Carissa Lintao is an app strategist helping entrepreneurs with organic marketing
I'm an app strategist. At a basic level, I tell startup founders their apps suck and then help them with organic marketing. Every app is different and has different needs, so the types of projects I take on are different every day. However, a typical project can entail anything from branding, UX writing, app store optimization, PR, high-level social media strategy, to content.
How did you come up with your business idea? What inspired you?
It was serendipitous. I started freelancing in 2014 because I wanted part-time work the summer of my senior year. I landed my first gig for $7, but the second gig I took on was $50 - a ton of money for a 17-year-old. I worked with an indie app developer on creating trivia questions and answers for his House of Cards app. I worked with him on a few more apps but didn't pay much attention as I was a music education major. Two years later business started picking up, and I switched my degree plan over to marketing.
I'm now a full-time, freelance app strategist. I'm proud to say that I've had my hands on over 200 apps, maintained a Top Rated status on Upwork for two years, and have worked at two award-winning NYC app development companies & The Next Web before even graduating college.
How do you generate new ideas to stay relevant on the market? Is it important to innovate in your space?
It's important to innovate in the marketing space, but at the same time, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Where most people trip up with marketing is riding trends and dumping thousands of dollars into strategies that "experts" suggest for the sake of it. Marketing at its core is the act of promoting/selling a product or service. You can't sell something through a channel that doesn't work to an audience that isn't interested in the first place.
The app marketing space is niche, and at the same time extremely competitive as there are over two million apps in the App Store. However, I don't focus on the notion of innovation as much as I do sticking to tried and true basic marketing principles and pure intuition. For example, getting to know exactly who your target audience is before even touching a Facebook ad, or nailing your app's value proposition before launching it.
The truth of the matter is that you can Google "marketing strategies" and run with any of them. Marketing is all about trial and error. What's more important is nailing the foundation of your marketing strategy.
Who is the one super successful person you look up to? Why them? Can you share their quote/ideology that inspires you the most?
Whitney Wolfe (CEO of Bumble) is a role model of mine because she doesn't comprise her values. In the unethical, toxic industry that is tech, she refuses to follow the status quo. And even if the billion dollar company that is Bumble flops tomorrow, I know that she wouldn't have any regrets. An ideology of Whitney's that I love is, "Look at what is broken in society, figure out how to make it better, and then, around that, formulate a business." People ask me for good app ideas all the time, and I used to say where there is a real need, there will always be a business opportunity. But now I just quote Whitney because it makes me sound more eloquent.
What is one thing you find to be true that most people would disagree with?
The customer, or client, in this case, is always right. Yes, the client is right in the sense that he/she knows what they want. But if a client is coming to you for the sole purpose of attaining a goal, then they need to trust in your skill-set to achieve that goal.