Meet WalletSaver one of our current Lisbon Challenge startups and their app that suggests the most suitable tariff plan for you, according to your consumption data (phone calls, SMS, internet) extracted directly from the smartphone.
Jacopo Soria, Co-founder of WalletSaver briefly described their last week and the great acceptance that their app is receiving.
“We launched our App on Sunday November 23 and, in just one week, we were able to have almost 3.000 downloads (today we reached 2.800). I would like to say that most of it was planned, but it definitely went better than we expected.
Starting from the beginning, 3 weeks ago we defined our marketing strategy for the launch, deciding to publish our app without creating too much hype. This in order to test it with a smaller user base (indeed we started with only our friends) to see if everything was stable and worked properly. We only set up a Thunderclap campaign which is a platform that allows you to have supporters that share the same post at the same time on their different social accounts. It was mostly to let all our friends know that we were finally online.
However we decided also to start contacting journalists and bloggers (mainly Italian) in order to have, after 7-10 days from the release date, some articles about us. We contacted different websites, blogs and newspaper covering startups, android, mobile, and technology. Some of them replied and were quite interested, some not, and some of them never replied.
Anyway we launched on Sunday and the first day we obtained more than 100 downloads, mostly friends, we didn’t have any crashes and just some little bugs.
The second day the downloads reduced because we decided to focus on some issues that came out to our early adopters. The rest of the week the downloads continued to slow down. Since I didn’t like this I decided to be a bit more “aggressive” in finding contacts and try to talk to them, so I started writing many emails, filling many contact forms to make as many journalist/bloggers as possible know about us.
On Friday we started to test Adwords with small results. On Saturday we decided to have the real “startupper approach” and we went in a Starbucks in Restauradores in order to work from there and be able to ask people (mostly Italians) to download the app in real time. It was fun, but not so amazing in terms of downloads.
On Sunday morning we went in the same Starbucks and at 11.00 I received a reply from one of the most important Android website in Italy : tuttoandroid.net, who decided to write a review about us. They published it at 12.30 and after that, we had a huge amount of downloads. It was incredible. In only one day we obtained 1.500 downloads, excellent reviews and, even if we had some problems in managing all the simoultaneous requests, people didn’t complained about anything. It was a great day.
Now, in the last two days we were also able to obtain articles from ANSA.it (website that distributes news to the other newspapers), Leggo.it and StartupItalia. All of them are very important website/newspaper that are helping us continuing our growth.
Let’s see what will happen in the next day…and let’s see how LC Investor Day will go!!!”