My First Year in the App Store | Hacker News Reader

My First Year in the App Store

trevormckendrick.com

255 pointstrevmckendrick100 comments

I was actually really excited by the "...you can get the next 9 posts delivered to your email by signing up here:" at the bottom. I like it. I like email, because I can read it anywhere and filter it any way I want. I dislike unsubscribing from email updates about as much as I dislike getting updates I'll never read. By making it easy to get emailed only about a story I've already demonstrated interest in (by reading all the way through), you've made sure I'll come back for your next 9 posts.

I'd like to see more people use something like this.

Or, if I've misunderstood how this works...well, the concept was exciting.

Very kind words. Glad you liked it. Indeed, fewer people sign up, but you know they're the ones who value the content the most.

Given that you're using wordpress, is that a plugin for the "sign up by email"?

Thanks,

It's just HTML that Mailchimp gave me that I stuck in the post.

I use Blogtrottr to email me when my RSS feeds update, for much the same reason.

That's what I use spamgourmet for. I give out a different address to various sites without fear. The address you give out includes a number which is the number of emails you will allow them to send to you at first. You can reload that number whenever you want to allow them to send more messages, or you can whitelist the sender if you want to keep receiving messages without it counting down.

Whenever anyone complains to me that its hard to make money on software, and/or the App Store is rigged, I always tell them I think anyone can make a living by making a bible app. You don't even have to be the best one, just pretty good, and iterate - it's the canonical product that you know has a big audience, willing buyers, and poor competition on the low end of the market.

Case proven by this guy! The next time you think to yourself that there is anything needed to make money on software besides persistence, thoughtfulness, and picking something you know people want, you're in a trap of your own creation.

People who don't make money on their apps typically fail because they try to be too novel, try to make the app too good, or they don't stick in there long enough.

I agree with everything except your last clause. :)

Most people do over think. But it really depends on your goals. If you're only looking for a small side income there's no reason to try something 100% new.

Sticking it out too long on these small projects can be dangerous though. We probably agree here more than not, but the trick is knowing when to drop something. If it's not selling and there's nothing fatally wrong with it, I say stop and move on.

Just my two cents though.

When to give up is certainly one of the most interesting questions in start-up land, and side projects are certainly easier to give up on than businesses that involve other people.

Maybe it's the persistence of business that makes so much invention come from commerce. People in their garage get bored, people at work get paid to keep trying.

Yes, but what about those "lucky" developers who live in countries where selling apps is not available in both - apple appstore and google play markets?

Are there any other channels for selling apps?

I "Ask HN"-ed this but didn't get much attention...

Why not make a web app? and make it responsive for mobile users?

Or have a friend in say the UK submit it for you

Got your point, but web app is a different story. I want to simply put the paid app on the app store.

The thing is, it is not only for the submission, but one needs to have, for instance, address, bank account... So you would have to ask your friend quite often, which is not comfortable and scalable.

EDIT: @ambiate - Sorry, didn't get your question, could you please clarify.

Are you telling me there is a market for laundering apps from the app store?

Is there a site where i can see what countries this is not available? (i googled but found nothing)

Google Play - Supported locations for merchants:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

Apple app store:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4277613/list-of-countries...

For Apple app store, that list seems to correspond more to where App store is available to users. It might not correspond to the same list for developers.

Perhaps the best thing about this is that you released a "good enough" (not PERFECT) first product.

Too many people don't try because they don't have the resources to make their apps as awesome as they want it to be right out of the gate.

Just get it out there. If people find it useful it'll gain traction and you'll get the resources you need to make it awesome.

+100

Patio11 has argued forcefully that developers systematically neglect women and underserve that large market; I wonder if we can add to that 'and developers also ignore religious markets too'?

Really, developers ignore every demographic that they aren't a part of. There's a reason "suits" are often at the head of large creative focused corporations and compromise artistic integrity to make things more palatable to their target markets. Market research and knowledge is a very real thing that product focused developers often completely ignore or rely on instincts of unknown quality.

I think this is a condition of most humans, not just developers.

When you pitch a product idea to someone many will come back with "but who would buy that?" when it turns out, there's TONS of stuff me, you, and my mom would never buy... that literally thousands of other people would.

> Really, developers ignore every demographic that they aren't a part of.

Unfortunately, that is not really a meaningful thing to say as a guide to behavior: it's like suggesting that someone sell non-apples - meaningful, not wrong, and useless advice. You need to know what demographics developers aren't before that can be useful; you need to know, say, that developers tend to be male, white/Asian, First Worlders, before you can say 'ah, females may be underserved!'

And you need to think of the categories in the first place, like this religion example shows. If someone asks you if developers might tend to not be fans of religion than the general population, it might seem obvious, but 'being atheists' is not the most salient feature of developers.

The book "design is how it works" has some great examples of how successful companies started, and got their design right. It is often a case of: scratching your own itch.

Developers should become part of other demographics, so they start to feel other people's itches. Understanding the itch is the best way to create the right product.

Some markets are hard to serve if you are not in the market segment yourself. I'm not sure that an atheist developer "serving the religious market" with a Bible app is necessarily going to be successful. It helps to read the Bible on a regular basis yourself (on your device and off) so that you know what people want. For example, it is often slower for me to find a specific passage in the iPhone Bibles than in the physical book, which is problematic if I am trying to follow along the sermon, since the passage is often finished by the time I locate it in the app. This might not be something that an atheist developer would discover.

Likewise, if I tried to develop a Qur'an app, it might not work so well, because I have no idea how a Muslim uses the Qur'an. Of course, I could go talk to a bunch and write an ok version, but I'm sure it wouldn't be as good as an app that a Muslim would write (given a developer of equivalent skills).

Being a domain expert helps to develop an app for that domain. But it is neither necessary nor sufficient (think: doctors, lawyers, etc).

  > The next time you think to yourself that there is 
  > anything needed to make money on software besides 
  > persistence, thoughtfulness, and picking something you 
  > know people want, you're in a trap of your own creation.

Well you do also need money to actually put the app up ;)

I'd be interested to hear how you marketed the app. Just building an app seems to be only half (or less) of the battle these days, as far as App Store success goes.

I've got seven apps on the App Store, and combined they usually don't even bring in $200/mo. Discouraging.

I'll talk about that in one of the upcoming posts, but basically:

I started with an app niche that I knew people were already searching for. And I knew that because there were crappy Spanish Bible apps already making money in the App Store.

Since then I have started collecting users' email addresses which helps with promotions and new app launches, but initially all my traction was through search.

Sounds like any successful business I've ever heard of. Find a niche with an unsatisfied need, then grow organically. Good for you.

Thanks!

> And I knew that because there were crappy Spanish Bible apps already making money in the App Store.

How did you know that? Just judging by the reviews or did you actually buy some to try them out?

All of the above. I bought quite a few of them.

It doesn't take too long to get a feel for how good an app is.

But how did you know they were making money?

Doesn't Apple only let those who have purchased write a review? If so, the gross number of reviews may give some idea of how many have purchased the app (ignoring price fluctuations, etc)

Some developers have told me this is a good rule of thumb, but for others it's way off. Mine # of reviews is not really indicative of how many downloads.

From what I've read it's:

(# reviews * 30)

My apps are more like (n * 100). But that is on Android...

AppAnnie (http://www.appannie.com/) gives some good insight in how well apps are doing.

Gross rank for apps reveals a lot. Any top 25 app by gross rank is doing well by "niche" standards.

Thanks for writing this. It's very insightful.

One question - do you have any interest in spanish and/or the bible, or is this purely a business exercise?

It's a good reminder to me, as a developer, that people simply buy (or use) what they want, not what I think they want.

Amen! (no pun intended :) )

I'm curious what translation you used (I signed up for the rest of the posts but haven't got through them).

Most modern English translations of the Bible are copyrighted and often you can only quote/print a limited number of verses without paying licensing. (I think the best public domain version is probably the ASV from 1901).

Did you license a spanish version of the Bible? Pay someone to translate a modern one? If so, were there legal hurdles to translating a copyrighted version?

You're right that most well known Bible translations are copyrighted. I found one that is in the public domain so it was game on.

The NET translation (bible.org) is widely used in free Bible apps, so while it is not public domain, it seems to be free. It's a nice translation, and also has lots of notes (if the app provides them).

The ESV translation has a free app, too, although that might not help someone trying to add it in their Bible app.

I thought the App Store had a rule that you couldn't submit an app that was essentially a 'book or a film' how did you get around that?

Great point. I've actually run into that problem. On some updates they would reject me and I'd have to add a few features to be approved.

That's part of the reason I'm redoing the entire app from scratch with tons of extra functionality, etc.

Fascinating example of finding and successfully filling an under-served niche. I would have never thought of creating this kind of app.

It makes me contemplate - how can you break out of your filter bubble to come up with and test product ideas for markets you can't even imagine exist because they are so far from your experience?

My two cents: I scrolled through tons and tons of top ranking apps in each category. That was where the initial brainstorm began: profitable apps that didn't look very good.

The coolest part of this post, IMO, is that by finding that niche you freed yourself up to work on whatever you want to work on. Legitimate residual income.

Thanks, and yes and no. When I realized I'd found a decent sized niche I had to make a decision: do I let it sit and coast/build something else, or do I invest more here?

I've decided with the latter, which will play out for at least the next year. Jury still out whether it was the right decision.

If you completely abandoned the project as it currently exists, do you think your income would drop off sharply?

In other words, how much of an ongoing effort is it to ensure your income stays high? Does search favor apps that are being updated constantly? Or is there any reason not to eventually just stop working on the app?

It wouldn't drop off. In fact there's many apps in the App Store that haven't been touched in years that continue to bring in money.

My thoughts are that I have so much to improve upon, and there's a lot of low hanging fruit left for me, so it's likely worth the additional investment.

I compared investing more time/money in this niche, vs in other unvalidated ideas I have and it made sense to stick with this for now.

Religious products are big sellers. Specially anything that has to do with the bible or prayers. I used to sell bibles as a teenager. Made more money than drug dealers. It was funny. But then I went ad turned atheist. I could no longer sell itwith a clean conscience.

Is there a link to the app on the app store? Or did I miss it?

My server is struggling, here's a cached version for the interested:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

This sounds very interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more.

How much time did you spend researching potential app categories?

Was your category decision driven by any hard data, other than anecdotal knowledge that Spanish bibles were a category that was selling and had search volume?

Great question.

No hard data. I saw that Spanish Bibles were ranking in the Reference and Book categories, like you said.

Also important (but not "hard data") is that when I searched "la biblia" relatively few apps appeared in the search results compared to other search phrases.

Great idea, did it cost much to record the Bible as an audiobook?

Yes. The most expensive part of the app by far.

So the $73k is net revenue after Apple but before costs, correct?

That is correct.

trevmckendrick - good to see the app do well! If you remember I (Sleepyhead) helped with the email forms. We pleasantly surprised to see the post here :)

Hello! You guys did great work; those forms have done perfectly... over 30,000 signups so far.

Thanks for saying hi!

Nice work for sure.

One thing that rang true, $73k isn't the sort of money that gets VCs going but that's full time salary for a lot of people. Making money on the app store is definitely possible, but we're no longer seeing the half a million in sales in one month figures we did at the start. Does that mean you can't make living from the App Store? No, it just means being realistic.

Very surprised by that type of revenue. What kind of marketing did you put into it?

Without marketing, my first app on the store went as follows:

> The next morning (and literally every day since) I woke up and first thing checked my email for that magical message from AppFigures. My total day one net sales? $0.70. Admittedly not very much.

As far as I know, all downloads are based on search.

Congrats on the success! Can you share a link to your app?

Also, do you think the only way to get discovered (for indie devs) is to pick app ideas that will match nicely to keywords that users search for? If you don't have a marketing budget, is there any other way to get discovered?

I'm going to be doing a similar writeup as my app launches in 2 weeks. I've got a small budget. All the design+dev was me, but I'm spending about $300-$400 on marketing. We'll see how that goes.

If anything I believe you should be spending more on marketing nowadays. There's no real way, at least to my knowledge, to search for a niche hole with keywords. I do, however, like to think of an app idea and then spend an hour search various keywords and seeing the results/competition. https://appstorerankings.net/ is a good website to find the keywords of an app. I combined common keywords in the app that I'm releasing with common keywords that are missing among competitors that yield few results.

Again, I haven't launched this app (my 7th) yet, but I'll be doing some analysis of its success using the marketing budget and keyword research.

I agree it's hard to do really detailed research similar to, say, the Google Keyword Tool. It's mostly a gut check. "Does this have a lot of competition? Does this keyword appear to get a lot of searches?"

What's your app name?

Poetreat. Aiming for May 7. Week of polish then submission. http://poetreatapp.com/

Nice landing page.

Thank you :)

Nice landing page for sure. Maybe this is obvious, but they key is finding out a solid upgrade that makes IAP's worth it to customers.

Agreed. Doing a freemium model where you can save only save 1 poem. Unlocking adds theming, Facebook+Twitter connection, and unlimited poems. Worth $.99? That's subjective, but this entire app is more of an experiment than a business. Just going to iterate and improve on the next one.

Is that a scroll bar down the right side? Seems poorly placed if you expect people to touch on the right side to advance a page.

Great point. The navigation between chapters is still being decided.

Nicely done! I'd love to hear more about the marketing efforts that went into promoting the app.

Thanks for the comment Nathan. Initially it was all via search.

Since then I've started collecting email addresses the very 1st time the app launches. I'm up to over 30,000 emails now so every new product launch starts relatively well.

Impressive...How do you collect the email email addresses? Do you just ask people for their addresses?

Yep. When the app launches the very first time I ask for their 1st name and email if they want to hear about deals/offers, new apps, etc.

They can cancel out easily and never see the form again. But when you have a free app that quite a few people download, email addresses start accumulating pretty quickly.

I was under the impression that this was a paid app. How does it generate so much revenue while still being free?

I signed up for future posts (extremely well-placed sign-up form by the way!), but I didn't see a description of in-app purchases or other revenue model as a topic for a future post, which is why I ask. I am also using Android.

Thank you for this post by the way. This is amazing and I'm excited to read your future posts!

Great questions. Revenue is where it's at!

Initially it was just a paid download for the text of the Bible.

With more research in the App Store though I realized audio Bibles were selling much more than I was.

So I outsourced the audio (mentioned in the post I think) and now the model is that users download the original app (with the text) for free, and then can buy the audio as an IAP.

This works great on multiple fronts: I collect more email address, I rank better in search because I get more downloads, and the audio sells better as an IAP than as a stand alone app.

Wow, you are incredibly ingenious! Thank you for responding!

:) You bet

I also recently started to use mailing list in my blog. I thought a mailing list will be useful in iOS and Mac apps as well. So I started a project building a universal framework for both the iOS and Mac platforms, complete with UIs. It illustrates the concept of code sharing between iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps with just one codebase. The fact that you got 30,000 emails proves its viability. The project is at https://github.com/rayvinly/DevNewsletter

I'm sure you'll make it clear in later posts, but are you a developer?

I'm not a dev or a designer. I'm tech savvy enough that I'm still the computer repair guy for my entire extended family, but I'm def not fluent in Objective C.

Did you develop it yourself, or outsource it?

I did the initial mockups by hand and some of the debugging. Other than that all outsourced.

Is it possible that the guys you outsourced it to could just make their own version and put it on the store? I haven't read a HN article titled "How foobar consulting stole my iPhone app and re-branded it as their own"

That has definitely crossed my mind more than once. There's a few reasons this isn't as scary as one might think:

1. Contractors work on tons of apps, the vast majority of which don't make any money. Their business is making apps, not selling them.

2. Focus on long-term relationships. If the contractor knows you're going to hire them in the future for more work they'll be less likely to screw you over now.

3. Last resort: you can report pirated apps to Apple.

Would you care to throw the offshore team some love by posting who they are? I have a web service and would love to use them if it cost $500.

The original guy I hired doesn't do development any more, but his Elance profile is here: https://www.elance.com/s/iprogs/

Since then for upgrades and other apps I've hired others that have cost more than $500 :)

If so, and only the later posts are about hiring, what, I assume, means you were hiring only after you've found about initial success, how come the first version ever came out?

Beside that, great story, great spirit, congratulations, I admire everyone actually getting things done :)

I'm not sure I understand the question, but I think you're asking how I made the app at all if I'm not a dev/designer?

I outsourced 95% of it. I created the initial mockups by hand and did some of the debugging, but the core app development was done by contractors. And yes, for $500.

The point is it wasn't great, but it was good enough to test the market.

Great first article in the series. Can't wait for the rest.

Nice! Even the most frugal of people will shell out some money when it comes to religion.

True about the copycats. Although there are a few things you have to do right in the app that most people don't know. Most versions of the Bible are copyrights for example.

And I also speak Spanish. I can't imagine doing this app in a different language. The text has to be perfect and it's (obviously?) hard to tell what's wrong when you can't read it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com