Bryan Tomie offered to help with Polygloss marketing strategy after a discussion following a twitter thread. I'm going to incorporate some of his first suggestions in this document along with other things I already had in mind.
Marketing either costs money, or time, or both. Our budget is not very big so we need to employ a mixed strategy. That means that we should all try to contribute with some time to take an action. We got some budget from Queen Mary University Try It Awards, that we can spend in marketing.
(instead of just working on the product and let it market itself)
While keeping work to the product can work as a marketing strategy for some apps, it is not an ideal strategy for us. Unlike other apps where the value of the app lies on using the app as a tool (examples: duolingo, google translate, netflix), Polygloss is a collaborative app. What does this mean? It means that the more people using Polygloss, the more people can obtain value from it (other things that work like this: telephone, groups, communities, facebook, uber, ifood, deliveroo). When there are more players, you have more people to play with, you get more corrections, you have more fun, and you learn more. So doing marketing is working on increasing the value of the product.
0 networks: Google translate: 🙎♀️ ←📱
1 network: Polygloss: 👩👩👧👧 ↺📱
2 networks: Uber: 📱 ↺ 👩👩👧👧 ←→ 🚗🚗 ↺📱
3 networks: Deliveroo:📱 ↺ 👩👩👧👧 ← → 🏍🏍 ↺📱
↑→👩🍳👩🍳 ↺📱←↑
This value requires a critical mass under a network factor to be successful, making it harder to take off comparing with products where this isn't needed, but luckily, unlike other business, we don't have to manage the mass of multiple networks.
Although much has been done in terms of marketing, there wasn't an organised marketing strategy or a wish for one before for two reasons:
However, now the general app is better, and the iOS app is stable (there has been 0 recorded crashes in the latest version so far), so there is nothing left to do in the app to change test stage from private to public test. Then we can add some other features and prepare for a full launch later this year.