Launching an app in the App Store is hard. And the App Store is an incredibly stressful environment because essentially you only get 2 weeks to settle into a ra

Launching an app in the App Store is hard. And the App Store is an incredibly stressful environment because essentially you only get 2 weeks to settle into a rank that will be the basis of your success. If you fuck it up, you're pretty much done because discovery on the app store is broken. I work for a social game company that has invested orders of magnitude more time and money into figuring out the best route to launch an app, and even they recognize that even after all their analysis and beta-testing, they too can fail. But they have the most disciplined process to give them the best shot at winning. I'll offer a few pieces of advice from seeing their launch process: 1) Beta test internally until the app is "good enough" for launch. Bugs are ok. Put in monetization features immediately and test. 2a) Come up with a target rank you want to achieve (both safe and stretch) and figure out how you need to get there. For example, if your goal is to get into the top 10 free games, you need to have around 1.5 million downloads a month. To get into the top 25, you need about 1 million. Understanding these targets helps hone your strategy. 2b) You can't afford to not do some initial projections in your industry. For a free-to-play game as an example, DAU and churn and Lifetime Value are important metrics. You need to setup some initial benchmarks for these metrics, so you can gauge if you're being "successful" in your launch. 3) Don't launch in the U.S initially. As you've found out, you only get one chance, and the U.S is a huge market to fuck up. One great thing about the App Store is that it has geo-targeting built into its distribution, so launch in a much smaller market that might validate your idea. We chose New Zealand, because its a large enough market to beta-test an idea, but "Whatever Happens in New Zealand Stays In New Zealand" as our marketing director put it. 4) If you fuck up a beta-tested market, don't worry, theres about 25 others that you can use before launching in the "mainstream" markets. 5) You will have to pour money into ads, but you only have to do it for 2 weeks because ranking in the App Store is determined by velocity of downloads. So as soon as you launch, target with any ad-system you can get your hands on from Admob, InMobi, Facebook, Google, TapJoy, whatever. This will cost you lots of money, but this is what it takes to succeed. There is simply too much competition in the App Store.