Pocket Lists sales: $13500 in first 3 months | Hacker News Reader

Pocket Lists sales: $13500 in first 3 months

1312.ru

71 pointshrabago26 comments

When you consider that this took two people 10 months to write and that lifetime app sales are usually heavily front loaded this starts to look like a pretty poor value proposition, particularly when you consider how much money people with the skills it takes to write these apps could have made consulting in the same time.

No matter what kind of movie you are watching and how expensive the movie was to produce, either it is a blockbuster or an art house film, the ticket price is the same.

Indeed. And this means you're way better off consulting for somebody else unless you think you can get an app into the top twenty. I've had apps in "New & Noteworthy" and "What's Hot" and I can still make as much in a day consulting as I do in a month selling my own apps.

This assumes that you're only ever going to build one app and that you learnt nothing from the process. It also assumes that you want to consult for other people rather than building your own projects.

Feels like they learnt a lot from the project, did reasonably well from it financially and hopefully the next app they build (or the one after that) runs bigger numbers.

> When you consider that this took two people 10 months to write

I noticed the 10 month development period as well, but I have a hard time believing this app took 10 months with 2 people working on it full time - and that's just to get to v1. Don't get me wrong, it looks great, but 3200+ hrs? No way, even if it was their very first app. I think this was a side project. It's a relatively simple (albiet polished) app.

> I can still make as much in a day consulting as I do in a month selling my own apps.

Would love to hear more about your consulting experience. Care to share? Specifically I'm interested in what types of apps you work on, how you find clients, etc.

I've been working exclusively on my own apps for most of the last year but I've recently acquired a few clients that have looked me up on their own based on their experience with my apps.

You can see the apps I've made so far here: http://www.plastaq.com

So I can't really offer you specific advice on finding clients except for maybe to think of your own apps as pieces of a portfolio as much as sources of revenue on their own.

I'm currently living and working in Vietnam so at the moment I'm charging my clients a lot less than the $150+/hr a good iOS dev can get in S.F. or New York but my living expenses are a lot lower here and I hope to gradually increase my rates for new work as I build a roster of clients.

Working on my own apps is more fun, of course, but actually making money is a good thing too.

Awesome, thanks for sharing. So you haven't tried using freelance websites or attempted to put yourself out there at all? I looked at your site and it doesn't even say you're available for client work :)

Nope. In fact I wasn't actually even looking for contract work, although I'm happy to have it.

I've looked a little at some of the sites like ODesk or Elance but all the job listings I saw there and the bids offered were a joke.

I think it's easy to dismiss freelance websites like elance but they are a good place to get started. I started using them in 2010 and continue to use them occasionally. Every now I got a client from them that has become a regular client now that provides a lot of revenue to my business.

Can you tell us more about using sites like Elance? Once you got a regular client did you have to tripe (or more) your rate? If so was the client ok with that?

It seems like the rates on Elance wouldn't be sustainable.

Once you get a client for repeat work they are usually happy to pay a higher rate because they know from working with you once they are pretty much guaranteed good work.

I've had several clients who had bad experiences on elance and other sites (undelivered work, bad developers etc). They decided to give it one more try and hired me. They don't want to risk the bad experience again and are willing to pay more to continue working with me (and we work outside the freelance sites from that stage on). It's an expensive and timely process to find a good developer so once clients find one they like to stick with them.

If I never used these sites I think it would be pretty difficult to ever find clients. Most of my other clients come through recommendations by clients I originally found on elance etc.

> I can still make as much in a day consulting as I do in a month selling my own apps.

I suppose it's worth bearing in mind that the app will presumably continue to generate money for a long time to come for little to no work, whereas you will always have to do a day's work to get a day's consulting pay.

In my experience and in most of the reports I've read the "long tail" is pretty thin. Unless you're continuously updating and marketing your apps sales will trickle off. I'm sure some apps are an exception to this.

I think the experience is strongly dependent on the market type, customer base and amenability to marketing of your app.

Tha apple stores and steam store seems to have made a world of difference for indie RPG maker, Jeff Vogel. http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2012/05/quick-thoughts-on-and...

But then, although he joined the app store model late, he serves a niche market with a healthy balance of competitors and had an existing base of loyal fans.

Of course there are some success stories, and in this guy's case it didn't hurt that this guy already had a large fan base, Humble Bundle exposure etc.

But I still maintain that it's far, far easier for the average competent solo developer to make money consulting than developing new apps.

It's been said before but this; "7. At the first hand, release the app for yourself and your friends. If they don’t use and don't like your app, it is hardly that everybody else will."

Hugely important! Congrats guys and thanks for a useful write up

For clarity, are you saying friend test before releasing to the app store or before advertising?

I'm saying that you need to go beyond dogfooding - it's all well and god if you like the app, as you have a market of one at least :)

But you really need to get your app out to non tech friends as soon as it's workable and get their feedback. If they don't like it or get it, it's unlikely customers who don't know you will.

This point is just not true..Buyers don't have to like you app first before they buy it. They just have to think that they will like it. In truth , most apps only get used a few times by most buyers

Thanks a bunch for this, very helpful stuff. And congrats on your well-earned success!

I just launched an app a couple of weeks ago and am past that first spike on your graph (we were reviewed on AppAdvice last week and on TheNextWeb yesterday).

So following your formula for success, I need to add some iOS 5 features and get Apple to feature it. I'll get on that right away. ;) It seems like every single success story of app devs has that in common: they were featured by Apple. That's the maddeningly frustrating part of it all because that process is such a black box.

It's not totally black box. Some sections (e.g. New & Noteworthy) aren't too hard to get into. I've been featured in them a few times when I launch a new app that gets a high number of sales in the first week. To get into the section therefore you need a good app and good launch marketing.

Its interesting that they broke down their earnings over the 3 months and how certain review sites don't affect sales.

However it took 2 of them 10 months to build it full time? I can understand if they didn't know how to code but it appears that can, I seriously don't get how it took them that long. Sure the app does look great but, this has to be a side project...

> The situation changed when we released an update to version 1.1 ... the Pocket Lists app was featured in the New & Noteworthy section in both Russian and (hooray!) US App Stores.

So was it just blind luck that you were featured there? What will you be doing with your next app to ensure you're similarly featured?

Thanks for saving me a few dollars by avoiding paid reviews. The pricing information/perspective was very helpful too.

And I'd love a follow up article telling how much hitting the front page of HackerNews helps your sales bump!!

Wow, not bad. I was surprised to see a new to-do list app do pretty well, knowing how many are out there. Well done!

Yet another "get featured by apple, make money" story.

Thanks for sharing. Could you have achieved more/less with outsourcing the development? Bulk of sales came from spike-can the exceptional sales be maintained?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com