Building a business, not just an app
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
The app store has a massive audience; you need to focus on large enough target groups. How many people use RSS apps these days?
Now that I think about it.. I should probably write an ebook on building profitable apps from a developer point of view.
Thanks
A random example: there are 1.6 billion muslims on the planet. Some of those will own smartphones. Most of those read the Quran. Meaning, some of those will look on the App Store for a Quran app. If you build a good Quran app, you'll be making money. It could be $50k a year, $100k or $500k; that I don't know. But you'll be making money.
Also, don't forget, even though my apps have never been featured, Apple does actively look for good apps. That can help significantly if you build something nice. But you still need to target a large enough group of people.
Example: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ventrilode/id486115720. That's an app I launched 4 years ago.
It brought in hundreds of thousands and took me 2 months to develop + the occasional bugfixes and small updates. Probably 3 months of work over a 4 year period.
> Do they keep generating any sort of revenue after 6 months?
Depends on the app. In most cases, it's not worth investing an additional 2 months developing/improving an app if you can build it 1 month. Launch an MVP and see if it sells. You can always improve it then. But once you have an MVP ready, it usually doesn't take much more time to "finish" the feature set of an app. That's what great about apps; as a project they can be "finished". Some apps sell for years, others only last 6-12 months. Also, for some apps the money comes in fast, for others it's slower but they will last longer.
You just have need to find a target user group of significant size. The app I linked above integrates with a system that, a few years ago and at the time, had around 10m daily active users. It's a niche communication system.
That means a subset of those users will automatically search for your app if you get it to pop up for the expected search keywords ("app store seo"). You're tapping into that user group without having to spend a dime on marketing.
Find a user group with lots of users - people will buy your app.
That seems like a free app atm, how did you monetize it?
In retrospect, I should’ve charged $8/$10/$15 for the app. I’m 99% sure it wouldn’t have made a difference to the amount of sales, but it would have doubled my profit.
Can you/somebody recommend good sources for learning this kind of thing (building/marketing profitable apps)?
is a decent start.
I wonder if he had some sort of analysis that made him think it would be more of a success which turned out to be wrong (e.g. projecting early sales numbers into infinity, whereas in reality they dropped off), or if he just jumped into it thinking that if he built it they would come.
Make money on ads, paid upgrades (remove ads, get premium features), and subscriptions. Show that you have value first, then it becomes very clear how much more value someone can get by paying a little extra.
Especially for mobile apps, ad revenue is very high right now as freemium games and VC money has flooded the market. I get as high as $5 per click, usually around $1-2, which is much higher than it used to be.
I've heard Airpush is pretty good. Have you tried them?
Rather, paying for exclusive license to a dictionary, and ensuring his apps are on the school syllabus was the path to success for this app. (Remind you of those TI calculators?)