Techcrunch has an interesting article up on their site today. The article is about iPhone app company Occipital (this is their Twitter-feed) and their app RedLaser. They claim there will be much more to come from them, but the case of RedLaser is already quite interesting in itself. Regarding numbers, up to now the app has been downloaded more than 750.000 times, bringing in more than a million US-dollars in revenues for them.

Much more interesting though is the way they got there: no marketing spend. Because the product was in the App Store since may 2009, but only started working well with an update in September, the app did not receive a lot of blog reviews or PR either.  The founders themselves conclude that the app spread almost exclusively by word-of-mouth, which appears reasonable.

We wanted to share this case with you, as we think this is a rare case of a product simply spreading itself virally – because it is a product that just works and provides utility. But why is this not the case for every app out there that works and provides utility?

In our opinion, the answer is simple: uniqueness. The mentioned Techcrunch article also refers to the early days of the App Store and how things have changed since then. Nowadays, a lot of the apps in the top 25 have a marketing budget, many of them even are brands. So to get attention and compete with other apps, everyone needs a marketing budget. We think that for RedLaser this would not be any different, if they offered an app that was slightly better or slightly different from two to ten other apps. But they really have something unique. The product is great and there were not many other that went into the RedLaser direction when they first came out. Also, from a user perspective regarding a bar code scanning app, there probably isn’t a large grey zone between working and not working. It either works in most of the cases or it doesn’t – so uniqueness is strongly related to “success-of-reading-the-barcode-rate”. In the end, the next four or five apps that offer a related utility, will most probably need marketing to get attention (as of now, a few more apps have been added to the App Store that offer barcode search).

So, congrats to RedLaser and their achievement, we hope to see a lot more coming from them. As a bottom line, stories like the one of RedLaser are not likely to be copied by looking at what they did to promote the app, but rather by looking at the app itself and its positioning among other apps.