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Expert

Austin Church Build a profitable business you love.

Knoxville, Tennessee

Co-Founder & COO of Closeup.fm. MA in English Literature. Poet turned businessman. Created & sold portfolio of 30+ mobile apps. Passionate about doing stuff, helping freelancers and creatives build profitable businesses they love travel, Jesus, creativity, and growth. I love bringing clarity & helping people move past challenges. Married to a wise woman & have three rambunctious kiddos.

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Startups

User Acquisition

Marketing Strategy

Mobile Apps

Branding

Mobile Development

Creative Writing

Operations

Music

Creative Problem Solving

Member since January 2013

Areas of Expertise

Reviews 31
Answers 55

Startups

User Acquisition

Marketing Strategy

Mobile Apps

Branding

Mobile Development

Creative Writing

Operations

Music

Creative Problem Solving

Clarity

Austin Church

Knoxville, Tennessee

Co-Founder & COO of Closeup.fm. MA in English Literature. Poet turned businessman. Created & sold portfolio of 30+ mobile apps. Passionate about doing stuff, helping freelancers and creatives build profitable businesses they love travel, Jesus, creativity, and growth. I love bringing clarity & helping people move past challenges. Married to a wise woman & have three rambunctious kiddos.

$16.67/min

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Startups User Acquisition Marketing Strategy Mobile Apps Branding Mobile Development Creative Writing Operations Music Creative Problem Solving

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Getting Clients Fast

Sometimes you don't have the luxury of courting clients. Sometimes you need clients now—that is, a transfusion of cash, a pressure release valve to keep things from exploding.

What do you do?

Well, desperation never looked or smelled good on anyone, so the first order of business is to stare down your fears. You're not the first person to be in this position.

And once you've mastered your fear and anxiety—if only for the moment—it's time to use that beautiful noggin of yours to make it rain. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.

I always recommend the same tried-and-true tactics for getting new clients when your bills and payroll just can't wait. I'll be happy to share some of them with you.

Are You a Non-Technical Founder Looking for Advice?

My business partner and I are in the throes of growing our startup, Closeup.fm. If you'd like fresh insights into lean startup methodology, growth hacking, fundraising, and operations, get in touch. This stuff is all I think about these days.

https://kicktastic.com/blog/article/the-art-of-the-casual-connection

Copywriting [That Doesn't Suck]

Back in college, I worked up the courage to ask out this beautiful girl whom I met at a coffeeshop. Let's call her Sydney. We both liked this Norwegian singer-songwriter who was playing at 3rd & Lindsley, so I bought tickets. We were sitting in the mezzanine, waiting for the show to start and looking at the appetizers on the dinner menu. Sydney asked, "Are buffalo wings really made out of buffalo?" She wasn't making a joke.

What does this have to do with copywriting? I'll tell you: It doesn't matter how pretty your branding, website, or strategy is if your words make you sound ignorant or irrelevant.

Get in touch if you want to discuss how to improve your high-level brand statements and messaging.

http://www.squidoo.com/austinlchurchportfolio

Dear Creatives & Freelancers, Can I Help You Earn What You're Worth?

I have run a consulting and creative services business for 7 years. I also co-founded a startup back in November 2013. Guess what? I have made A LOT more money selling creativity to clients and packaging it in products like guides and courses than being a startup founder. That to say, let’s build you a business that bankrolls your desired lifestyle. Do you love helping people? Do you always seem to give more than you meant to? Good. Call me, and we’ll discuss strategies for turning that into a six-figure income.

http://brightnewt.com/

Brand Development – Would You Want to Invite Your Brand Over for Dinner?

Are you an artist, freelancer, entrepreneur, or sole proprietor? Does the quality of your work and the outcomes for your clients matter to you? Are you trying to build a profitable, sustainable business and create more freedom in your life? If your brand were a person, would you want to invite him/her over for dinner?

If you've got a specific problem that you want to move past, then let's develop a step-by-step plan for strengthening your brand and attracting the right customers.

https://kicktastic.com

Answers 55
Reviews 31

Answers

Austin Church answered

Revamping the copy on my website to better explain our story/'why'. Hiring a copywriter, should I know this or can the copywriter help us discover it?

There's a lot of really good stuff here already, so I'll do my best to be brief:

The most successful brands figure out why they're in business and then they look for an intersection: the sweet spot where what they believe and value overlaps with what their target audience(s) believe and value.

Gary Halbert used a great thought exercise with his marketing students: "What advantages would you want to have to sell more hamburgers than your competitors?" He'd let them throw out answers like "high-quality beef" and "a great location" before he'd interject and say that the only one that he needed was a hungry crowd. In other words, you can totally nail your USP and still go broke trying to sell hamburgers in a vegetarian neighborhood.

So you start with the why (a la Sinek), then move to your audiences (your hungry crowds), and then move to that intersection of beliefs and values.

Then you craft a story and develop high-level brand messaging around that sweet spot.

This process works best as a, well, process, that happens with a cross-functional team at your organization—typically 2 4-hour sessions in-person. But you can also do an abbreviated version and get it 90% right (that is, good enough).

Hope this helps,
Austin Church

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Copywriting

Austin Church answered

I'm looking for a great full service app design firm to build my app and help with all design, branding, development, etc. Anyone know any good ones?

Yes. Who I would recommend would depend on what you'd like to see happen. Are you building only for iOS, or only for Android, or both? Will you have a bunch of content/stuff in your app or just a little? Are you thinking game or non-game app? Do you already have a big fanbase or would you be trying to build one while building the app?

It's easy to save a bunch of money on mobile development if you know how, and even easier to overspend. Making an app can be a ton of fun or a major headache. I'd recommend the fun.

So if you want an outside perspective, give me a ring.

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Application Development

Mobile applications

Product Development

Austin Church answered

How can a failed 40 year old tech entrepreneur find a job at a startup?

+1 to what Jordan said.

Oddly enough, people love to hear about other people's failures. And from what I understand, failed startups are a rite of passage for an entrepreneur. You're a salty dog, and that's a really, really good thing.

If you haven't already, consider blogging about the specific mistakes that you, your co-founders, and other members of your team made, and what lessons you learned from those mistakes.

Get really specific with dates, numbers, and other details, but change the names out of respect to your former co-workers.

Also blog about what you're looking for in your next startup.

And your heroes and great books, conferences, seminars, mentors, and films that saved you from making more mistakes.

Remember this: If K. Anders Ericsson is right and mastery takes 10,000 hours, then you might already be a master entrepreneur. Walk in that truth.

Shoot, I'd hire you for your humility alone. It takes guts to not sugarcoat your failures in a public form. Kudos.

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Job Search Strategies

Resume Writing

Austin Church answered

At what point should we pay for design work?

Lee, Ali, and Daniel have it right. These days, your branding is part-and-parcel with the perceived quality of your whole outfit, and for that reason, I think great design is a non-negotiable.

But if you're bootstrapping, then you must face the very real concern of budget constraints. The blanket doesn't stretch.

So perhaps the real question is how to get great design without gutting your bank account?

If I were in your shoes, I'd start with a 99Designs contest: http://99designs.com/how-it-works. That way, you're forced to write a design brief, and you can see a variety of different color palettes, typeface/mark combinations, and even interesting examples of lateral thinking based on the connections that each designer was forced to make between your words and the visual representation of your brand.

From there, I'd take the results of the contest and either do a few Clarity calls with branding experts to get their feedback or reach out to a couple of top-notch designers you already know.

Then I'd add all of the designs to your creative brief, pick a winner, pay that person, and either hire him or her to finish or go explore Dribbble or your own network.

Spend as much money as you reasonably can on the best designer you can afford. You won't regret it.

Key takeaway: great design sharpens how you think about your own product.

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Start-ups

Austin Church answered

If you have valuable advice about best ways to get customers for www.holisticretreatsireland.com/ , please say hello. I'll schedule a call with you.

I echo what Tom said: beautiful property!

Since 2009 I've been helping a couple of boutique resorts in Turks and Caicos with their marketing and booking strategies. This isn't the place for a soup-to-nuts explanation, so I'll just share one big break-through for them: TripAdvisor reviews.

Your property is probably already on TripAdvisor, but do you have a strategy in place to help you get positive feedback on a consistent basis?

Most managers and property owners have a love-hate relationship with TA, and I don't blame them. But positive reviews drive rankings; and rankings, visibility; and visibility, bookings.

We kept it really simple: At checkout, give guests a branded Thank You card printed on cotton or linen paper with step-by-step instructions for setting up a TripAdvisor account and leaving a review. Then send a follow-up email the next week saying that you'd love to hear more about their experience on TripAdvisor. Include the instructions and TripAdvisor link in the email as well.

If someone does leave a negative review, simply apologize, share your perspective, and ask them to give you another chance to impress them. Then offer them a free stay. That will raise eyebrows and take all of the risk out of booking with you, and can help you turn critics into your most vocal advocates.

This one little strategy worked like a charm for us, and because we were able to achieve such high rankings so consistently, the properties started winning Best of TripAdvisor awards, which compounded the effects!

I hope you'll give this little strategy a try. Let me know how it works for you.

Cheers,
Austin

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Travel

Holistic Health

Digital Media

Austin Church answered

iOS App: Beta vs Launch Quietly?

I'd second what Dan said. Pick a small country, such as Canada, and do a quiet launch. Even if I get people to register their devices and join a beta distribution on TestFlight, it is still difficult to get real, workable feedback from them.

But if you launch in an App Store and make it very clear in your description and through in-app prompts that you're looking for feedback then you'll be able to iterate much faster. You'll also turn some of those early adopters into your most vocal advocates.

Once you've worked all of the kinks out of your MVP, and have validated your learning, a la Eric Ries, you can be confident that you've created something people really want.

One last thing: using the quiet launch as your beta will encourage you to ship this thing faster. The app ecosystem evolves so rapidly that I've come to believe that shipping an imperfect product is smarter than waiting for perfection. It's not until you hear from users that you know what perfection is anyway.

Hope this helps,
Austin

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Mobile applications

Testing

Product Launches

Austin Church answered

I have developed and launched an app and am looking for advice on marketing it.

Hi there,
I take it that the app is already live in the App Store. If you didn't map out and execute a launch strategy, then you might consider doing a "re-launch" of sorts around an update to the app.

There are a number of tactics that can be really effective for boosting organic downloads—two examples: a long-tail keyword strategy for your ASO and press release with extended release through prMac.com.

That being said: I agree with Slaven. I'd be slow to spend money on Facebook, iAd, and other campaigns until you've benchmarked your average revenue per user (ARPU). Otherwise, you run the risk of simply flushing your money because your installs aren't making back the money you spent on them. I just finished writing an app marketing guide for iOS developers, so all this stuff is pretty fresh.

Let me know if you want help mapping out your strategy and tactics.

Cheers,
Austin

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Mobile applications

Austin Church answered

How do you get traction for a B2C app? More importantly, how does a Free B2C app make any money?

B2C apps typically use a freemium model to make money off of in-app purchases and ad revenue. You could also make a paid monthly subscription model work in several categories, such as Newsstand. The challenge is finding the balance between giving enough functionality away for free so that your app can attract and retain users. Only if user retention is high does your app stand to monetize well over time.

A word of caution though related to free-to-play apps: http://m.ign.com/articles/2014/04/10/two-thirds-of-mobile-free-to-play-gamers-quit-after-24-hours.

Basically, the only safe bet in mobile development in particular (and business in general) is to create something beautiful, unique, and entertaining (or helpful), and then to market, market, market it and build a tribe of fans.

Hope this helps,
Austin

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Freemium

B2C marketing

Mobile applications

Austin Church answered

My off-shore development team wants my App Store credentials so they can publish the app for me. Is this common practice?

Hi there,
I totally understand your nervousness. Your App Store credentials probably feel like the keys to the kingdom. The question you have to answer is whether or not you trust your offshore development team. If the answer is no, you could use a "remote control" app like TeamViewer (http://www.teamviewer.com/en/index.aspx) to log the developers into iTunes Connect. If the answer is yes, you could add one or more of the team members as Users/Testers in iTunes Connect. I, for one, usually hand over my credentials. After 3 years of iOS development, a couple dozen apps, and probably 10 different programmers, there's been no funny business. Here's one last thing to remember: people selling development services in the form of contract work usually aren't interested in becoming app entrepreneurs. They run small lifestyle businesses, not startups, and they actually stand to lose more than they gain by ripping off a client. Even if they do rip you off, I think you stand to gain a lot more by giving your programmers the benefit of the doubt rather than disrupting their workflow to protect yourself. It all comes back to trust. If you don't trust them, fire them. (Also, be sure they're making daily commits to a code repository on Bitbucket or Github so that you always have the latest version of the code.)

Hope this helps, Austin

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Mobile applications

Offshoring

Austin Church answered

What banner ad placement companies are strong in ad orders overseas, namely Asia?

Hi there,
Two things come to mind: 1) Go to the networks directly and ask them about their fill rates, historically, in your target countries. 2) Once you've identified 3 that seem pretty good, ask your programmer to implement an ad cascade. S/he can probably handle this with a .plist file if you don't want to build a backend. Basically, you designate your preferred ad network (based on fill rates and eCPMs though the relationship between the two is a whole other can of worms), and then your #2 choice, and #3 choice. The "cascade" effect comes into play if your #1 choice doesn't have an ad to serve, and the code then queries #2. And so on. Rather than pick one ad network and hope for the best, you can have three or more networks that provide "failovers" and minimize missed impressions. Some devs also like to create an online dashboard so that they can swap positions in their cascades on the fly.

Hope this helps,
Austin

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Marketing

iOS Development

Banner Ads

Austin Church answered

Is it unwise for an entrepreneur to sign a non-disclosure agreement?

+1 for what Chris said. I usually wait to sign NDAs until very late in the process because most deals fall through and NDAs can limit one's freedom to act on ideas you had BEFORE you even met Mr. So-and-So. For example, if I later tell a programmer to start working on an app idea from two years ago, then a particularly litigious company could claim that I had wrongfully disclosed some of their ideas. So when someone asks you to sign an NDA in the first or second conversation, politely decline and offer the reasoning above. Say that you'd like to get to know the person better before signing anything. Say you'll be happy to answer specific questions about your experience and expertise. Say that you don't mean to be a stick in the mud, but you've found that two potential partners can have a meaningful discussion about partnership without inking paper. Over the past several years I've learned several things: 1) the people fondest of NDAs are the people least likely to act on their ideas; 2) as often as not, the person asking you to sign one really just wants free consulting; and 3) experienced businesspeople know that ideas are worthless without execution. Thus, they're typically not worried about divulging a few of their secrets because they know that 99% of listeners will do nothing with the information. The last thing I'll say is this: the bigger the promises, the harder the fall. So perhaps find a way to collaborate on a few smaller tasks or projects before hopping into business bed together.

Hope this helps,
Austin

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Entrepreneurship

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Legal Assistance

Reviews

Austin was amazing - he packed tons of information into our short conversation and stayed on point the entire time. I'm glad I made the call. Thanks, Austin!

Michelle Guiliano Source: Clarity

This call was so valuable. Austin provided strategic insight and also practical ways to grow as a freelancer and professional.

Ashley Clontz Source: Clarity

Amazing insight on branding and copywriting. I got a ton of value speaking with him!

Evan Johansen Source: Clarity

Austin was great!

Matthew Bennett Source: Clarity

Fantastic Call with Austin, so much value, motivation and inspiration provided during the half hour that we spoke for. Would definitely recommend to anyone who stuck in a rut with their current sales situation and is looking for creative ways to grow.

Eddie Kingsnorth Source: Clarity

very practical approach. i'll definitely call him again.

thank you Austin

Sita Adrian Source: Clarity

Austin is extremely helpful in giving us idea's on how to better solve problem we where facing. He is aware and super respectful of our time and objectives. I learned more in my 30 min call with Austin then a whole day at a marketing conference. Thank you !

Jessica Gonzalez Source: Clarity

My call with Austin was excellent. I walked away with a plethora of actionable advice to help me find new clients. He got to know my specific needs and helped me develop a plan around it. I would definitely recommend setting up a call Austin.

Michael Nicolosi Source: Clarity

30 minutes went too fast! Austin really helped me lock in my strategy for the rest of the year. I'm glad I called, and I'll definitely consider a follow up next time I'm feeling a bit stuck.

Dave Novelli Source: Clarity

This was my first clarity.fm call and Austin provided me with really great advice. He's a great listener, could relate to my issue and after I hung up, I looked at my situation in a new light. I highly recommend Austin if you want honest, straight to the point feedback and of course, much-needed clarity! Thanks, Austin!

Source: Clarity

Austin is a good listener and he seeks to understand before he speaks. his experience in the freelancer space helped me see my problem differently and opened up a fresh path toward improvement.

Jason Manarchuck Source: Clarity

Member since January 2013