Before you start developing a mobile app, you need to consider how you’ll support it after launch. Apps are living breathing things and when left unattended over time they’ll die. It sounds dramatic, but from all of our experience, the apps that perform the best are like a well managed garden. They need constant and intentional attention. 

At Flywheel, we’ve always believed we’re best positioned to help our clients succeed and when they do, it’s a win-win situation for us and them. 

Since Day 1, we’ve wanted to be a part of every client’s post launch journey which is the biggest differentiator between us and other agencies. Most agencies focus on developing projects and handing them over to clients. This works when clients have the internal resources and experience of running ongoing technology projects, in particular mobile apps. When clients don't have that experience, projects typically underperform expectations, which is where we come in.

In this article, I want to cover two different topics: what we do post launch and how we do it. One of our monikers is that we want to be a good client partner so we frequently change and adjust our services to meet our client’s needs. 

Services We Perform

Every app has different requirements but our approach to support is mostly standardized. 

Hyper Care & Fast Follow

The first two weeks after go-live are what we call “Hyper Care”. We ensure resources are available to support user support, bug fixes, or anything and everything that can come up during this exciting time. It’s more of a mindset that we need to prepare to 

The majority of apps that go live have some “fast follow” work. For example, one of our apps that launched last week, CreatorsAGI, we wanted to add light mode but it wasn’t available in time for the launch, so we quickly added it after. 

Besides fast follow items, we work with clients to prioritize and organize their backlog of requests. During the development process, we come up with a lot of great ideas. These get backlogged as we focus on the core of the project. Some of these are important long-term features and we put those on our roadmap and allocate resources accordingly. 

All of this said we like to spend the first month not doing a lot of work! It’s an important time to get user feedback, look at the analytics, and adjust the path going forward. 

Analytics

We use analytics, user feedback, and business strategy as the basis for future development. This requires looking at the entire funnel, top to bottom, analyzing performance, and benchmarking against competitor and industry apps. 

We start with App Store Analytics and website analytics to examine the “top of the funnel”. We want to see how much traffic the listing page is getting and what the conversion rate is. The App Store Analytics aren’t perfect and there’s definitely want for better segmentation, but overall, it’s highly indicative of how you’re converting users to download the app. 

After a user downloads the app, we move to Google Analytics (GA) to review the rest of the analytics. We integrate GA into all of our apps. It’ll track usage at an anonymous and aggregated level. In particular, it lets us see the following:

• When users drop off in the onboarding process
• What percentage of users pay or convert
• Are users performing key actions within the application
• Segment users by traits (phone brand, location, etc.)

Ongoing Development

After gathering business requirements, user feedback, and analyzing analytics, we create a roadmap and then execute against it. It’s that simple!

Every project requires different development support based on velocity and complexity. We work with clients to ensure their projects are properly staffed and try to create long term plans that design and development can execute against. 

Projects are always changing, sometimes high priority (or fire drills) come up, but in general, we try to avoid being reactive and focus on being proactive. 

Lastly, I’ll say it’s an important reminder that once your app is in production, development velocity slows down exponentially. This seems like a bad thing, but it’s a bit more complex than saying “We aren’t moving as fast”. First, for every feature, we now have to consider how it’ll impact existing users. Secondly, our testing becomes significantly more extensive. 

Marketing & Optimization

When we talk about mobile apps, most people focus on development. It’s the tech that matters because that’s what a user downloads. Unfortunately, this isn’t true or at least the complete picture.

In our experience, go to market (GTM) and distribution are more important than technology. There are a lot of great apps that never reach their full potential because they aren’t distributed properly. 

Flywheel, through our marketing brand Convert on Web, offers ongoing marketing and optimization services designed to improve the probability of an app's success. This starts at the top of the funnel and goes to the point of conversion or activation, meaning:

• Website
• App Store Listing (imagery, description, key words, etc.)
• Onboarding optimization
• Paywall optimization

Traditionally this service is known as App Store Optimization (ASO), but we take it just a step further and include the app’s website, onboarding, and payments. We view this as a holistic journey to improve the user’s experience.

How We Perform These Services

Flywheel offers what we call success based packages, these vary from client to client because what it takes to be successful varies, but the theme is the same - we offer customized packages that fit your needs. 

Hourly Services

Some clients and projects don’t require ongoing support or have minimal infrequent requests. We offer hourly services through a dedicated client service web portal. You can either pay by the hour or purchase hours in bulk. The more hours you buy, the less expensive it becomes. 

Ongoing Project Team

For everything else, we keep the team together and provide a unified product team experience. Our core philosophy is that to build, manage, and optimize products you need to have a few specific roles:

• Product strategy
• Design
• Project management
• Development

Most agencies rely on Developers to perform all four roles and for simple fixes or non strategic work, this works in the short term. For production apps that don't work. Over time you’ll produce a subpar product that’ll cost more money and take longer to deploy. 

The service we provide is as close as possible to hiring your own internal  product team (all four roles). We bring fractional expertise, but participate internally in your organization. 

What does this look like? 

• The product manager joining marketing and sales meetings to see what’s coming in the pipeline and assists in outbound sales demos
• Project management sharing weekly updates in a product review meeting
• Developers solving customer feedback or issues ad hoc as they come in
• Quarterly roadmap against the business objectives

Marketing & Optimization

Convert on Web offers separate marketing packages. The most popular package is a 12 month optimization roadmap. Every month we try 4 optimization (A/B tested) experiments to improve conversion and activation rates. 

Why the long contract? We take a long term view of app performance. There are a few basic truths to optimization:

• You can’t optimize without testing
• Experiments need to be run independently to get conclusive results
• There’s a minimum amount of traffic required to have scientific results

These three combined require us to take a methodical approach to ensure clients get the best “bang for their buck” in the growth hacking process. 

Summary

Flywheel’s always been interested in how we can improve the outcomes and success for every client we work with. Over the years our services offered and how we provide them have changed significantly. I’m sure over the next few years they’ll continue to do so and I’ll need to combine them to edit this article. 

The one part remains the same is that we want to be a great client service partner and we’ll always be flexible in meeting our client’s needs in how we achieve that.

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