I woke up yesterday morning to a nice surprise in my inbox. As I do every morning, I was checking to see if our Football Team Trends iPad app increased in ranking and how downloads were trending. Conveniently, all of this gets emailed to me automatically every morning thanks to the folks at Mobile Dev HQ- a Seattle-based startup building new and amazing “organic” App Store ranking tools all app developers should be using. I was anticipating a “NR” , or not ranked, status similar to those I had been getting as we gradually ramped up our promotion tactics. I was pretty stoked when the email opened and the status of 65th position in the Top Free Sports iPad App list was staring back at me!

Getting into a top list in the sports category has been a goal of ours since we launched the iPad app live a few weeks ago. Getting into a top list greatly increases the exposure of apps in the App Store and comes with a nice correlation in app downloads (or sales, if it’s a paid app). For us, ranking in the top free sports iPad list meant an increase in downloads of 10x over our average daily rate! While it’s never guaranteed that you will make it onto a top list, I thought it would be nice to share a few of the things we did to help nudge our app along:

1. Categories: When submitting an app, you have the option to select a couple categories your app should be placed under in the app store. We obviously picked sports for our app. Make sure the category you select is relevant to your app’s theme. Don’t pick categories just because they see larger amounts of eyeballs than others.
2. App Store Search: Additionally, in the app submission process you have the opportunity to identify some keywords for your app and write the app description. These matter. Similar to Google, Apple’s App Store search utilizes key words and their own “SEO” algorithms to determine which apps show up when customers search. Again, the tools at Mobile Dev HQ were indispensable for recommending appropriate keywords. Plurals matter, 1 word VS 3 word keywords matter. Pay attention to this.
3. Downloads: Similar to Google’s “Quality Score”, Apple considers app downloads a key metric in determining an app’s ranking. Obviously, the more downloads, the more popular, and the app will rise in ranking.
4. Exposure: To generate downloads we actually focused most of our effort outside the App Store. We submitted our app to countless app review websites in order to get the app in front of as many people as possible out on the web. In addition to app review websites, we partnered with key companies who already have large audiences interested in our app’s content. We asked them promote the app via their social media accounts. Through A/B testing, we found social media actually worked best to drive app downloads over traditional banners and link ads. Apps are very much a “social discovery” kind of content whereby people rely on recommendations of friends in order to check them out.
5. Topical Themes: There are many strategies for building out an app portfolio. Companies can try and build enduring titles, like Angry Birds, or companies can “snipe” on emerging topical themes. Our app is NFL Football related, and with Superbowl coming up this weekend, I’m sure we benefited from the increase in awareness and interest in the event. Depending on budget, it can be better to create smaller, narrow apps, that snipe an upcoming holiday, or event. A new entrant into the App Store can quickly ride a rise in ranking boosted by a targeted event. Development budget and functional scope does need reflect the short-lived nature of these apps though as there is a much shorter window for ROI.
6. Building A Great App!: Last (but not least!), the app has to behave as advertised. Of course I’m biased, but I think we made a beautiful UI and extremely high value user experience. (Check out Bob’s post on the making of our app’s navigation system over on our tech blog). Building a great app and delivering an amazing experience encourages people to rate the app and leave comments. Similar to downloads, positive reviews and ratings improve the apps “quality score” and the app’s ranking increases in the App Store. For this piece we relied on the kindness of strangers. Well, strangers and a polite request out to friends and family to get the ball rolling ;)

We took about two weeks to put together the first version of the app, trying to keep closely to the navigational structure of the original web app.

The initial navigation structure for Football Team Trends.

As you can see, the trend builder screen was buried in the middle of the app, not the core of a great user experience as we’d hoped.  You can also see that entering the app brought people right to their saved trends, which means that they would initially be presented with an empty list.  The structure of the app did little to show off its functionality and we were worried that people would have trouble really getting what the app was about within a few seconds of launching.

All the stakeholders in the project had a similar feeling after getting the real live app under our fingers, and we immediately agreed that it was worth spending a few more days restructuring around a better experience.  A couple of us locked ourselves a room and started brainstorming how to solve the biggest issues with our initial prototype.

Eventually we decided that we were grouping the data incorrectly.  Out of the five major screens, two of them were about presenting automatically generated trends, one was about building trends, one was about presenting trends that had been saved by the person using the app, and one was for drilling down into the trend itself.

We started the new navigation structure with a few simple goals:

• It was important for the person using the app to see the auto-generated trends first, to give them an idea of what the app could do.
• The person should see the trend builder before seeing their saved trends, since they couldn’t have any saved trends until after they’d built one.  The idea of ‘saved trends’ forced the question of ‘saved from where?’
• There should be a consistent transition to the trend details.
• The trend builder had to be more discoverable.

With that in mind, we laid down four non-detail screens in a row on the whiteboard.

We started with the idea of using a standard tab bar to navigate between the various screens, but the requirement that the person using the app should see the builder before their saved trends meant that we wanted them to navigate the screens in some sort of linear order.  Our product owner kept trying to swipe between the screens, so we decided we wanted to try that as a solution.  Unfortunately, swipe to delete on some screens meant we couldn’t use a swipe gesture anywhere on the screen to navigate, so we came up with a compromise.

We called it the duckbill, since that’s what our first whiteboard diagrams made it look like.  Swiping on this area would reveal screens to the left or right.  After questioning just how much swiping we wanted the person using the app to do, we decided that “Top Trends” and “Top Trends by Team” should really be on the same screen, so we folded them into one screen.

Duckbill with Placeholder Graphics

With that decision made, we just had to figure out how to show the trend details screen.  We decided to flip over the screen you were looking at to expose the trend details.  Given how we were navigating with the duckbill, we didn’t want to use a navigation controller because that might cause confusion what exactly was to the right of the current screen.  Was it the screen you went to when you swiped the duckbill?  Was it the screen that slid in from the right when you tapped on a trend?  Flipping to reveal trend details let us step around that particular tripwire.

It took about a day to move the existing app into the new navigational scheme, using silly placeholder graphics and rough animations.  We were extremely pleased with the result, so we took another couple of days to get some real graphics done and finish putting together the app.

The duckbill in its final form.

Football Team Trends is available on the App Store for free, and can be found on the Top Free Sports Apps list.  We’re extremely pleased with the results.  As with any product, we’ll be continuing to iterate on the design and look forward to shipping an even better version for the 2012 season.

• We build cool stuff. Here in 2012, barriers to entry in the iGaming space are at their lowest point ever. Anybody with $25,000 can purchase turnkey software, and with a gaming license and a domain name, can quickly launch a new brand in the market (for proof of this, look no further than next week’s International Casino Expo in London, which we’ll be attending). So how is a sportsbook operator supposed to differentiate its brand and product in an increasingly commoditized space? The truth is that there are only so many ways to skin a cat: low vig, high bonus, and infinite-market sportsbooks have all been done. So what’s left? Well, in our view, a massive opportunity exists for brands to differentiate the punter experience with cool new ways to bet. And that’s what we do at Bet Smart Media – build technology-driven products that differentiate our customers’ brands by enhancing the betting experience for their customers! In short, we give sportsbook operators a fighting chance by building cool stuff for them to use in their product mix. Mobile. Social. Games.

• We’re crafty technologists. Our engineering team is solving complex technical problems to make our products and apps a reality. We obsess over big data, low latency, and high performance technical issues (many of which will be documented on our Technology Blog!). This creates a competitive advantage for Bet Smart Media, while at the same time creating scarcity in the market as our products are, quite simply, difficult and expensive to replicate. As punters demand more interesting and exciting ways to interact with a sportsbook, pressures mount on sportsbook executives and product managers to satisfy these demands. But sportsbook operators are just that – sportsbook operators. The lion’s share do not have the resources or technical proficiency to build sports apps like ours in-house. Nor should they when instead they can let Bet Smart Media do all the heavy lifting and deliver shiny, polished products that drive action – and results.

• We’ve created a strong culture. And that’s not just corporate-speak. Most people spend more waking hours at work with their coworkers than they do at home with their spouses. We acknowledge this reality by creating an environment that offers challenging yet rewarding work with fun, like-minded people. We operate as a meritocracy and value things like accountability and trust in each other, but at the same time we don’t take ourselves too seriously when we don’t have to (here’s a snippet from our last spring retreat as evidence). In our mind, as soon as you stop having fun at work, you might as well close up the shop and go home. We’re not about to do that.

As important as it is to celebrate what one does well, it’s equally important to acknowledge what one has done poorly. Today at Bet Smart Media, we’re celebrating the launch of our new corporate website. This update has been long overdue — the last incarnation of our website was vague. It intimated that we did *stuff*, but it did a poor job of saying what exactly that was.

That has unequivocally been our biggest challenge as a young company: we haven’t properly articulated our position and value proposition in our market. This is a problem that all young companies come up against, so we’re hardly unique that way. Frankly, we’ve been shy at times about who we are, what we do, and why we’re doing it. But not anymore. 

We’re Bet Smart Media. We build innovative sports gaming apps.

You should get to know us. We’re already working with some of the leading brands in the gaming industry, and we’ll be announcing more names soon. We’re good Canadian kids (our Mother’s raised us well). We’re very approachable: email us (we’re all [first name] at betsmartmedia.com), Tweet @betsmartmedia, or deface our Facebook wall. And if you buy us a beer, chances are we’ll drop whatever we’re doing right now to help you.

So today, we celebrate the new, improved version of Bet Smart Media. If you already know us, it’s nice to re-meet you. If not, we look forward to meeting you soon!

But more specifically, we’re open-source enthusiasts. We take credence with a quote attributed to Sir Isaac Newton:

“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

This ideal still rings true today. If we share our collective intelligence, then we can build more faster, and often better.

That’s why Bet Smart has decided to start sharing pieces of our technology stack. Like any thoughtful Open Source samaritan, we have made efforts to isolate the pieces of our stack that can be disseminated without sharing any intellectual property that may adversely affect our business.

Our hope is that other individuals and companies can leverage our work to ”see further,” to get to a point where they’re building the stuff they actually want to build, not all the scaffolding that needs to exist underneath it. This is where Open Source shines.

You can view our public GitHub repository here:

https://github.com/BetSmartMedia

Going forward, we’re going to be introducing more reusable software components on this blog and on our GitHub repository. We’ll also be discussing new technologies, challenges and solutions as we encounter them.

We’ve benefitted from Open Source in innumerable ways. Hopefully you will too.

The move gives Bet Smart Media access to growth capital and a seasoned Canadian Internet executive who has dealt with similar scaling challenges as co-founder and CEO of XE.com during the site’s meteoric rise to become the world’s favorite currency site and the 360th most popular site on the Internet, as measured by third party rankings. The XE brand is now synonymous with currency and foreign exchange online, and the site ranks first in Google for many related strategic terms.

“My involvement in Bet Smart Media made sense on a number of levels,” comments Mr. Dengler. “Firstly, I like the business. Secondly, the business models have many similarities, and the technological challenges around sports data that Bet Smart Media deals with are on a similar scale with the currency data challenges we manage at XE. Plus, it’s great to support a healthy Canadian tech sector and early-stage investment community north of the border.”

Bet Smart Media’s offer of a directorship coincides with a private investment in the company. Terms of the investment are not available to the public at present. Investment proceeds will be used to continue developing and marketing sports statistics applications that align with the company’s vision of making sports data easy to use for everyone.

“We’re very excited to welcome Steve to the team,” said Jesse Learmonth, President and co-founder of Bet Smart Media. “His involvement comes at a time when Bet Smart Media is closing a number of B2B partnerships to distribute our software. Steve’s involvement has helped open a number of doors for us and we look forward to what his involvement means for our future.”

About Bet Smart Media Inc.
Bet Smart Media is a technology company focusing on making sports data easier to use and more relevant. The information generally includes statistics, scores, odds, and other live information pertaining to sporting events. Bet Smart Media’s objective is to create amazing technology so that their partners’ customers can access, use, and manage the types of information that is most important to them as sports fans.

About Steven Dengler & XE.com
Steven is the CEO and co-founder of XE.com Inc. Since its inception in 1993, XE.com has grown to become the world’s favorite currency site, consistently ranked as a top 400 site worldwide, and a top 100 site in a number of countries. Steven is an early-stage investor in a number of Canadian businesses. XE.com is based in Newmarket, Ontario.

For more information, visit http://www.betsmartmedia.com

SOURCE Bet Smart Media Inc.