This blog post is part of a recent AMA hosted at Sean Ellis’ GrowthHackers.com, with Prabhjot Singh, cofounder + President at pyze.com. We are fans of Sean Ellis and wrote about why Growth Hackers need Growth Intelligence.
Arsene Lavaux: As an app developer, what is the one thing you need to do right to distribute your app in a sustainable way?
Mobile is already penetrating every aspect of our life. We’re already using mobile to order Pizza or a ride. Certainly, it’s going to continue to cannibalize a lot of industries from commerce to advertising to payments but it’s also going to become the primary channel for accessing a lot of web centric services today. There are a lot of enterprises still struggling to adapt to mobile and those that can’t are really not positioned well for success.
We are already seeing Mobile fusing with Augmented Reality, IoT, and AI (in different ways of course) to create a brave new world. This is a much longer conversation point. I’ll say this, mobile is definitely a larger shift than Web was from the Client-Server days. And not only are we in early days, the technologies that are maturing alongside mobile are going to give rise to both amazing and scary prospects for the future.
Pyze Blog 
Sustainable distribution has a lot to do with the Addressable Market Size for your application. Most app publishers don’t take advantage of the true distribution power of the App Store or Google Play and are too “home” centric in their thinking. Fast-growing markets such as Japan, Brazil, India can make your app successful, even if it’s doing poorly at home.
At Pyze we’ve heard from a number of developers after they start using us and are shocked to find out how many users are coming from India or Brazil. Just by localizing the app in the locales where it’s getting traction, you can significantly increase usage and retention.
Check out Dickey’s blog on localization.
There are also non-app store distribution channels, which I am happy to follow-up on offline and I have had a lot of success with OEM preloads in the past, but those aren’t going to be right for every app.
The one caveat I’ll mention is don’t blow your addressable market before you achieve product-market fit. It’s critical to get users loving the app, just like you would for any product, before you start to scale distribution. Else, the end result won’t be pretty.
Arsene Lavaux: Do you believe mobile growth core principles apply to improving education in the world? If so, which ones?
I believe that improving education is almost exactly like growth principles. Not everyone learns the same, and in the exact same way not everyone uses an app in the same way. The people that excel in both fields should not get the same attention, either by the developer OR the teacher, and those that are lagging behind, be it in class or usage of the app, should get a little more attention – this could be in the form of personal tutoring by the teacher, or a push notification from the app to get the user coming back. At Pixtel, we’ve created an adaptive learning platform to help students of all learning levels achieve their full potential and also built in gamification into the platform to encourage friendly competition and the desire to excel. I’m a big believer that this is the future of education.
Arsene Lavaux: Where do you see the future of mobile going?