Even if you don’t follow the Kardashians, you probably haven’t missed the news that Kim Kardashian and her sisters launched a number of personal apps for our favourite mobile devices. Ugh, I know. But it was on TechCrunch for goodness sake. And Fortune.

What the Kardashians did was launch individual ‘lifestyle celebrity’ apps for Kim, Kylie, Kendall and Khloe, while Kourtney’s app isn’t out just yet. First of all, download one of the apps and start your free 7-day trial so you know what we’re talking about. Then, we can move on 🙂 Also, cancel the trial right away so you don’t get charged!

1. Your Personal Brand Needs An App

While your personal brand, even after following our Summer of Me guide, is almost certainly nowhere as valuable as Kim Kardashian or her sister’s, you might already need an app. If you have fans of your work as a writer, musician, expert or any kind of performer, people might want to have a glimpse into your world, what you do and how you do it. In Kim’s case, it’s the way she looks (makeup tutorials), where she travels (videos about her trips) or just the fascination of her fans with the celebrity world Kim lives in.

While a lot of bands, for example, have mobile apps, almost all of them lack the intimacy of the Kardashian sisters’ apps. From the minimalistic interface which we’ll talk about to the content that goes deep into their lives. It’s not just a picture here or there, it’s a canvas of experiences formatted in images, video and text – brought to users in one seamless app. That’s exactly what you can expect from celebrities that have made their name – by being famous…

What can you learn? The Kardashians are showing us the way, honestly. While Kim and her sisters might be the first to discover how to truly make money from making apps around just one person, it’s a trend that I’m sure is going to explode. It’s not that you just need a personal website anymore, you also might need a personal app – on a .ME domain name of course!

2. Look to Snapchat For the Future

I wouldn’t consider myself old, but I felt very, very old when I took the latest version of the popular messaging app Snapchat into my hands and tried ‘snaping’ with my girlfriend. The flow of the app is something completely different than any other app I’ve used before. It’s lack of an interface that considers that you should know where to swipe for what shows exactly how an app that aims to remove itself as a barrier between people should look like.

If you look at one of the Kardashian mobile apps, their interface is certainly inspired by that of Snapchat’s, with no ‘main navigation’ or ‘menubar’ to speak of. You just swipe and get to the content you want! It can be Kim’s makeup tutorials or a video of #sistersaturday, you won’t reach it by clicking on a link. The app is thinking: You know what to do!

What can you learn? Depending on your audience, look at the apps they enjoy using and try to see what you can learn from them. By tapping into Snapchat’s unique experience, the Kardashians have made a number of unique apps, unlike any mobile celebrity app before them. While you can use an app generator service, it probably won’t offer the customization you need to make a next-gen app that can really take off!

3. The Feel Of a 1-On-1 Experience

There’s a reason that the Kardashian apps are a better experience for their fans who can’t wait to sign up on their way to making the sisters millions in revenue. Unlike social networks that Kim and her sisters have dominated over the years, the apps are a more focused platform that isn’t just an experience in which a Twitter or Facebook profile has been extracted into a natively iPhone or Android experience.

This comes back to the Snapchat-like experience that I already mentioned, which gives you a feeling of intimacy to Kylie, Kim or any of the sisters, as if you were actually not ‘following them’, but instead chatting with them. I can’t dodge the feeling that opening one of the videos the ladies include and regularly upload feel like Skyping (oh sorry – probably Vibering or WhatsApping) with a very, very chatty friend who can’t take a few minutes to hear you out. Which is fine if you like them so much you’re willing to pay them to talk to you.

What can you learn? Apps and other ways of communicating with you shouldn’t feel like TMZ, in the sense that someone is following you around. It needs to feel like a 1-on-1 conversation so a handheld video might end up being far more interesting than a professional video shoot. While “overproducing” content might seem like the real deal, think of all the YouTube celebrities with millions of followers who don’t need an expensive studio to make their content work. The YouTube gamer celebrity Pewdiepie is lovable because it seems like he’s your gaming buddy, stuck on YouTube.

4. Upsell Your Intimate Interests

Do you want to buy the same bra that Kim Kardashian wears? Now you can! Integrated in the apps is a backend that features a seamless e-commerce experience, linking photos and videos of the sister’s favourite products to a simple checkout process that will get you the bra you always wanted – in a pinch!

While there are a lot of startups that offer integration of e-commerce in fashion magazines, tweets and other platforms that feature your favourite celebrities, these apps offer a far more intimate experience. It’s your favourite person in all the (celebrity) world recommending you products from the experiences they’re already sharing with you.

What can you learn? Personal branding is powerful because it creates trust between the fan and the brand of the person behind it. If your personal brand is strong enough, you can easily enough get people to buy products that make sense in the context of your relationship with your fan. If they consider you an authority in writing blog posts (like I hope you consider me), recommending a course on blogging will do much better than suggesting they buy Victoria’s Secrets.

These are just 4 things you can learn from the Kardashian’s apps – what do you think the 5th… and 6th are?

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