Building the mobile app that users asked for to increase customer acquisition & engagement

Venturing in the world of mobile apps is something that the folks at LANDR had been thinking about for a long time. Most of the web apps have been built with responsive design in mind, but having a place on the home screen of people's phone is something else.

Users had asked for it multiple times throughout the years and our competitors had already made some moves. Additionally, we had spent a significant amount of time and energy on collaboration tools like Messenger and Sessions (screenshots below). It only made sense to have a stronger presence on mobile to improve customer experience, to keep our users engaged and, potentially, to get new people onboard.

Challenges

In short, most of the challenges came from the lack of experience at LANDR with mobile apps in general. Our team was composed of a product director, a product designer, a developer and myself, and we had to navigate through some unknowns like the cost of development, the rules imposed by the stores, the scope of the project, etc. Which technology would we use? What features will we be able to build? What do we want to start with? With limited resources, we had to make sure we'd build the right thing to have an impact on numbers.

Approach

To face those challenges, we followed a pretty simple but effective process:

1. List all user needs and requested features

2. Create a small roadmap with that list

3. Search for a technology that can support this roadmap

4. Design and prototype the first step of our roadmap

5. Run user tests, gather feedback and iterate (private beta)

6. Ship it to everyone!

In the end, we could say that our first mobile app was almost fully driven by what users wanted. Also, we could have taken the shortcut of using a "website wrapper", but we decided to build a native app in React using Expo to achieve the best user experience possible. Kudos to Patrick Bourget, Karim Dahou and Ludovic Thomas for their efforts!

Access to the tracks library

This was probably the oldest request from users. After mastering a track from their computer, it's common (and recommended) to listen to your song in different contexts to hear how it sounds. For example, users might want to listen to it in their car, on their phone with earbuds, or on their home sound system. It was a no-brainer to have this feature in the mobile app. In future iterations, we also added the possibility to download, share and organize tracks.

Master from anywhere

The first release of the LANDR mobile app was mostly an MVP, so including a big feature like mastering wasn't part of it, but we knew we'd have to add it at some point, being the company's most popular product. After many requests from users, we went with a simplified version of it that was accessible for subscribers, then added a free trial for anyone who installed the app. This was a good way to introduce new customers to the product without too much work.

Monitor releases performance

After launch, one of the most requested addition was the integration of our distribution product. It only made sense, since users who release tracks and albums might want to see, from their phone, how they're performing on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Competitors like Distrokid and Amuse were also offering similar functionalities, so getting in that space was a good business opportunity. The first iterations of Releases only gave users access to their music catalog along with basic features like trends, statistics and sharing, but this was a great start to increase engagement.

Stay connected

LANDR Messenger is an instant messaging tool that was reintroduced a little while ago to facilitate file sharing, online collaboration, and network and community building. It's meant to be the Slack or the Discord of music creators. It has the common features that you'd expect, but we also added time-stamped comments for easier annotating on tracks, which was a good design challenge considering the size of the screen and the lack of cursor.

Results

Rapidly, we saw a strong interest for the mobile app. In terms of downloads, activation and engagement, the numbers were above our expectations.

• 4.9/5 rating based on 788 reviews on iOS

• 4.5/5 rating based on 584 reviews on Android

• Tens of thousands of downloads

The feedback has been quite positive and has helped the team plan what's coming next: "It’s great to see Landr finally has a mobile app. Been with them for about 5 years and have been happy with their services. This is a welcomed addition to everything else they offer."

Congratulations to the team!

Learnings

As said earlier, this app being our first serious attempt on mobile made it an interesting and educational challenge. A few learnings stand out to me:

1. Even though building a product on a different platform can seem scary, I realized that, with proper technology and planning, mobile development doesn't have to be costly and time-consuming.

2. LANDR's mobile app acts as a great complement to the web platform and it didn't have to be packed with features to be successful. Giving what users wanted the most, listening to feedback and quick iterations was the key.

3. Mobile app stores can be a good customer acquisition channel for a company that's been mostly creating products for the web. Many people discovered LANDR thanks to this simple mobile app.