1368: Moburst: How to Grow Your App in a Crowded Market with App Growth Expert Lior Eldan

Robert Plank 0:01 Hey, we're here. We're back on the podcast with Mr. Lior Eldan, and we're here to talk about App growth. We're here to talk about perhaps localizing a brand when entering new global markets. Now Mr. Lior is the co founder and the CEO of mobers. They are a global digital full service mobile first marketing agency, and Leo and his team, they have worked with top brands like Google, Samsung, Uber, Reddit and Pfizer, helping them achieve significant growth. And we are going to find out how perhaps we can learn some of these lessons and find out some of the magic tricks, the secret sauce. You choose your metaphor for what we want to do, because there's the technology and the software, and then there's human behavior, and there's all these challenges building a strong online community. So Lear will get us dialed in, help us out, set us straight. So we are glad to be speaking with you.

Lior Eldan 0:53 Nice. Nice to be speaking with you, Robert, happy to be here.

Robert Plank 0:59 Happy to have you. And so I did my best to introduce you, but from the source itself, what are you all about? What currently has you so excited, passionate, focus?

Lior Eldan 1:09 Sure. So as you mentioned, I'm the co founder of Mo burst. We, we are an agency running already for this is will be our 12th year. So we've been doing this for quite some time now. Started as a mobile only agency, and really kind of came out about 2013 when mobile and a few couple of years after the iPhone and mobile was booming, built our brands and worked with a bunch of amazing companies like the ones you mentioned and many more. And in recent three years, we've kind of expanded to being more of a mobile first, digital mobile first, and acquired a few other agencies to So today, we're kind of run the gamut across marketing, from PR and podcasting and obviously marketing and apps optimization, SEO, even we're dabbling into optimizing for llms Now, obviously user acquisition, media runs The gamut across the services and our clientele as well. We still serve those kind of tier one global brands where, typically it's a bit more mobile focused, but also have a bunch of other clients across our different services.

Robert Plank 2:36 Well, very cool. And so you're you do so many things, right? And it's such a deceptively hard problem to solve, isn't it? You think, you know, I have an idea for software, and I'll get it going. And then, now we're in this age of apps and phones, and so the software, it not only has to work, it has to be completely bug free, it has to be fast, it has to be easy to use with bright colors and big buttons and exciting and then it's also really competitive, isn't it? There's like, the app ranking marketplaces, and people always, you see these apps like they put in these is really just amazing techniques, where they like, they make it social, to get friends involved. They have pop ups. They get you to use it every day. They have the gamification in place. And it seems like they're, they're always updating. They're always like, you know, making it better. You figure, like a lot of most games have, like, mini games built in that update all the time, and have other levels. And it seems like exhausting, right? You listed, like, 25 different things, and so, like, with all those, those tasks to do with this impossible task in front of you, like, what do you think are the do's and don'ts? What do you think that the apps that fail miss out on and what do you think that you and your agency do that just really makes it all work?

Lior Eldan 3:49 Yeah. So I think one thing we often see, you know, app developers and companies is kind of figure out that they come with the thought that, if you know, they build. If the product will be good, people will come. And I think that the reality is that if you look on both the App Store and Google Play stores, There's well over 2 million apps on each one of them today. And as you mentioned, apps that have been years in the making have a very kind of are very well optimized. And so I think the first premise is, is kind of an app doesn't, you know, go viral without, without marketing, without putting, you know, actual dollars. They there have been, you know, a few a tiny few phenomenons that kind of grew viral, but in the most case, it's actually kind of real marketing, either use acquisition or using apps optimization strategies, making sure your funnel is well optimized, working with influencers, kind of doing the. Kind of go to Marketing and make sure to get the message out. So I think that's the first thing when you develop. You go about and launch an app just to not expect the app to kind of succeed in of itself. It needs that marketing backfire.

Robert Plank 5:21 I like it sometimes, once in a million times, they luck out, there's an angry bird that just like, takes off. But for the rest of us, we have to apply these tactics, don't we? There, you mentioned things like funnel optimization and user acquisition and app store optimization and all these interesting things. And so as far as like you've seen so much, right? You work with big brands, and I'm sure some apps that we've never heard of and like, what interests and excites you about what you've accomplished? Is there anything remarkable you think, as far as, like, an AHA or an interesting turnaround that you and your agency applied you? It's one of these apps that may maybe without you might not have succeeded. Maybe.

Lior Eldan 6:01 Yeah, so we actually have several of these, I think. So I think I have stories on both ends, right? We worked with, as you mentioned, huge, huge companies. We worked with most of Google's B to C apps at the time. So thinking about Google and YouTube and in Chrome, and being able to, you know, move the needle for these, you know, monsters, has been exhilarating to see kind of the the scale and what we were able to do there. And also helping clients like Reddit, which, you know, launch their their app, moving kind of helping them transition from web to the to their early days of of the app. And in many, many startups where, you know, they were just kind of growing with them. Many times we have startups that come to us at the onset of, you know, even, even pre seed. We help them with kind of getting a strategy together, a go to market strategy. They go and they raise some capital from investors, then they work with us on executing on that marketing plan, reach their milestones and kind of grow from there. So we've, had several of these apps that we kind of have from from launch to, you know, to to to multi million and multinational apps.

Robert Plank 7:33 Well, very cool. And as far as, like, the places where you struggled, right? Because like, you've gotten these apps to like, you've gotten Reddit to like, really take off and getting widespread adoption. But then it's never quite a straight line, is it? Sometimes there's the difficulties, the stress along the way. So do you have anything along those lines? Or maybe you and your agency, like, struggled, stumbled, were stressed out, were uncertain, where there was just kind of a problem conflict along the way?

Lior Eldan 8:01 Yeah, yeah, sure. I think the dynamic of, you know, digital marketing, and I think increasingly mobile marketing is the fast pace, right? Like Tiktok is, is, you know, a phenomenon, and it wasn't even around a couple of years ago. So I think being able to to adapt. So I think just to take a recent, relatively recent case of of the whole iOS privacy change that that happened a few years ago whereby Apple kind of changed the script in terms of what they allow app developers and specifically mobile measurement providers to collect, and that kind of was a, I think, a paradigm shift in many ways, and in how to kind of read the marketing data of our campaigns. And we got, you know, many clients we needed to kind of work them through this transition, what they can see, what they can see. So And speaking about, kind of the straight line so overnight, for many apps, kind of, you know, their whole data stack was, was almost irrelevant in terms of what they what they were used to seeing, what they're capable of seeing. Moving forward, I think the industry has come a long way since, but, but that's just an example of how you need to kind of adapt to to everything that's going on and dynamic of the market.

Robert Plank 9:33 And you know, you bring up an interesting point here, that that that many times these app stores, these marketplaces, they really change their rules, right? You're kind of at the mercy of whatever they make these sweeping changes and, and I don't know about you, but sometimes with these app creators, they've kind of been maybe frustrated or or gotten maybe, like, let the emotions get involved. They gotten angry, like, I knew a guy that was involved in Farmville early. On and, and it was when, when, like the Facebook kind of one click Login became a thing. And he was like, Oh, well, we don't want to add a one click Facebook log in a farm bill and give them our data. And it's like, but like, they already have everyone's data, right? Apple and Samsung and and Facebook, like, everyone's on there already what you're not It's not like they're only your customers. So is there anything along those lines of, like, maybe, like a misunderstanding or a reframing that that needs to get out there, as far as the, maybe the frustration these app creators are feeling?

Lior Eldan 10:33 Yeah, so I think again, it's a bit technical and nuanced, but one of the one of kind of the premises that Apple came out with is something called the privacy threshold, which means, if you run a campaign on Facebook, for instance, on any one of the network, any one of the networks, until you reach a certain scale, you won't really see too much in terms of the Install. So you might, you know, spend a few 100 bucks and see that it's it's not, it's working miserably, or it's not really driving installs, where the fact of the matter is that actually, you're just not reaching that, that threshold that Apple dictates, no one really knows what it is. There's kind of industry rumors. But that's just an example of something that might be frustrating. And then you say, Okay, maybe if I scale just a bit and reach that kind of threshold, suddenly I start getting more signals the algorithm can, can hone in, and that kind of can, can be a positive snowball in terms of the campaign. So sometimes it's just understanding the intricacies and nuances of of how reporting works, how the systems work, and being able to to use that to our advantage.

Robert Plank 11:52 And that seems like why we need someone like you, right? If someone's creating an app or looking to grow it, they need you in their corner, so that way they do know about some of these, these roadblocks that aren't even really well documented, right? They're rumors. And so you get to that specific privacy threshold, and as far as, like, an app growing, scaling, are there logical different, like, levels, plateaus you could, like, sometimes people say, like, well, I'm growing a company from like, you know, 1 million to 5 million in 10 million. Do you think of the growth of an app and kind of similar milestones, or is it just different for everyone?

Lior Eldan 12:30 Yeah, so I think it's, it's definitely milestone based, I think one of the things that we see with a lot of apps is that reaching a certain scale is, you know, it's just basically spending more once you find, once you kind of find product market fit, once you've honed on the creative, the targeting, all of that stuff, and you start to see, to see good results, you can just spend more and scale until a certain until a certain phase, and then it kind of okay, and then the costs go up. You're kind of reaching outside of your immediate ICP, your ideal customer profile. Need to think about different ways, and maybe different onboarding and different messaging for different types of audiences. Maybe you want to go into a new market, and that's kind of, you know, a whole different way and localizing, as you mentioned in the beginning. So I think that's kind of the milestones we tend to see that like zero to I don't know zero to one is, is, is hard, but once you do that, it's just kind of pushing the gas pedal a bit harder. But then once you hit that plateau in terms of, okay, now the numbers kind of aren't making sense to just push more budget. I need to get creative. I need to expand to newer marketing channels, maybe outside of kind of the metas and the Googles, and also markets outside of kind of us are the ones that I or the English speaking ones for for example,

Robert Plank 14:17 I like it well, it's fun to think about right? There's there's growth and their scaling, right? There's times when I'm pointed in the right direction, and I just need to do more of that. And then times when I say, Okay, well, now I've gotten to that goal. Now it's time to pivot to other countries, or new features or Okay, now the the paid ads that I'm doing aren't working, trying time for something new, so like two different mindsets, right? More of what's working or something new. And once again, it helps to have someone else to think through the big picture, the strategy, the next decisions, and speaking to that, what has you excited about the growth of your own company? What are you working on? What's ahead?

Lior Eldan 14:57 Yeah, so we are. Our so we're increasingly getting asked from our clients to to look beyond their mobile so to optimize their website. Now, you know, kind of traffic is moving outside of people are asking more and more chat GPT and all the llms, so start looking at that and see how we can get our, you know, our clients listed and and be more present there. So making sure we're kind of on top of all the new mediums, AI, obviously, and how we can use it to make sure, you know, we provide better services. We provide better scalable services. So rather than, you know, having the capacity of every analyst or a creative strategist or designer, suddenly we have, you know, the ability of each person to to monitor or deploy or or create so many different things in it, I think, creates immense opportunity for us as a business, just to kind of grow and serve maybe types of customers we that, you know, didn't necessarily have the budget beforehand to work with us, because now we can also launch kind of services and products that that are that don't require as much of labor, and on the high end of kind of the brands of the world to to provide services which just weren't possible in terms of the amount of designs, the amount of AB tests we can run, the amount of data we can track and optimize on. So that's what we're really excited and investing a lot of time and resources

Robert Plank 16:41 Oh, yeah. And there's, there's so many cool ideas built into what you said there, right? Like, you think about the like, there's that some famous story about, like, Google had some web page, and they split tested 55 different shades of blue, just because, whatever website it was, they had millions of people going. So when you're talking about an app with these huge numbers, and you can say, well, do I have the button here? Do I have the button there? And you split test that. I mean, that can make such a difference right as far as the the revenue of the app, people using it, and once you have, like, those huge amounts of users, then my man, now it's party time. And I'm glad that you mentioned AI, because it's such a mixed bag, isn't it? Like, sometimes you see like, like, Adobe added like, a talk to your PDF button, and I used it, and it was, like, so useless. But then, like, there is, I got an app a couple weeks ago for my son, and he's like, He's not speaking as much as he should. So I added like, different cards and pictures and the words, and you can tap in, and it speaks the word aloud, and it's amazing. And when I started using it, it was like, well, you created a card for like, this type of food, like this type of dinner, right? Like, like bananas. And it said, Hey, do you want me to, like, put in like, 10 more foods? And even a few years ago, that feature didn't exist, right? You'd have to go and do all this manual stuff. But now with AI, you just plug it in and it's like, Hey, you did one of these. Do you want 10 more of those? And so that's what's exciting, right? When, when AI is, like, so built in that it's like, magical, and we don't even notice it. And so, like, what's your take on all that? As far as, like, using AI in an app, like, what's your approach? Or maybe, like, what's an interesting usage you've seen.

Lior Eldan 18:22 Yeah, so I think there's, there's a lot to unpack there. So I think first thinking about how digital marketing and app marketing evolve. So the, I think the ability, as you mentioned, to double down on a certain messaging creative I've heard apps that you know work with UGC, with user generated content, kind of hone on a creator and a messaging that works, and then basically Replace the the person with AI, with different AI presenters. Second, basically, instead of having you know one person, one man speaking, have almost the same the same messaging, the same tried and tested with different voices, different people, women, and it doesn't require you know so many people to you to you to work with as many influencers or or creators. So I think a it kind of allows for scale and testing, and it also allows for personalization, right? Because, especially for apps with with this massive reach, until now, they would need to think of a funnel onboarding banner, etc, for each and for kind of user segments. And today, with the clever use of AI and their data, they can, you know, have an almost one to one relationship with their with their company. Customers, speak to them about about what interests you, show you, the kind of onboarding screen that that is tailored to to you. So I think personalization is definitely it will unlock a lot of of helpful use cases and and in our case, how we think about it, I think there's lots of, as we do, all these different services for apps. So having the ability to to kind of analyze cross service, cross platform, what's what's going on a lot of times with these big apps, you know, something happens and metrics spike this way or another, and and we're tasked with understanding why, like, Okay, did an influencer post? Was there a PR? Was is it something seasonal? Was there an issue with the app? So there's all these different things that can happen that I think if you can also have aI involved, you can, you can kind of train a model to understand, okay, this is what's happened. This is what needs to be done, and this is how we're thinking about it, to kind of act as another analyst on our side, based on all of our collective experience, like, what, what, what actually happened, and what should we do in these cases, based on all the different cases we've seen

Robert Plank 21:22 very cool. You're such a problem solver. I love your enthusiasm, right? Of this, this whole the funnel mindset of saying like, well, you know, where is it stuck? What's the bottleneck? What can be improved? You get someone using your app, you onboard them. Where might they get stuck or frustrated or get bored or leave? And there's so much to think about. But that's why, if someone out there has an app that they want to grow, they definitely need you and your team at mo burst to get their heads wrapped around that, to do it right, right? Because life is so short, the apps move at such a fast speed, with the rankings and the competitors and the rules changing, and it's like you try to figure out it all out yourself. It's it's really difficult. By the time you do figure it out, it's changed so it it helps so much to have a dedicated team of experts who know this and so tell me about mo burst. How does someone know if their company and their app is a right fit for you, and if they are, what's the next step?

Lior Eldan 22:18 Yeah, sure. So we're pretty approachable on our website, on social, we actually launched just late last year a new program called core by mobers. So traditionally, we've only worked with kind of big brands, Google, Uber, Samsungs of the world, and we've kind of had all these smaller clients and couldn't take them on board because of budget constraints. And last year, we launched this program where we cater to clients with that are a bit more budget constraints and and just with AI and kind of a more core approach. So to try to give them again the essence of our know how, just again in a price point that would hopefully meet their needs. So just reach out, and we have a team in the US and across Europe as well. And we'll have, and we can, you know, have a chat and see if there's a fit,

Robert Plank 23:25 very cool, no harm in that, right? See if it makes sense to proceed. So that is m, O, B, u, r, s, t.com, where they have that core program that Lee or mentioned. But also, if you want to have a conversation about hyper growth and what can be done, and all those services you mentioned at the beginning to grow your app. And so I'm curiously or do you have any disqualifiers or qualifiers? Like, do you say that someone already, like, has to have an established app? Do they have to be a certain size? Like, what's the criteria for having this conversation?

Lior Eldan 23:57 No. So we're we work with with apps and camp and companies. Again, today, we serve also non app clients of all different sizes. So you know, we have, on the one hand, you know, PR and podcast booking agency which works with founders and you know, companies that that are just starting off, we also, as I mentioned, do strategy work for them. So help them kind of raise their next round all the way to the scale up brands which are ready to to rock and roll and go live and, you know, have the budgets to to actually invest in growth. So, as I mentioned, just let's have a chat. I think worst case will kind of tell you what, what if sometimes we feel that an app is just not ready for marketing. So either we'll offer them for us to do some product work, or we'll send them kind of to do to kind of make sure their app is ready for for Prime before, before spending money on it. And. Um, so I, in any way, I think it's, it's worth a chat and to see, to see if, if there's a fit,

Robert Plank 25:10 very cool. It is worth having a chat to see what can be done. And so that website is m, O, B, u, r, s, t.com, have that chat, discuss your app, share with Lior and his team what you've done so that you can become your category leader. That means own your category and blast off with hyper growth, because mo burst has helped the world's best and biggest companies exceed their KPIs, and they can help you do the same. So mo burst.com is the place to go, but before I let you go, Mr. Lee or it is time for the scary part of the podcast where I try to stump you. I try to put you on the spot by asking for a fun quote or lesson that has served you. So what comes to mind as far as a quote or lesson?

Lior Eldan 25:53 Sure, so I'm a big Michael Jordan fan, and he has a famous quote I really like that the I think it's from commercial. He once did that. He says, I failed over and over again, and that is why I succeed. And I think that with marketing in general, and especially in times like these, where there's there's such so much change going on at an overwhelming rate, it's better to do than and fail than not to do. And you know, things usually aren't as good or as bad as they initially seem. So we I think one of the things that kind of has kept us in this business for so long is is being adaptable and trying out. And that's kind of what I try to live by and encourage our team.

Robert Plank 26:46 That's great. I like that a lot. You succeed because you failed along the way to get to that success. And so if you are someone who is very excited and interested about growing your app through some small failures that get you to the bigger success, then mo burst is the agency for you. They were like we said, apps, websites, getting you booked on podcasts to promote your app and website. It's all taken care of for you. Have that conversation, growth done right. Mo burst.com and have that conversation to become that category leader. So thank you very much, Mr. Lior, for being here, blowing our minds, helping us out, telling some amazing stories. I really appreciate you and what you brought here. So thank you.

Lior Eldan 27:27 Thanks, Robert, this is fun.

Robert Plank 27:33 All right, super.