App Store Milestone: $10K
ear-fung.us
ear-fung.us
"I learned a lot from releasing my first iPhone app: Six-Pack Equivalent Calculator... primarily that you shouldn't release an ad-supported app that does not have high user engagement times. The app was a utilitarian "one use and quit until you want to use it again" type of app. I can see an RSS reader or a Facebook client being free with ads, since there's a long user engagement period, but this revenue model simply didn't work with my application type."
It's a pretty good 'rule of thumb' on when you should or shouldn't consider ads as your monetisation method.
Ask them what they need. Build it.
This doesn't minimize all the work that goes in, but I think it's a great practical reminder that building for an audience with a need is the first step of product management and product marketing. When Amazon launched the original Kindle Development Kit, I posted in ebook forums asking for 'requests' for apps. I received many, many pages of really pretty good ideas for applications.
I couldn't build any because Amazon turned me down for their early-access program, but I was gratified to see how much time and energy enthusiasts put in to helping design and spec an app.
Careful with that. Been there, here's a postmortem - http://v4.swapped.cc/certtime
First, you never asked if people would pay. I only saw one mention of money exchanging hands in the thread, and it was from someone saying that they wouldn't pay unless it had been proven rock-solid from a legal perspective.
Second, how many people actually landed on the signup page during the time you had the beta up? I think devs often hit the trough of despair and rush to add new features, when the real problem is that they just don't have enough people coming in the front door.
Sorry it didn't work out, though. What's your next project?
That's off the point. Virtually no one who asked or cheered for the service ended up even trying it. I conversed with many designers privately beforehand and they were unanimously saying that - yes, this is something that I've been waiting for and something that I would personally use a lot.
The takeaway here is that the community validation of an idea may not meaning much, even when it is very explicit.
> What's your next project?
I'm leaning towards opening a restaurant :)
But the thing you have to guard against most in customer development is a false positive (am I using that right?), where people say they will sign up, buy, whatever, but then they don't. So anything you can do to get closer to a fully validated yes is worth it.
Lots of ideas are neat and things I might say I'd use, but will I whip out my credit card and give you $20 / month or whatever? The ideal is to get a commitment to pay before you build (prepay, pay $1 for the beta, kickstarter, whatever).
However, I think if you had really asked that question and really hammered whether they'd PAY, you might have gotten a little more honesty about whether they would actually value it. You wouldn't have gotten perfect honesty, but I bet the enthusiasm would have waned significantly if you had asked "would you pay $20 / month for this" instead of "would you use this".
But sometimes it just sucks and it goes wrong in the end no matter what you do.
I'm working on a project that's very similar in terms of stage, needing to be validated, uniqueness, etc. So my plan is to reach out to a ton of people, see if they have the problem, see if they'd pay for the solution, and then build a landing page with a giant price on it and see if I can get people to click on the sign up button. Before I write a line of code. I'm tired of building things no one wants or will pay for.
In my experience it is:
Ask them what they do. Ask them what they want. Distill that down to what they need. Build it.
People regularly don't know what they need but if you ask the right questions you can figure out what is actually important to them and what is stuff they think the need but actually don't.
Don't just join the 99c app game -- if you are looking at joining the app market, examine what unique expertise you can bring to it and target a niche.
But then I think about how crowded the app store is and how bad discoverability is, and maybe going after a super-small niche with a high price is actually the only low-risk strategy left (long tail). And maybe since it's so niche, you win just by showing up, not by building a super premium app. Which then begs the question of how you find ideas like that.
I'm rambling, but I'd love thoughts from those who have dabbled in the tiny-niche-but-high-cost model on the app store.
One option is to go after a professional audience, i.e. create apps that are likely to be paid from a corporate account. Look at LogMeIn - they have a remote desktop access app aimed at sysadmins and it sells for $99 with 5 star rating. Look at Office-like apps - $10-$20 a pop and they sit firmly in top grossing charts. Anything useful that qualifies as a business expense just begs for a higher ticket price.
The advantage of being able to set the price dynamically will let you experiment. What I've found is that holding the quality of the app constant, you can experiment with the pricing. You might get 10 sales at $5 or 50 sales at $1. If you believe your app really does provide $5 worth of value, it will probably sell. If it doesn't you can experiment with the pricing. It's only "super-premium" if users think it is.
>> Whereas I can do five .99 or 1.99 apps
I'd discourage going this route. For most people this will make more money ... Wait! Don't stop reading. What it won't do though is increase the quality of the applications you put out. You'll end up with 4 or 5 mediocre apps in most cases that roll on getting a few bucks a day. You might get lucky and have an app with better sales, but it's not the same as a rockstar performance by one app. OP's example is a good illustration of this.
>> win just by showing up, not by building a [great] app.
Nope, that's unfortunately not how it works. Sorry. You can win by executing on idea that you have validated. It's much like a startup.
>> how you find ideas like that
You see a need and you fill it. I think that's the best way to put it. Since I can't really help you find an idea, I can tell you this much, you should validate your idea first if you want to reduce risk.
win just by showing up, not by building a [great] app
This is explicitly NOT what I said. I don't think you can win in the long run without creating something great, but great and super premium aren't the same thing. I've bought apps for $1.99 that were great that I would never have paid $19.99 for because they just didn't provide that much value. So what I was trying to say was that if you're going to try and create something worth $19.99 in value, you can either pick a saturated area and try to be the super premium offering, OR you can pick a completely underserved but hungry niche and create something good that solves a need.
Great job on the app, and congrats on the success!
My wife is my muse and I try and make her life easier. In turn I make others lives easier.
I am in the process of moving back to my previous DNS manager.
I especially like your marketing idea: qr codes on business cards handed out at a conference. Glad it worked for you!
Keep in mind that this is 95% women in this industry, so I didn't expect them to be as "tech savvy" than if I was at a computer conference or something.
I believe that the personal touch of saying, "I built this for someone like you" has a HUGE impact on how people feel about your brand and your app.
That's my next mountain, so to speak: how to market my apps. Still scratching my head on that one.
The best marketing you can get is through reviews and word of mouth. In my mind, that money is better spent on improving the product.
Question: Can you disclose any information about your in-app sales? You mentioned you sold customizable background art, what was the price point? How many did you sell? Roughly what percentage of app owners end up doing an in-app purchase?
Thanks
---- No problem. Those are some pretty complex stats, but I'll try and simplify them for you.
Total In app purchase revenue to date: $460.73. That came from 545 total transactions averaging out to about $0.85 per transaction ($1.22 before Apple's cut). I have some art that's $0.99 and some is $1.99, but nothing over that. You can see the percentage of the whole by looking at the last graph. Anything at the bottom of Sept-Dec that isn't that large maroon color was an in-app purchase.
During that same time frame, I had 3,007 purchases of the app, which means on average, 18% of my users made an in-app purchase (not taking into account users that purchased more than one item or users that upgraded from previous versions and then bought an item). If I take into account my total user-base of 4,748, then about 11.5% of users made an in-app purchase so far.
As I understand it, the in-app purchase for a game like Jetpack Joyride hovers around 1% or so (read that somewhere, can't remember where). So 18% and 11.5% are pretty dang high in-app purchase numbers. ----
(Not to minimize the importance of word of mouth and a great product, of course.)
Keywords are one of those things you don't think about right away, but they can have a HUGE impact on search results in then end.
Screenshots are part of it. Word of mouth is also a big factor. If people actually do like your app you'll have positive reviews -- it's commonly said that reviews/ratings don't matter, but for some apps they seem to matter quite a bit.
I haven't delved into CoreData just yet. It looks daunting, and I've only been doing this for a year, but it's next on my list to learn.
Check out my github account for some of my iOS stuff. (my username on hn = my username on github)
I am just wondering how to do something similar in an app I have built, calculates a column of numbers, but in a different knowledge domain from your app.
The numbers that are calculated are from direct user input, but the things that are stored like shipping and tax rates are stored using NSUserDefaults.
Caching data locally is fairly easy... just put the downloaded JSON file into the application's sandboxed /Documents folder for easy retrieval later.
Best possible solution in a perfect world? No. Works? yes. Works well? Yes.
And remember, that $10k was in 6 months. So potentially, we're talking about $20k/yr for this app. 10 apps would be a potential $200k a year.
Right now, I'm content with this being supplementary income, but I never imagined that when I paid that $99 developer fee that I'd do so well.
Hostessing these sort of deals successfully takes a lot of prep and work up-front, during and after to make sure it runs smoothly, customers are totaled up correctly, orders placed, items delivered etc.
There's likely a wider scope for checklist and CRM-type apps...
http://blog.lescapadou.com/2011/10/how-ive-made-200000-in-io...
I think their company name says it all: "FQ Publishing"