We want to get people talking about your app, and buying your app. We are bringing the group buying model to iPhone apps to accomplish this.

If you're not familiar with group buying, it's a phenomenon pioneered by Groupon (and now used by many other sites) where an item is put on sale each day for a big discount, and buyers have incentives to get their friends to buy the item as well (in the case of Groupon, the sale only goes live if enough people buy the day's item). The way we're doing it is a tiny bit different than some group buying sites (because of how the App Store works), but basically works the same way.

Each day, we're partnering with a developer to put an app on sale for 99 cents, for that day only, and let all our subscribers know, via email, twitter, facebook and of course our website.

We then track how much our users blog, tweet and post about your app in social media channels. If this buzz reaches a certain level, we give out promo items to some of the users talking about your app (iTunes gift cards will probably be the most common promo items, they're easy and universally loved).

We also track which of our users buy your app, and if we hit a certain number of sales, we give promo items out to some of them as well. This creates a great incentive for people who buy your app to get their friends to check it out as well. It's basically the same mechanism that built group buying sites like Groupon into the massive force they are today.

These promo items are a way of getting people to check out your app and tell others about it. They make the site more than just somewhere that puts apps on sale: They create an actual group buying experience.

Here is an example of how these work in practice. For the first week, we don't know what traffic levels we'll get and we're going to have a $100 maximum commitment from developers, which only comes into effect in this way:

If we get 100 tweets/facebook mentions/blog posts about your app being on sale, $25 in promo items are released

If we get 200 or more tweets/etc. about your app being on sale, $25 further in promo items are released, for a total of $50

If your app sells 25 copies to our users, $25 in promo items are released

If your app sells 50 or more copies to our users, $25 further in promo items are released, for a total of $50

We haven't launched, so we're not established yet and can't make any specific promises about traffic or results. For this reason we're not going to charge a fee to the first few apps we feature (apart from the cost of promo items - which you only pay for if the sale is a success, so that's not a risk at all).

We have a press assault planned for the launch. My partner Fran has been working very hard on the PR side of this and we're letting everyone possible know about the site launching.

There are a lof of reporters/blogs/etc. out there that love talking about group buying, iPhone apps, and sales on apps, and we think people are going to really pick up on Zeepo and write about it. There will be a lot of extra benefits for apps who are featured early once people start writing about the site.

We'd love to have you involved! There's no real downside or risk to this, the promo items only kick in at certain traffic/sales levels, so if you put your app on sale using us and noone buys it or talks about it, it doesn't cost you anything.

You can email me (Andrew) at fingerbakery@gmail.com to get involved or for more details, I'd be pleased to answer any questions or whatnot.

thanks,

Andrew