Disagree with many of these sentiments here. As a performance marketer, and someone who also was in the games industry:
FB Gaming market has flattened. FB has taken numerous methods to rely less on gaming revenue. FB revenues was 10% from game companies when the company went IPO. Much less now, not even mentioned.
Mobile is good at driving mobile installs at scale, limited competitors here. But as a general performance marketing channel, they do better at ecommerce and consumer focused businesses.
Most of FB advertising revenue is coming in from Brand marketing. Performance is steadily growing, but not as you suggest, the reason for this growth.
Re: "light cavalry armies are useless against castles and fortified cities as the ones found in most of Europe"
Not true, as the Chinese cities at the time were much more fortified than Europe. The Mongols were able to plunder the surrounding lands.
Also, despite Europe's fortifications, a scouting party led by Subutai of 20,000 horse archers, widely wiped out a much more significant force of Central Europe soldiers, greatly outnumbering the Mongols. Fortified cities may cause trouble, but by this time, Mongol dominance had incorporated Chinese siege technology that fortified central european cities had not seen.
I met this team a while back. All good people, very smart, but unfortunately seemed more focused on being a silicon valley startup than building a business in commercial real estate. As indicated by the topics discussed on the site's blog...
Tim Cook was COO of Apple before taking over as CEO. Steve Jobs may have help bring the iPod, iPhone and iPad to the world. But someone else had to figure out how to get those millions of devices into hands of customers.
credit cards only make up 10% of what's actually in my wallet. Now if they could minimize health insurance cards, loyalty cards, etc.. etc... then we're talking.
Nice! Great to read your experience from creating a product to launching it. Also glad to win over another developer to not thinking that all marketing is BS ;-)
Some tips from a marketer:
+Get analytics set up! I see that you've only mentioned the top of the funnel (traffic) and the bottom of the funnel (downloads). I'm assuming you don't have tracking for the full flow (traffic > install > activation > day 1-30 retention > Sales). Get this set up pronto. It's crucial to understand where the bottlenecks are and to also segment traffic to know which efforts are working.
+Marketing starts before you launch. You'll get a far stronger reaction from blogs, sites, and other people when you contact them 2-3 weeks before launch. Creates a sense of exclusivity and plus gives you some momentum to develop an installed base from Day 1. In light of this, perhaps you should call the current app an 'alpha' and re-launch to get some buzz :-)
+Major sources for you to consider:
Organic: SEO
Referral: Blogs, 3rd Party App Stores, Tech Sites, Forums, Quora, Stack Overflow, and where ever people who have the problem you're trying to solve is asking for help.
Partner: App stores, resellers, etc...
Paid: Facebook, AdWords, LinkedIn, GDN (I advise you to do thorough research before starting. It's easy to launch poorly designed campaigns and get the misinformed idea that these channels don't work)
Viral: Add any social sharing anywhere you can.
+App Review sites review 100s of requests each day. I ran FreeiPadApps.net for 2-years and received 20+ app review requests/day. Mostly from indie developers, agencies, and bots. Try instead to reach out directly to an editor or writer by email/twitter/linkedin.
+SEO: Get up to best practice (title tags, headings, kw research and mapping to content), but don't bank on it. The gold rush for SEO growth circa 2007 is largely over :-(
+Look heavily into any type of 3rd party app stores for free promotion.
+Not sure of JIRA/Github has any 3rd party app pages. Worthwhile to look into this and seeing if you can get included.
With all that said, doing everything above will get you on par with what everyone else is doing. To separate yourself from the pack, the awesomeness of the product needs to take over :-)
The overwhelming majority of revenue comes in the first weeks of a game launch. For a major franchise like this, you safely know what minimum dollar amount you'll make. Invest in market for hopes of a big hit.
Sure, ROI is tough. But think about the wrong decision to not market and sales flops in the first 2-3 weeks. You can't make up that lost revenue from launch.
Having witnessed the eras of gentrification in the mission district (my family has a small business around 20th and mission), the same people that are complaining that 'techies are forcing them out' are the same people that forced out the large hispanic community in the mission just 5-years earlier.
At the end of the day, Apple's goal isn't to get rich off the App Store. It's to do what they can with the App Store to continue driving sales of iPhones and iPads. At the moment, what they believe is that by promoting apps (via these lists) that promote and show off the iPhone/iPads in the best light is the way to do it.
As for finding an SEO/SEM expert, typically best to go by referral. Most SEO/SEM experts that you'll find on google/forums will run you through templated best practices.
Best to work with someone who has been vouched for.
Why wouldn't updating the website make a dent again? Landing page optimization is a huge forcus for any online commerce company because updating a website (design, content, flow) does make a dent.
I've been doing SEM for five years and worked with the full range of google reps.
Quite simply, don't ask reps for advice on a product they've never actually used (as in, with real money). You're better off investing in a proven SEM expert in your field.
Also, the answers/responses from Google reps are basically read from a training manual.
...aside from mostly being pushed out of historic community neighborhoods.