Hi all,

This is my first post on the forum as I wanted to share my experience as a developer in marketing a mobile app for poker players. I thought maybe some of you might be interested in my findings and have some good advices for me.

First some background to the app:
The moment I started to play poker for cash, I wrote down every time how much I would spend or gain in the game. The idea to build an app came after I found all the existing apps to keep track of my poker bankroll complicated and cumbersome. I did not want to enter dates, stakes, limit types, locations, type of games and what's not. I just wanted to know how I was doing months after months. I first used an Excel spreadsheet but after 2 years of using it I got tired of it so I decided to code a mobile app and called it "My Poker Bankroll App". For casual players like me.

I wanted the app to be simple, easy to use, useful, not in the way of me playing the game and straight to the point. I just wanted to enter my buy-ins and my cash-outs in the fastest possible way and get nice statistics in return. I built it for me but thought other players might benefit from it.

It took me a good month to learn Javascript so I could build a PhoneGap app (I'm a trained developer but had not coded for 20 years) for Android and iOS.

Version 1 of the app was very basic and was available for both platforms for $0.99
Version 2 is only iOS, is free, has more features and a freemium model.

Here's what I learned:

1/ Android users don't look for apps.
Both v1 of the app were released on the same day for iOS and Android and I made no particular effort to promote one vs the other. I did no marketing except having a website, a Twitter account and a Facebook page. In the first 3 months, version 1 of the app which used to cost $0.99 got 12 Android installations (including free trials) vs 253 on iOS (including some free promo for 24h that half of them).

2/ Users search directly in the App Store.
On any given day, I have more downloads on the App Store than visitors going from my website to the App Store. It's a factor of 1 to 10.

3/ Poker news sites talk about poker bankroll management but never about the tools.
Google "poker bankroll management" and you get about 220,000 results. You will recognise most of the names if you read poker news online. I'm the last one on the 2nd page results but app website. Not bad for a one page website. It's a topic that has been talked about over and over. All the pros praise how this is the most important thing to track "Bankroll is the only thing you can control in poker" etc. You will find strategies to apply but very few talk about the tools to use. Now try Googling "poker bankroll management app" and you will get 31,000 results. I'm the 3rd result on the first page (if you are logged out of Google) after the big Apple itself.

4/ Users love simplicity and free apps.
There was no doubt in my mind that a free app would get more downloads than a paid app so I decided to make it free and added more statistics that would be available for a fee. The daily downloads increased up to a factor of 15 on certain days. Better than that, users love the simplicity of the app. 3 months after the app was launched it has a retention rate of 80%. This means 80% of the users who try the app still use it after 3 months. I thought there would be other players who would benefit from it, now it's a conviction of mine.

5/ Twitter works. Facebook, not so much. StumbleUpon costs me money.
I have 363 followers on Twitter and 37 fans on Facebook (Yooohooo!) and excluding the organic traffic from Google, Twitter is my primary source of traffic to the exception of StumbleUpon (whose users only stay for 2 seconds on average). I don't tweet that much, not even once a day. Maybe more like 3 to 4 times per week on a good week.

6/ Finding affiliates take time.
Apple has a built-in affiliation model for freemium apps so I added a page for webmasters and a reference to it on my Twitter account but unless you actively contact them, there are a few chances they will find you and we all know success is all about good traffic.

7/ The vast majority of players have no clue how they profit from poker.
Ask any player if he knows exactly how much profit he has made since he started to play live poker and either he "doesn't care" or he wish he knew. But if I show the app to that person he downloads it. Always. "Because it's free". 8 times out of 10 they still use it after 3 months and thank me. That's the best part of it.

8/ But they want to know more
I only make money when a user unlock one of the 7 graphs available. For free, he has enough to know how much he is profiting from the game and how often. If he wants to know how much he is winning per hour, how many hours he is playing, how much he wins on average, what are his best ups and downs, his longest best and worst streaks he just has to unlock them individually for $0.99 or 7 bundled for $4.99 - 3 months after switching to the freemium model, the monthly revenue from the app has increased by a factor of 10.

That's all folks! I'm not including a link to the app so I'm not accused of spamming but if you want to check it out, read the end of item 3/ again

I'm happy to answer any questions.

thanks for sharing all that, I found it very interesting!

What kind of stuff are you tweeting? I would imagine that people are following you on twitter because of the app and not finding your app because of twitter, no? I guess im just curious how twitter drives traffic to your app

What percentage of the people who download the app for free go on to unlock content? What percentage of people who use it 3 months later have paid to unlock content?

Has it generated enough revenue that the time youve spent on it has amounted to a meaningful hourly? (Maybe you could make an app that tracks how much time you spend on making an app for developers to figure out their hourly! )

People find my site via Twitter. I tweet anything I find interesting, useful or entertaining as well as some specific about my app. I use hashtags as much as possible and Twitter search to find the right folks. I retweet interesting posts. Sometimes they retweet you and expose you to their network. You can automate this but I don't. People see my Twitter profile page and click on the link to the website. It's usually pretty qualified traffic.

Without going into too much specifics, right now it's about 2% of the total number of installations (it's higher if you look at active users) and the ratio is increasing every month. After entering games data for some time, the historical data become very interesting and worth unlocking to see your progress months after months.

It also depends how people are doing in the game. The more they have been accumulating some profit the more likely they are to unlock all the graphs...


My fixed costs are very low if I exclude my time and since I built the app first for me, I'm not really counting it. Having said that, I've not made any money out of it yet but considering the trend and retention so far, it should happen by the end of the summer.

On the topic of poker sites talking about how important it is to manage your bankroll and not talking about the tools, the results are even more striking if you remove "management" from the search

"poker bankroll" 2,500,000 results (I'm in 18th position after all the big boys like Blush, PokerStrategy etc...)
"poker bankroll app" 272,000 results (I'm the 2nd result)

If some webmasters are reading, I'm happy to swap links (is there a place on the forum to post such a request?)

Thanks for sharing. The difference between android/iOS is pretty interesting. I'm about to launch apps for both platforms, though we have a full-time marketer.

We're definitely going free and potentially a freemium model down the road.

Thanks for sharing, all very interesting. I am just starting programming and am finishing up a poker tracking app soon that I just used as a learning tool. It's very basic and pretty ugly as far as the graphics and user interface are concerned so am just using it for personal use. Was thinking about doing another with pretty much the exact model that your freemium app is using when I got a little better, so I'm glad to hear that model works better. Will probably have some questions later on when I have more time to think and I'll check out your app.

Getting a bit more technical:

how easy was it to get up to speed with Phonegap?

What IDE did you use?

How did you store data? - Did you use HTML5 specific localStorage or did you use a separate file?

How long did this take phone start to finish?

Is it fully compatible with iPhone 4 and upwards? - Same for Android

Technically what would you do differently now?

I'm about 85% of the way through a phonegap app (well, cordova) using ionic framework. It's going to save me time, but at the end of the day I would have been better suited learning iOS native development. I just spent like a whole day trying to figure out something that would have been trivial in a native app (it's all about community support).

Stuff routinely breaks in new builds, stuff is not well documented, stuff just has to be hacked to work 70% of the time...

But, given that I only know web for a front end framework, it has been a good solution to a problem of needing a relatively simple iOS and android app.

Phonegap was very easy to get up to speed. I used the Telerik platform and was up and running with a test app in 5 minutes. From there, it was just about hacking into that template and change the content (HTML, CSS and Javascript)

I use LocalStorage and a WebSql database so my app also includes a lot of SQL (to retrieve data and feed the statistics)

If I had worked on this full-time I would say it would have taken my less than one month. 10 days probably.

The Telerik platform takes care of the compatibility. Some plug-in are OS specific (like Facebook sharing or in-app purchase).

Technically I would do the same.

Hope this helps.

On another note, and since writing this post, I'm now the first result on Google for "poker bankroll management app" (with the quotes and 3rd without)

Here's a link to my app: Poker Bankroll management app

Probably, instead of doing a huge link building campaing for a trivial app, you should try moving on to other projects. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do trivial projects, but all you can do for such an app is release it and index its website. You are going to find diminishing returns by having twitter accounts, forum link building, facebook pages all for this small app.
There is not that much money to be made from such a project to justify marketing it more heavily than the effort it took to develop. The campaign is really nice and all, but maybe the project doesn't match it.

Yo, I'm also building out a poker app using Ionic. What have you run into when testing on native?

Oh just little stuff. For example, I'm using ngCordova and getting the camera stuff to work was a pain in the ass. I'm using inkfilepicker.com as a backend for processing/storing images/videos, which has a native iOS kit but doesn't work in the web browser on the app. So, my take pic code looks something like this:

There was basically no way to figure out how to do this besides banging my head against the wall, since it's not well documented, as is kind of niche. Took a while, but now if I want to do it again it is easy (and have done the same with videos, selecting media, etc).

Things like using the web interface for facebook login is a pain in the ass. Would much rather use a well documented/well answered (on sites like SO) library like facebook for iOS.

All in all it has been a good experience in terms of speed of getting stuff done... but it's not without its frustration.

Interesting. Why is v2 iOS only?

I explain in my post: tiny number of downloads from Android users of v1