Winning the 1st Million: Notes from VentureFizz Panel

This past Wednesday, VentureFizz hosted an event about scaling to 1million users. It was moderated by Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix Partners, the shop that backed TalkTo. The panelists were Brian Carr from Springpad, Sarah Welch from Gazelle, Scott Healy of Care.com, and Ed Marci of Wayfair.

A ton of knowledge was dropped. Here are the 7 major takeaways.

1. App Store - Don't just use screen shots of your app. Brian Carr from Springpad suggested using the first 1 - if not 2 - screens to tell your story through pictures. This alone gave Springpad a meaningful bump in downloads.

Takeaway: Use the first screen as more of an advertisement than a tour/tutorial of the app. Here is a good example from Sesame by Sincerely:

2. Google Play - You won't get any love in Google Play if your marketing materials have Apple/iPhone. So if you're serious about marketing in the Android market, create Android centric images and video.
3. App Store v. Google Play: - Apple rank is a function of # of downloads and frequency of downloads. Google Play, on the other hand, is a function of Reviews and Uninstalls. Counting uninstalls is brilliant; it's the true sign of a useless app.
4. Facebook wins! - Antonio asked: "If you had one marketing platform to invest all of your kids' college fund into, which one would it be?" Facebook got 3/4 votes. There was a lone vote for content marketing.
5. Fun Fact 1 - Average person has 43 apps on their phone and use just 8 per day.
6. Fun Fact 2 -  7 pm is the heaviest hour for mobile traffic. 50+ million American launch their phone during this hour every day.
7. Localize - Even if your app doesn't work outside of the United States, you should still localize it. I didn't get the exact reason but I believe it is because Apple looks more favorably at localized apps. Can anyone shed some more light on this?