Ask HN: Help? Breaking into the App Store top 100.
Last year I had a baby and quit my awesome job as a graphic designer for the Blizzard web team largely because I wasn't making enough money to keep living in Southern California if my wife was going to be able to stay at home with our newborn. We moved to Las Vegas and now live with my wife's father. I spent most of the past year starting Falcon Empire and making my first iPhone game, Beat Boxes, which I finally released late last year.
Of course, nobody noticed.
Despite what you're reading here, I'm terrible at self promotion. In desperation and ready to give up on my dream and go apply for a job at McDonald's for a while, I started giving my game away for free. I figured that way at least some people would get to play it and I won't simply have wasted the last year of my life. I thought maybe a couple hundred people would find it and download it. Well, things have gone a little differently. And now I have a chance for things to go very differently, and I need all the help I can get, and that's the only reason I'm here now.
I know I'm essentially a nobody here, but I'm begging you to help me become somebody.
I'm asking for three huge favors.
First, please upvote this post.
Second, if you have an iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch or even if you just have iTunes downloaded on your computer, please download my game, Beat Boxes, for free.
There's no catch or anything, there aren't even ads in the game or in-app purchases. It's completely free, and hopefully also kind of fun. But even if you do nothing but download it and never play it and delete it right away, I think that would still help me so much.
Lastly, and this is asking a lot more, I know, please help me spread the word. Even if all you do is post, "check out this game by this one guy," on Twitter or Facebook and include the link to the game (in the comments, below), that would be a HUGE help.
You see, I thought I'd get a couple hundred downloads but it turns out that I'm getting many thousands of downloads. I'm getting enough downloads that I actually just barely poked into the top 100 free games on the App Store, which to me is a very big deal. I'm freaking out a little bit about it. But I also know that this is my one chance to get Beat Boxes noticed by a wider audience, and maybe even Apple itself if I'm extremely lucky. And I'm going to do what I can and what I have to in order to try to help make a little luck.
Right now I've obviously made negative money on the game between all the license fees I've paid and the music I commissioned, and that's completely ignoring the year I spent not having a paycheck. But if I can break into the top 50 or maybe even top 10 free games with Beat Boxes, then maybe I'll have momentum. When the promotion ends and Beat Boxes isn't free anymore, maybe people will actually drop 99 cents my way to play it if they hear about it from a friend who tried it and liked it. Maybe I can put off applying at McDonald's for another month while I try to finish up my next game, a game that I've been too depressed to put any work into for the past several weeks. I won't know unless I do everything I can to try to help myself, and that means coming here with this completely self-serving post and begging you. I don't want to do it, but I had to try.
Thanks, and if nothing else then please wish me luck. I'll gladly and happily do follow up posts about numbers and graphs and lessons and I'll answer any and all questions you guys have. You can e-mail me at alan@falconempire.com or post them here (though I have pretty strict noprocrast settings that I'm too afraid to disable so it could take a bit for me to have a chance to answer here). If you want to see any follow-up posts, check out my blog at syncingdreams.com - I'm going to head over and write up a post there right now.