Many entrepreneurs we speak with initially have a picture of the launch in their minds, and it involves a lot of crowd cheering, PR work, press interviews, and tens of thousands of downloads.

While coordinating the launch of an app with a major PR event is a great way to initiate your marketing efforts and campaigns, it is rarely effective for long periods of time. These PR events, if done correctly, can also add to your legitimacy for early adopters (especially if you receive good coverage by major publications), but that benefit is only useful after a user has discovered you.

If you are launching in the iOS App Store, you must be absolutely certain you have submitted your app to the review process at least a week before your launch date. Having the captive audience (reporters and literal audience members) try to remember to come back to download your app in a "few days" via Apple reviews, and then being written up in articles as launching in "just a little while," as opposed to having a link ready for taps is the easiest way to squander early adopters. If possible, aim for a launch date further out, particularly if you are doing anything that may be flagged by an Apple reviewer, or have complex interaction that will take longer for Apple reviewers to test. If you are rejected, you'll need time to fix the issue and resubmit, or appeal the rejection. So give yourself and your team enough time to hit the mark, and if your PR event is a hard date, adjust course frequently to hit that mark (though read on as to why we dislike this approach).

Unfortunately, we have seen the review process hang up a PR campaign multiple times at Twin Engine Labs, for good, product-focused reasons that, while unfortunate, were still the best path forward. It's for this reason that we recommend setting up deployment options early, getting your builds in product owner and early adopter hands as soon as possible, and staging private, invite-only beta launches to collect initial feedback.

Taking your time to get to your launch, and creating multiple feedback opportunities and early adopter growth opportunities prior to your big PR push will make sure your app is truly ready when you finally do submit. Additionally, when you have that base of early adopters to launch a PR campaign with, you can bring them along with you. Asking them to review your app in the app store, share articles you were published in, and tell their friends to download the app are all critical pieces of your efforts that youshoulduse your early adopters for. Many of them will be happy to oblige and support you.

Another item of note is that in both app stores, you can delay release of your app when you submit. That means that if you submit 3 weeks ahead of schedule, and your review passes with flying colors in a week, the app will be waiting until the date you specified. This is the absolute best scenario when planning your PR campaign. The earlier you can get approved, the better.

At Twin Engine Labs, we frequently submit a build that is perhaps not the most desirable for launch, but we know will be approved on time and way ahead of the PR launch. We then will continue working on polishing up the app, again, weeks ahead of the launch, all the while submitting updates for review. This guarantees you will have an app in the app store, and a link for people to click from the articles. It also primes the whole team for submitting updates to the store prior to the pressure of a launch. Your engineering staff will thank you for having this foresight.

Once you are approved, the app store link is live, and your PR campaign is in full swing (by either a PR agency, major events, or by reaching out to reporters and online publications), it will be an exciting several weeks. We noticed major spikes in traffic for several days after each write-up, and interviewing with reporters is always a fun opportunity. Reaching back out to the reporters who covered your company, as well as retweeting, commenting, and sharing the article in as many ways as possible are fantastic ways to make the most of PR-driven content.

But therein lies the disappointment. Articles, events, and PR campaigns typically only create 2-3 day bursts of inbound traffic, 1-2 weeks if you are lucky. We have been on the floor of major events with thousands of participants, helping to promote cross-platform apps for several days within the niche market the participants represented, and we still only typically netted out several hundred users within the consumer market per day.

This is why we feel like a PR campaign is a great way to start, but in the end you'll need more than that to get moving.

So prepare yourself to meet the deafening silence after the big push as your user growth engine shifts into gear. Every marketing initiative takes time to become effective.

Once you're over that bit of disappointment, roll up your sleeves and get back to work implementing the sustainable portions of your marketing campaign for early adopters.

At Twin Engine Labs, we have found success with concerted efforts to attract early adopter users through social channels like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. Using techniques like re-marketing, buying social ads (Twitter/Facebook), and viral mechanics built into your app (though the viral co-efficient takes time to build) are all ways you can continue to nurture your users after launch.

Other methods have been local community events for "feet on the street" inbound traffic, though do not expect much more activity than mentioned above. That said, we have found that your local fans will be your loudest and will surface news about your company the soonest, so they are one of our favorite methods of gaining users. And you have the added benefit that you can always take them out for beers and ask them what they think.

Once you have the above in place and moving forward, you can begin experimenting with differnt methods of bringing users to your apps. Listening to the feedback that early adopters give you will allow you to begin planning your next features and road maps.

Just after launch, you will likely be busy fixing the first bug reports that come in, planning the next portion of your engineering backlog, and tweaking your marketing campaign.

The next sections will describe a few of the finer details about launching, and some of the decisions, tools, and techniques we use in our production teams for a smooth launch.