Help, my iPhone app made it into the New York Times, what now? | Hacker News Reader

Help, my iPhone app made it into the New York Times, what now?

nytimes.com

7 pointsc1sc021 comments

So I have this app that has been steadily bringing in a tiny amount of passive income & then suddenly today I saw a huge spike in sales. I googled around a bit & it seems my app has made it into the paid Top 100 & the NYT has mentioned it.

My dilemma: this attention comes at a pretty bad time, because I'm working on a new venture & I really need to focus on that one.

Should I focus on the new venture & let this spike die out? Or should I try to use this spike in media attention now, & if so: how? I'm torn between long-term focus & short-term profit.

Open articleView on HN

3. ...

4. PROPHET

What issue to you see arising from this exposure?

I assume you meant "profit". "Prophet" is probably not the way the OP intends to go, what with the atheism and all.

Isn't profit == prophet a valid statement most of the time? ;-)

It's always a VALID statement, it just happens to be TRUE in this instance ;-)

I'm pretty sure the wordplay was completely intentional for this exact reason.

Congratulations on your newfound fame. But I can't help but notice something startling in the article.

Do people really still use the anthropic principle as a real argument? That's so silly it's almost sad. It's the logical equivalent of a double-ended knife; any non-trivial universe or solar system or planet is discarded by that misguided notion.

- you probably won't get so much visits from it

- promote the story to bloggers/other press who may want to do a similar story on it. Offer them your own phone nr. and phone nr.s of other developers of these apps, make it easy for them.

- keep an eye on your stats, if you don't have real-time stats, install them for a week or so.

- make sure the site is up.

- perhaps add a message to your site "welcome nyt readers" trying to convert them

Any suggestions for a good real-time stats package?

I use appFigures.

I don't think AppFigures qualifies. What I'm looking for is a tool that detects intra-day traffic spikes. Both AppFigures & Google Analytics arrive one day late at the party.

Localytics is close to real time. I track my launches with it and can see the spikes from certain big blogs to be clearly visible.

Ahh, I see, you're looking more for a flurry type thing: http://www.flurry.com/

Lots of the Atlanta Shops use that.

Flurry isn't real time though, is it?

"Flurry Analytics provides accurate, real time data to developers about how consumers use their mobile applications, as well as how applications are performing across different handsets. Application developers receive aggregated usage and performance data, as well as robust reporting and analysis tools. With this data, developers can identify issues and opportunities, create a more informed product roadmap, increase retention and grow their user base."

piwik, clicky

I use Localytics

I'm a fan of writing your own; it isn't very hard (just send back some data in appWillTerminate: and a quick ruby/perl/python/cgi/whahtever script to parse it into results) and it lets you keep track of information like the OS or device type that your users are running. Flurry and the like can no longer collect this data for you due to a change in Apple's dev agreement. Although, with your app, this might not be terribly important information.

Congratulations!

1 Put "as featured in the New York Times!" with the best quote about you from the article at the top of your app store description.

2 Consider temporarily dropping your price and trying to convert more of the people that check out your app after reading the article.

Can't read it. I don't want to register.

I can read it, but I'm outside of the US. Does the print link work? : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/technology/03atheist.html?...

I can read it just fine, I'm not registered with the site.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com