Lessons from my app launch, with stats

Your SEO, Landing page, plus posts on HN and reddit probably had little if anything to do with your sales. Most people discover iphone apps on their devices(app store), and the closer you are to the top of a list, the more likely you are to sell . In your case, the list you were on was the new releases list

few takeaways (having just gone thru the same experience of launching our first app in July)

1) don't assume that because you're bootstrapping, you "have to charge something for the app". View free/paid as two different marketing channels (that's really all that they are). With free apps - they are ad, in-app purchase and/or lead supported - while paid apps support themselves. There is no right or wrong way to monetize, but by having one of each, you're eligible in both top app chart categories, which helps.

2) you may have benefited from this (or maybe you didn't) - but one thing that surprised me was the market for "apps gone free". We released our app as a free app at first, but once the downloads started to fall off, we figured "what the hell, let's make it paid" after which we rose even higher in the rankings on the paid side than we ever achieved on the free side. Then when paid installs started to fall off, we switched the app back to free, which had a surprising result: it got picked up by all of these "apps gone free" feeds (tons of blogs subscribe to app pricing updates - so it was suddenly eaten up by this niche market of users who download all of the apps that recently became free). Granted - these weren't engaged users, but it padded download stats for a few days. When that happened we experienced our best two free install days ever before normalizing again.

Interesting to see your stats, thanks for sharing.

Congratulations on your launch and nice work on the app!

I'm concerned though about the economics of your investment. Have you calculated what your break-even point is in terms of sales? Do you expect to hit it?

Congrats and keep shipping :)