How a Mobile Game Dominated the App Store Without Any Press

Draw Something, a Pictionary-like game for iOS and Android, had 1 million downloads before it had a single search result in Google News.

"There was nothing written about us," says Dan Porter, the CEO of a company called OMGPOP that created the app. "[Reporters] weren't interested. I tried, but I couldn't even get their attention."

Press is often cited as the best way to get an app to stand apart from the approximately 500,000 others in the App Store, hopefully catalyzing its rise to visibility in one of Apple's top app lists. Draw Something, however, reached the top slot on that list with minimal media attention. At a little shy of four weeks old, the app has about 6 million downloads and users that are creating 1,000 drawings every second.

"It's like the difference between winning the Super Bowl and having a football team where you win three games in a season," Porter says of the app's success compared to that of OMGPOP's more than 30 online and mobile games.

Draw Something, he says, brings in more revenue in one day than all of OMGPOP's other properties combined do in a month.

So what is the secret sauce behind Draw Something's viral quality? What about it is different than the other OMGPOP mobile games that did OK, but never dominated the app store — and how can other app developers replicate it?

Porter's answer, in short, is that Draw Something is just awesome — and social.

"What was the marketing plan for Facebook when it started?" he asks. "Create this amazing thing that people want to use and tell their friends…It has to do with how you make the product itself."

Other than being awesome, here are some strategies Porter suggests for dominating the App Store:

• Build viral features into your app. Draw Something, for instance, urges users to invite their friends as opponents.
• Advertise in other apps. Companies like Tapjoy let developers advertise their apps within other apps. "The only place to advertise an app is in another app," Porter says. "Nowhere else matters."
• Don't depend on advertising. The first rule of apps is still to be awesome. You can buy your way to the top of the app store through advertising, but if you ignore this first rule, you'll just sink back down. Porter says that fewer than 5% of Draw Something's users came from advertising. "It was just enough to light the match," he says. "The huge fire came after that."
• Choose a less-competitive category. Maybe your app belongs in both "trivia" and "games." Choose the category with less competition.
• Check out Twitter. When your app goes live, look at what people are saying about it on Twitter and adjust accordingly. "It's like a real-time focus group," Porter says.
• Keep users in your app. When you do hit the top of the app list, make sure your app is cool enough to open again after it's downloaded. People who download apps are more likely to show their friends an app they actually use than one that just sits on their phone's third screen. "If you can keep those people in your app," Porter says, "you can kind of grow from there. But if they never open it again, it just doesn't matter."

To be fair, OMGPOP did have some advantages in spreading the word about Draw Something. It was, for instance, able to drive 30,000 downloads in the app's first day through its own well-established website. Not everybody has a website that gets that much traffic, but Porter still thinks anyone has a shot at making the next killer app.

"When you bake word-of-month and viral activity into the product, it doesn't have to be about the marketing," he says. "It's how you create the product."