Show HN: My First iOS App - Pro Golf Results, Stats, Trends and Comparisons | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My First iOS App - Pro Golf Results, Stats, Trends and Comparisons

progolfscout.com

24 pointsdanenania11 comments

I checked out the screenshots in detail. I like the concept of your app and the implementation looks at least pretty good. I would love to see more data density in situations where it's possible.

In my opinion, for the casual golf fan, you've set the price too high at $4.99. I would go ahead and buy it instantly just for fun at $1 but I won't go to $5 for something like this.

Have you considered a $1 or $2 price point? I think you'd make a lot more money that way.

Thanks, I really appreciate the feedback. I'm not certain about the price, but my thinking was that the app would appeal more to people playing fantasy golf or involved in sports betting, and that price wouldn't be much of an issue for them.

I'm biased of course, but I honestly think it's pretty powerful as a statistical analysis tool, so I also want the price to reflect that. I'm open to experimentation though, and I could see how potentially getting more purchases from casual fans could offset the more serious ones who'd be willing to pay more. Something to ponder...

Edit: By the way, shoot me an email at support@progolfscout.com and I'll give you a promo code to try the app for free.

Same goes for any other HNers (up to some reasonable number) that want to try the app without spending $5. Just let me know.

I think you have the right idea with the current pricing.

For hit-based entertainment apps that are going to sell 1M copies, you want to go $0.99 (or free) to make the purchase decision easy. The consumer of those apps is weighing that app against all the other entertainment apps available, so price is a major factor. With games especially, I can buy 5 awesome games for $5 (or even more with free-to-play), so why should I pay $5 for your game?

For a functional app where there's little competition (like yours), the decision is more about whether I should buy the app to fulfill a need I have, and much less about the price. Once you have someone convinced that they need your product and willing to pay some amount of money for it, you're already over the biggest hurdle. This is why many productivity and business apps are priced at $5 and $10.

If I understand correctly, you're going after a small market segment of passionate fans. In that case, the theory is that dropping the price isn't going to get many more potential buyers, so you can make a lot more money by charging each of them $5.

You might be right. But in my view, this isn't "a functional app where there's little competition". It's not functional for very many people at all; it's useful in a trivial context only. Also, it does have competition; you can get all of this golf event and player data on Yahoo or various other websites which are quite usable on an iPhone or iPad.

Therefore almost nobody would "need" this product, and so you'd really want to try to sell this to guys who watch a lot of golf on TV, are golfers themselves, etc. A fairly large group.

I see your point, but I think there is a fairly large niche of people who are into fantasy golf and/or betting who take golf stats and results more seriously than you might realize. The app was developed with constant feedback from a few people in that category, so it definitely has more of a 'power user' slant. That said, I do think it could be fun for casual fans to play with too--I'm just not sure if I can find as much of a market by targeting them.

I've downloaded the app using the promo code (thanks for that!) and what I notice is, the data in the app is out of date. Tiger Woods, for instance, is still listed as #2 in the world, even though he won at Bay Hill 8 days ago to take over the #1 ranking.

This tells me that your app is not polling a server to refresh its data, or that the server is not up to date at all. Either way, that's not going to be competitive at $5, for a power user, with simply going to the PGA Tour site or Yahoo or elsewhere for golf statistics which get updated within minutes of an event ending. For free.

Do you have to update the app itself for the data to be refreshed?

Yep, there's an update server. If you have an internet connection, you should be prompted to download the most recent data. Are you not getting prompted? There should be a little blue bar at the bottom of the app that says "Latest results are available". Click on the cloud icon to sync. If you have a decent connection and aren't getting the prompt, then something's wrong and I'll get on it asap.

That was exactly my line of thought. I wanted to keep it low enough to be in the range of an impulse buy, but high enough to capture the value added for serious fantasy players, gamblers, or people interested in a heavier duty stats research tool.

I don't have iOS available at the moment, so can't comment on the actual app. The screen shots on the bottom are off to the right of main web page for me in Firefox, though. The buttons to scroll through the screenshot still work, but I have to move inside my browser window to actually see them.

I do like you have lots of screen shots, lots of apps I see have 2 or 3 for some reason.

Oops, I'll see what's up with that. Thanks for letting me know!

Edit: Should be fixed now. Thanks again.

Did you have to jump through any hoops to get that PGA data?

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