomiting out random words about sunscreen when asked, “What does your app do?” is also not a skill.
But the question I keep coming back to is:
Do you want this to be an art project or do you want to make a living from it?
And so if I want to make my living from it, then I’m going to have to be more than an iOS developer and learn some damn marketing skills. So after wasting a week, I took a couple of steps to educate myself:
First, I started reading any marketing book I could find on Libby.
Second, I
reached outannoyed my friends who do this for a living to see if I could ask them as many n00b questions as humanly possible.
A tangential, yet related story: This is kind of how I taught myself how to code. The first person I pestered with the question, “How do I teach myself how to code?” was my buddy Vikas in Seattle. He looked at me like I was nuts. He knew I knew it was nuts. But yet, he still took the time to encourage me with realistic advice and I always appreciated it. We still talk about it and we still laugh about it.
I love that story.
It’s still TBD on how these steps are going to play out but at least there will be a plan vs the current “headless chicken” approach I’m going with right now. In the meantime, if you’ve got any marketing books you want to recommend or marketing Substacks, please drop them in the comments below. I am going to need them!
What’s Next
There’s an entire marketing arm of the App Store that I’ve been completely ignoring throughout my career. So, I’m going to dive into that rabbit hole and report back on what it has to offer. Just to name a few of the tools, there are Apple Search Ads, App Store Feature Nominations, and App Store Marketing Tools. A brave new world!