Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally
medium.com
medium.com
Not sure if their business model will work out (given the sad state of affairs that is the Mac App Store) but I liked that they were transparent about it.
On another note... the Vimeo ad they released https://vimeo.com/145400917 features a white, well-dressed man working at an empty desk with nothing on it but a macbook, coffee mug, iPhone, and Moleskine notebook. I find this marketing trope hilarious and want to amass a collection of such images. Is someone already curating such a thing?
The article though was pretty effective in making me want to try the app since I make a handful of pdfs and exporting from photoshop is a pain since I always forget the settings I want to use to make the file not gigantic.
But to your point, I kind of like the idea that people can make a business like this and eke out a nice income and have happy customers. It reminds me of a tooth whitening supply company I temped for a while back. They had 4 employees and were 100% happy with the number of customers they had and would get more via tradeshows, dentists liked their product, and the profits were really good. I imagine the owners knew that at a certain size managing the business would not allow them to live the lifestyle they enjoyed, so they just maintained it as is.
Speaking about lifestyle business: we definitely decided not to do it. It's been 7 years, we grew to 85 people and 45 million users... that is why we are aiming for something that is much bigger and has much more impact! Have a look at Spark!
On PDF Expert, one feature I'd love to see would be an option to add links to sections of images in a PDF. That's the only thing I use Acrobat for, and it'd be incredible to be able to quit using it forever.
This is what a 'small business' is. Not every entrepreneur is out to take over the world.
Sometimes the domain specificity of advice is not immediately obvious from its context.
https://twitter.com/Desk?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Es...
If you look for more than a second, you realize nothing, absolutely nothing about it makes sense. It's insane.
Ideally, you'd want a system-level daemon that downloads and preps updates in the background, and either waits until the system is idle (I think Apple has some tech like this already for running Time Machine backups), with pending updates optionally installed on system shutdown (am I shutting down to save on battery, to restart, or because I'm about to leave the office and I don't care how long it takes for the system to shut down).
Here's their announcement of it from 2013: http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/50501747774/open-sourced-a...
In the case of Dropbox (whoa, that was a long time ago), I think I just had it verbally recommended to me from techies or I just read about it on HN.
In fact, all of what I end up installing and using comes from the backs of people rather than videos. Maybes it's a generational thing.
If you want video, go for it, but make sure to also include text somewhere because if the only way to find out what your product does is to watch a video I'll probably just close the tab.
Apple is being very helpful these days, and they want developers to succeed. That is why you really should keep in touch with App Store Business Management and keep them updated on what you’re building and when you’re getting ready for a launch.
It's a highly rarefied group of developers who have a contact in App Store management that would be interested in hearing about an upcoming launch.
We have two apps that have had nearly 4 million downloads across both app stores. Here's been the growth of our Mac app, for example: http://qbix.com/calendar . Our average reviews are very close to 5 stars out of 5 after thousands of reviews.
It's all organic. People just found us in the store. We were never contacted by Apple to get featured, and we had no way of contacting them, that we knew of. So I'm curious. It's not just about numbers.
That also makes their advice on this point rather difficult to apply. It's sort of like this marketing advice:
"It can be really helpful if the New York Times writes a two-pager about you. You should call up your contact on the editorial team in advance and tell them about what you're doing, so the story will be ready on launch day."
For us, we launched our first web app in 2008 even before the App Store. Apple loved it - they called us and told about App Store that is being launched so they wanted us to be there on day 1. We consistently delivered great products that people loved. Here, I wrote a post on how to get featured on the App Store http://denzhadanov.com/2014/03/26/how-to-get-featured-on-the...
I have been a solo mac developer for the past 15 years or so (you can see my stuff at http://macdaddy.io), and I have never been able to attend a WWDC. It does strike me as unfair when I see other companies having the opportunity to attend, getting advice and recognition, and then getting featured by Apple and so forth. I have seen other companies allowed to have their apps on the mac app store which require root access, while I write a competing app data recovery app and it's never allowed on the mac app store - only to see that they blogged about attending WWDC and rubbing shoulders with the right people at Apple. Sometimes I feel that I write good software, but I lack the political connections to make real progress.
Our apps have been featured dozens of times and there is definitely a method to the madness. I shared my 2 cents on how to get featured as a comment on that HN link.
It's not a buggy, slow, unusable piece of crap that a lot of low-end software is. It's easy to use and it works well.
Beyond Compare[1] has a 30-day trial that is 30 days of use - not just 30 consecutive days. If I actually use a piece of software 30 different times on different days, then it's definitely worth a purchase. It's too bad more developers don't design their trials this way.
In my apps, I limit the amount of data you can store in trial version. So, you can try it as much as you can. For example, if your software was an e-mail client, you could limit it to 30 messages in any folder (inbox, sent, trash).
But it's probably not worth building that into your software (I don't) - customers will either get so sick of reinstalling every 30 days that they just buy your software, or they're so poor that they were never really going to be a customer anyway, so you may as well let them continue with the workaround until they can afford it.
Time trials can be useful though. While most customers buy within the first day of use (and typically the first hour!), anyone who tracks metrics knows that expiring the trial version also generates a boost in sales around day 29 / day 30 of the trial.
The number one factor which he alluded to is which pricing strategy to follow. My app is not 70 but 9.99.
I too am using a time limited version and I am realizing that this isn't the best approach for my app either. So I am working towards something like what Sublime is doing.
One of the biggest learnings I have gotten from this experience is that an app is rarely a business and that the MAS is rarely a good distribution channel if you are doing something unique.
I could make at a minimum double as much as I am doing right now if i spent som more time on it (I will make around $50K the first year) and there is money to be made if you have something unique. Unfortunately thats hard to do on the MAS with Sandbox.
Then got in contact with a lot of websites. Was lucky to get som really good reviews on LifeHacker and MacUpdate plus other places. And then people started telling their friends about it.
Plus I have an email list now with +10K customers or potential customers.
Kudos to someone else who actually wants to make money these days, not just spark investor interest, burn a ton of other people's money and then retire to write a book while their company goes down in flames.
It is polished.
It works well.
They marketed it like hell.
And it probably doesn't have anywhere near as many security vulnerabilities as Acrobat.
$60–70 for a fancy PDF reader ? By doing this you will get only the people that really, really need your software, the others will turn away unable to justify such an expense for a non vital software.
A bit like an iPhone in fact. I could afford one, but I don't want to make sacrifices on other more important things. Sometimes I wonder if the peoples that make these prices live in a kind of "rich people bubble" where money grows on trees and 70 bucks for a PDF reader or almost a grand for a smartphone is just chump change.
Finally, it all depends on what exactly you need from the app. Fast, reliable and well-designed software can't be cheap - and I don't think it should.