What Happens When Your Mobile App Is Too Successful?
As soon as your mobile application hits the store, you want your target audience to eat it up. If it’s the Starbucks app, the dream is for everyone who enjoys your product to download the app and have it ready before picking up their morning brew.
But is it possible to have too many tapping the download button? When does success start to weigh on the developer? Etermax founder and chief executive Maximo Cavazzani, who is the man behind the app phenomenon Trivia Crack, is struggling with success. Because the questions in the game are written by players and each submission needs one hundred positive ratings before it can go live, the question rotation isn’t where it needs to be.
“It’s a problem we haven’t dealt with,” Cavazzani told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s like building a house and a million people came to help you. We just need one house.”
People just can’t get to all of the questions coming in, which means if you want to submit your own query, you might not hear any feedback for weeks at a time. With more than 130 million downloads and popularity greater than YouTube and Facebook Messenger, this user-maintained app has reached heights its developer never could have predicted.
When demand for your product outstrips your resources, problems can arise. Take designer Nguyen Ha Dong, the developer of smash hit Flappy Bird. Sure, the simple-yet-challenging time-waster generated fifty thousand dollars a day from advertisements, but Dong couldn’t take the pressure of such a massive, vocal audience.
"It also ruins my simple life," he wrote. "So now I hate it.”
Understanding how to scale your business based on such success is another tricky issue. Look at an app like Draw Something, which blew up overnight but lost steam over time. More notably, Zynga had to lay off more than 15 percent of a workforce it built up after releasing so many hits. FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and a load of other free games with microtransactions built the company up, but in such a fluid industry, financial stability isn’t easy to come by.
We want our apps to soar as high up the charts as they can. Success is always the goal, but it’s also important to keep scale in mind. Without the resources to back up your app, too many downloads can quickly go from a blessing to a curse.
