How our app went from $20,000/day to $2/day in revenue | Hacker News Reader

day in revenue

medium.com

23 pointstwapi6 comments

Next keyboard has a 2.5 rating on the app store right now for the current version of the app.

Here's a comment from the article:

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I appreciate this case study, but I feel it doesn’t cover everything.

I backed you on Kickstarter, and you didn’t deliver the features you said you would, even ones that were mainstays of that campaign. Swipe to type, as an example. After beta it just slowly… faded away with little or no communication from you guys.

I believed you when you said you wanted to fix the keyboard, but yet-another-theme won’t do that. More stickers won’t do that. What excited me about Next, initially, was that it seemed like you were going to push the envelope on input methods and keyboard user experience.

Unfortunately, every time I’ve used Next it’s been extremely unstable to the point of being unusable, so you didn’t come close on the things you did deliver. I actually think I had a better experience with it in test flight.

We can blame this on Apple APIs, but I’ve used a number of other keyboard replacements and they haven’t had crazy issues. That includes GBoard, which can be slow loading but then runs smoothly where it counts: when you’re using it.

I know I’m being more than a little bitter, but I wanted you to win.

I’m very sorry to hear that you have to sunset this project, and I’m a big fan of your previous work. I’m also looking forward to what’s next.

But I hope that you spend more time making it work than making it cute.

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Meaning that the answer to the byline - "How our app went from $20,000/day to $2/day in revenue" - is probably "the product wasn't very good".

The pertinent question for these articles is often why the founders thought they could pull of what they were doing with the budget they had in the first place.

A well written, sober reflection on a business venture that didn't pan out. The author has deliberately made the title a bit baitey, though: $20,000/day in the app store for a handful of days (based on the graph they posted), maybe. It's not like they went from $20,000/day for months down to $2/day.

I was expecting an explanation for why they sold a bunch and no more after a few days.

My guess: being on one of the top lists in an app store is a ton of exposure. One of the biggest problems with selling apps is getting people to know it exists. Once it fell off the top paid apps list, it suddenly got far, far harder for people to find it, thus the dramatic drop in sales.

Indeed, there's really nothing about how the app went from $20k/day to $2/day, which is precisely what the title promises.

Wasn't really $20,000/day was it, more like $2/day with a $20,000 spike. These articles are such crap.

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