An App’s Initial Cost Per User Acquisition Doesn’t Have to Be High – If It’s A Good App

Apps, especially social apps, are made of users. A high-quality, engaged user-base is the foundation that an app company needs to become great, and a pre-revenue business has to to earn that foundation affordably. It stands to reason that the cost per user acquisition is going to be the highest for the initial foundation user base, and trail off as the app’s natural appeal fosters organic growth. For that reason, it’s tempting to tolerate a relatively high cost per user acquisition initially. Mindful that user engagement comes at a cost, Hello Pal designed a strategy that wasn’t simply focused on engaging the most users through the most touch points, but rather engaging the right users, achieving the activity necessary for a successful social chat app. By targeting multiple communities of likely users, we were able to achieve the seed users we needed while keeping cost-per-user-acquisition low. Here’s how we did it.

Identifying and Engaging With User Populations

Hello Pal first identified communities of likely users. Students have a natural need for a translation app, and are also curious and prone to socialization. Confident that certain specific populations of students would become active Hello Pal users once they became engaged, we set out to on-board them. To help that process along, we hired people who understood and related to the populations that we were targeting, and made them brand ambassadors for Hello Pal.

A Team Is Only As Good As Its Talent

We took care to bring on brand ambassadors who knew and had relationships with our preferred users. Our people weren’t just experts on the communities that we targeted, they were members of those communities. They understood the appeal of the app to those populations, and were able to be example users, rather than annoying pitch men.

An ecosystem centered around conversational language learning needs multiple populations of speakers and learners to play off of each other. Fortunately, these types of users are curious. It worked as we expected, and quickly. Students found an innovative way to learn and improve, and made exotic friends as they went.

Our evangelists and ambassadors did an excellent job in all localities, and the target communities engaged with Hello Pal very quickly. Once the base got going, it was exciting to see organic growth start in populations that we had yet to target. We’re still seeing user growth in social populations with language interest that surprise us – who knew that there were Americans with a deep love of Korean pop music?

Mindful of Cost, But Not At The Expense Of Value

Any social app is only as good as its user-base. People will leave if there’s nobody to talk to.  If an app knows its base and hires ambassadors and evangelists who really understand and love the product, they’re in a position to get through to the community with infections enthusiasm, and that’s really the only way that the company has a shot. While the pre-revenue fiscal foundation ultimately comes down to its cost per user acquisition, the longevity of the community has more to do with the quality and engagement of the user-base. In short, they have to be the right users.

Growth is easy when people like the app. Our engaged, curious and fun user base are excited to be meeting and making friends with people from around the world. We’re certain that by helping them do it, we’ll be able to build a suite of global, trans-cultural social apps.
The beginning of our journey has been thrilling. In the coming months we plan to continue our successful engagement strategy, and give our user base even more people to talk to and learn through. We’re excited to have an excited user-base more than 1 million people strong, and are looking forward to find out how large we can make the World’s Social Messaging App.