{"id":9923,"date":"2014-11-13T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-13T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/creator\/?p=9923"},"modified":"2020-03-30T18:59:26","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T22:59:26","slug":"make-beautiful-one-advice-led-3-million-downloads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/ideas\/professional-development\/make-beautiful-one-advice-led-3-million-downloads","title":{"rendered":"Make it beautiful: how this one piece of advice led to three million downloads"},"content":{"rendered":"

Working in the tech startup space means that you have to be willing to take advice.<\/p>\n

Granted, some of it isn\u2019t going to be that great, and it\u2019s important to take everything with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n

But every once in a while, someone will drop a truth bomb on you that will completely change your perspective on what you\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

For me, it was the day I talked to someone about the importance of consumer-facing assets in relation to marketing a mobile game.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the advice: \u201cIf your indie game doesn\u2019t look like something that was made by a big company like Activision<\/a> or EA<\/a>, you might as well quit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whoa. That sounded pretty ominous and maybe a bit of an overstatement. Has this person heard of wildly popular games such as Flappy Bird, Doodle Jump or Minecraft that weren\u2019t made by gaming empires? They aren\u2019t exactly beautiful works of art.<\/p>\n

With that advice in mind, I led my next marketing campaign with a focus to improve the game\u2019s quality to push it from an \u201cindie hit\u201d to mainstream success.<\/p>\n

The app developers I was working with at the time, Digital Tales<\/a>, had created a great racing game for the eni FIM Superbike World Championship. The SBK14 Official Mobile Game<\/a> faced an uphill battle in the U.S. because the racing league isn\u2019t very well known at all.<\/p>\n

However, at the very beginning of the process, Digital Tales dedicated themselves to aligning the app with Apple\u2019s brand standards with hopes of getting the game featured on the App Store.<\/p>\n

This is a tall order for any indie developer. While some people think you need to \u201cknow someone at Apple\u201d to get featured on the App Store, the truth is you just have to make something that will catch people\u2019s eye upon submission.<\/p>\n

In other words, the game and the App Store assets have to be so eye-popping that you stick out among the thousands of apps submitted everyday.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what the Digital Tales team knew they had to get right:<\/p>\n