What would iPhone users do when iPhone’s efficiency goes down or even is out of order? Some might be excited about the next generation of new iPhones while others might be worried about the huge cost of repairing the phone. No matter what it is in iPhone fans’ mind, everyone surely wants to know what is going on within their phones. Since nowadays cell phones seems to be as important as part of our body, iPhone users perhaps are looking for “health insurance” for its phone that can cover “health examination” on cell phones. This idea might be ridiculous for you, but in Taiwan, as almost everyone cannot live without cell phones, this unprecedented idea might someday become the hottest business to solicit clients!

Before welcoming the “health insurance” for cell phones, we can actually do a lot to keep our cell phones functionally alive, such as doing regular check on cell phone’s efficiency and trade in a functional old phone to a new one. “Phone Doctor Plus” took chance on it and grew rapidly in the global mobile Apps market within the past year.

“”Phone Doctor Plus” was established in February 2014 and the App we developed has been ranked on the Top 3 in App Store for one year, and also ranked within top 10 Apps among 103 countries,” said proudly by co-founder Ryan from “Phone Doctor Plus”. Yet, from our interview, we can feel it is not enough for Ryan, and he is looking for a more significant breakthrough in their company.

This team is from Kaohsiung, Taiwan, located within the business incubator in National Sat Yun-sen University (NSYSU), with the beautiful view of famous Bay Siziwan outside the window. They have launched several popular Apps in the market including Pinow, which allows people to know the current location and address in the fastest way, and AAkey, which provides text-based emoji stickers to the users. Both Pinow and AAkey have been ranked first in App store of Taiwan and Hong Kong respectively. By looking at the members in this team, it would be easy for you to understand why this team was able to launch an useful and popular App into the market: Ryan, who is in charge of Business Development in “Phone Doctor Plus” was a sale manager of the south Taiwan region in Asus. The other two cofounders, Yu-Jen Cheng (鄭宇哲), who used to work in Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), and Chun-Yi Li (李春億), a former technical leader from TSMC.

Right after our interview, they have just finished the last promotion of free downloads of “Phone Doctor Plus”, and we got the fresh figures showing that the App officially exceeded 1.7 million downloads. Significantly, the Apps has no regional restrictions and is available in 10 language versions (including Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, French, Russian, German and Spanish), which made the App have more than 1 million downloads in the first two quarters in 2015.

People might still wonder why this App can be named as “doctor” in iPhone market. Is the “doctor” of iPhones able to examine the “body” of iPhone accurately? Well, “Phone Doctor Plus” fully deserves the title of “doctor” by conducting advanced technology to check up on iPhone’s condition. The team “Phone Doctor Plus” owns three patents related to the advance detection of cell phones, in which the most important patent is the automatic feedback mechanism of the detection that examines 25 different hardware conditions in iPhone. Unlike others Apps with similar functions that only show snapshots of problems, “Phone Doctor Plus” clearly reports to iPhone users with the details of problems. Let us take a look at how “Phone Doctor Plus” works:

Ryan admitted that it is very difficult to promote this App at first. The only way to promote the App is to email bloggers to ask them to introduce this new App; but slowly, once the App is known to mobile Apps market, people would be interested in it and introduce this App themselves every time “Phone Doctor Plus” has new updates. The team also shared one of the most interesting experiences to market its App – they flied to Japan to get a brand new iPhone 6 which was just launched in Japan while iPhone 6 has not been launched in Taiwan yet. And what they did with this brand new iPhone 6 is to “break” it immediately…in order to catch public’s attention. The team with 12 people together made a video of breaking iPhone, post-edited the video immediately, and uploaded it to the Internet. Although the video did not spread as fast as they expected due to some external factors, their creative marketing indeed made an impression on the public.

The team started to explore the oversea market after the successful marketing in Taiwan. Since November 2014, they have built a close cooperative relationship with FunStar International, which is an integrated marketing company, to assist them to develop Korea’s market. Linda from FunStar is very acquainted with the market and culture of Korea, and therefore, they, with limited budget, began the marketing from Internet forums or blogs to build relationships with domestic bloggers. And soon after this strategy, there were over 300 thousand downloads of “Phone Doctor Plus” in Korea. According to Linda’s observation, Internet users in Korea tend to have similar preferences toward or against new ides. And because of the network effect, it is easier to obtain supports from huge numbers of Internet users if the product is in a good quality.

But how can a $0.99 App support the expansion of the team? They figured an ideal way to support their expenses: the market of used cell phones. With the advance of technology, consumers keep buying new phones to replace the old ones, and most are interested in Apple’s iPhone. Therefore, used cell phones is a huge potential market that has not been widely noticed by too many people. “Only 15% of cell phones have been recycled because of some factors as follows: first, used cell phones can only be classified by its appearance and basic function; secondly, the risk of purchasing defective phones and the personal cost of repairing used cell phones are both very high. These factors all make the companies in used cell phones market difficult to estimate the value of the used phone.” said by Ryan.

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中文版連結

• 想知道你的舊 iPhone 有多少身價嗎？手機醫生除了幫手機看診，也兼買賣