Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

When I started my business, I looked at sales number every day.

I got my hopes up when I sold 15 copies of my app on a good day, only to feel completely devasted when I sold only 4 copies the next day.

After some time I stopped looking at daily sales numbers, and switched to weekly numbers instead. But even that was too often.

Now I fetch my numbers roughly every other week, and don‘t worry at all about an individual numbers. Only by looking at trends over a longer timeframe can you make sensible decisions... The numbers just fluctuate too much from one week to the next.

View on HN

That's definitely one of these things you have to learn as part of running a business. You tend to over-index on things you can measure and under-index on things that you can't. After a while you realize there's a lot more randomness in what happens than you might expect and so you can't weight any particular data point too highly. If you look at patio11's blogging of Bingo Card Creator, you'll notice he has little idea as to why his userbase grows or shrinks any particular year: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-o... And he's one of the most sophisticated product analytics experts out there!

The same principle applies to other information.

I used to spend a lot of time reading news stories and checking stock prices every day. Turns out almost all of that is random noise that doesn't add up to actionable patterns.

Better to ignore the hourly and daily stuff and look at longer timeframes with long-form articles and books. Even fiction can be pretty good at identifying real macro patterns.

> You tend to over-index on things you can measure and under-index on things that you can't.

I am going to steal this. I am going to deploy it in one of this morning's meetings and pass it off as my own.

It's basically the same as the streetlight effect, isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

I am also checking much less frequently now. But it is still zero :) https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2017/09/27/you-have-0-ins...

Do you have any way to tell if any free users actually entered their AWS keys into your app? There is a much higher level of trust needed for your app over the average mobile app. To actually use it with production data when I'd never heard of you before, I'd probably generate a honey pot set of keys and check if they leaked, and other tests before I could trust it with real keys. Security apps are really tricky to bootstrap.

The keys are staying on the device, so I have no way to check if people actually entered them. I'm also not running any analytics.

I mean, I just guess that if people weren't using the app, they would uninstall it eventually? I've had a retention rate of 60% which I thought was pretty good and made the think that people actually use the app.

That being said, I completely understand the trust issue you mention. It's even worse for the online version of the same service, iamproxy.com

Do you have a suggestion how I can improve the trust?

Have you considered increasing the price?

I'm serious. I'm not a mobile app publisher, I don't know anything about app discovery through the Play store, but I have experienced the paradox of increasing sales by increasing prices in other channels.

I'm not super up on the psychology at play, but I've read it's because people use price as a proxy for quality/utility in uncertain markets.

I think that the price is pretty high already for app store standards :)

And honestly, if you look at the app, a higher price would feel like a ripoff.

Well it might be worth a try - you at least don’t have to worry about killing your sales :)

Touché... :D

Economically, if you deliver value, you deliver value. Does not matter the price, if it's worth doing and generates profit for me.

I know.

But what value would you assign to "being able to check Kibana on AWS from the phone"?

Here's my metric: I do complicated merges once in a while. If Beyond Compare (price = 60$) helps me resolve the conflicts in few minutes, of what used to take an hour of cursing and sweating, I pay them and consider the money well spent, because I can spend that hour (and a lot of others) that the tool freed up for me, earning money. The tool pays for itself basically.

If it's a niche market, low prices is rarely a viable approach because you won't have a lot of volume. Also, all the info you have about app stores and revenue are based on the total mass, or on the top-100 lists, and niche apps fall completely outside of it. There are actually a few narrow categories where you can get away with a high price.

Also see: The stock market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com