By now, you’ve no doubt seen the relentless DraftKings/FanDuel commercials — they seem to be everywhere. In the wake of a scandal in 2015, both companies had a record performance that following NFL Sunday. Most people see the amount of industry growth that has happened with daily fantasy sports and think the barrier for entry is too high. Well, not us. We saw something exciting that brought together two of our favorite things: sports and technology.

How did we take on the massive daily fantasy sports niche and succeed? Simply, we started with mobile. This was our shortcut to success, and it’s how we obtained over 30,000 monthly active users in a short period and why we achieved a $450,000 seed investment. Below are some lessons we learned about how to get started with your own mobile app — and how your first customers can help you improve your product.

Start With Mobile

App stores represent the second coming of the dot-com era. People don’t search Google for the recipe for “grilling chicken” anymore. They search an app store for a grilling app that will teach them the top 10 different ways to grill chicken.

App stores, not search engines, are the first solution to most problems people face these days. We used this line of thinking in developing the tools we made for Daily Fantasy Sports into the award-winning LineStar app.

Because we started with mobile, we had a strategic advantage over our competition, who were fighting for search positions amongst thousands of other sites, spam and paid advertisements. Due to our strategic positioning in the app store, we got immediate visibility, fan recognition and most importantly — candid feedback from our customers. That feedback has helped make our app the daily fantasy sports power tool it is today. If we had made our product on the web first, we certainly wouldn’t have the traction that we currently have.

Maximize Your App’s Visibility With Quality Design and ASO

You can’t make a website and immediately appear on the search engine, but you can make an app and immediately show up in the app store search results — if the quality is there.

Apps take hard work. You can’t just whip up a quality app like you can build a WordPress website. A good app requires a qualified programmer/designer, or several, to make a high-quality product that will resonate with users. But if it’s done right and executed properly, you can unlock immediate access to thousands of potential customers.

Then, once you do have an app, you’ll also need an understanding of App Store Optimization (ASO). This helped boost our application to immediate visibility. ASO, like SEO, is the process of manipulating app metadata, keywords, titles, and getting the right combination of user interaction/ratings/downloads to negotiate a higher ranking in the app store.

Play to Your Audience

Just like a performer modifies his routine to his audience, you should make the decision if mobile first is right for you. For example, if you’re making a sports app, chances are your customers are in front of a television. While at a friends house or a bar, players won’t have access to a computer, meaning they have to turn to their second screen. In a lot of ways, mobile apps revitalized the fantasy sports industry by allowing customers to check their phones while the game is going on.

We knew this was the case with our customers and we played right into it. Thankfully, our intuition was correct. We put out our minimum viable product (MVP) on Android and we immediately got downloads. But it’s important to do market research first and verify this strategy is viable for your particular niche. We listened carefully to what our customers wanted and improved the product based on their feedback. As our user base grew, so did the amount of feedback we received.