An App Store Experiment | Hacker News Reader

An App Store Experiment

stuartkhall.com

127 pointsappbot67 comments

I feel like I'm missing something, the post keeps saying you need to "create a story around your product" and "you need to sell your app with a story" yet the post never explains what this means, or does it, instead he has made a cool app that wasn't selling and made it free instead and people installed it and liked it. Doesn't this post demonstrate the problems with selling vs. free, not story this or story that?

There's a lot of focus on marketing, especially app reviews. Perhaps he means you need a hook for journalists to work with? For example, the first X, champion team, X meets Y, stunning screenshots, or something. You need a headline a journalist can use.

I think his point was that he didn't do that, and sure enough he wasn't able to generate any intest around the paid version.

I think you're all missing the point. His post is the 'story' behind the app. This post is the marketing.

I agree, I really hope he posts the stats after this post.

Yeah. I guess now all those app review sites will cover his app.

I think the story is, he got paid $37 per hour for 12 hours of work. Not bad at all. So without telling anyone, he made $440. After telling journalists, with just a small pitch as in the photo, not one journalist installed it. I believe his goal was to test the two theories. 1 was to have a "brand story" 2 was to have a short little description. 2 didn't work. He has yet to test 1.

I thought he meant "story" as a catchall for anything marketing related.

I really don't want to be That Hacker News Comment, but isn't the story here essentially "made an app, tried to sell it, didn't get the success I wanted, gave up"? Or is there some major benefit to the reviews and download figures for the free version I'm not seeing?

(Although this does tell us one very interesting thing - that a topical app on the App Store, with minimal marketing, can get huge downloads if it shifts from paid to free.)

The part of this story that really impresses me is actually the $440 revenue. That's not at all bad for an MVP, and demonstrates there's a market and that the app sells. Those are the kind of indicators I'd look for before pumping a lot more time into the app and attempting to turn it into a real business.

There's every chance - particularly given the subsequent good reviews - that this app could have been an $xxxx/mo success.

Any chance OP can push an update and upsell his happy customers to a paid version, I wonder?

> "didn't get the success I wanted"

I believe this whole project was an experiment in how successful your app can be when you try out strategies X,Y, and Z.

I also made one of our apps free for a day. It was also 1st in the nav category in the US, and many, many other countries.

People shouldn't misinterpret this bump. It's largely because there are a billion robots monitoring prices, and you get a bunch of marketing from these robots when you shift from paid to free. And there are "journalists" who watch the bots and add to the clamor. And there are people who will never pay, but will take a free app.

I don't think going free translates to sales later, though it can be useful for reviews. It was also problematic for us because our app hit servers, and was not self-contained.

Another time, Amazon made another of our apps the free Android app of the day. This resulted in 120K downloads in a day, but only scant residual sales, most of which came from an Amazon accounting error.

Was the accounting error that you got paid some % of your retail price for each free download?

As far as I can tell, they kept the app free for a small amount of time after the 24 hours was up, and paid us for those downloads. I was never sure I interpreted the data right though.

I find it frustrating that you basically have no chance of getting coverage on blogs unless you spend your life "building a relationship" with bloggers. Look, I don't want to "build a relationship". I want to build an app!

And I know bloggers get a ton of email every day, and not everything is worth covering, but it would be nice to get at least a reply saying "no thanks" once in a while instead of just being ignored…

/rant

Bloggers will not drive much traffic to your app, do not worry about this. You need to be in the top lists or have a repeatable paid marketing strategy. And usually bloggers will not give you enough of a bump to initially crack the top lists, unless it's a huge amount of them and all synchronized... which would never happen from cold tip submission anyway.

If anything, I found his post discouraging. He's built a great app and only managed to get people to notice it when he made it free. If a top20 app only managed to earn under $500 what does it say about the current state of the app market?

I'm surprised the author isn't putting ads on the free version.

He should wait to see how the free graph will develop after a few days/weeks because chances are that download numbers will fall pretty quickly to ~1000/day.

Why wait until he's flamed out then? The same amount of dev time will have be spent whether he adds ads on day 2 or day 20, why miss the bulk of his opportunity at the top of the charts?

Why are you surprised? Ads in the app = instant uninstall for heck of a lot of people.

I had the opposite reaction. He sneezed something onto the App Store in mere hours and it made quite a bit of return in a short time.

Agreed. I see a consistent story here; the formula seems to be 1) identify a current fad that doesn't have a lot of good apps 2) write the app quickly 3) profit.

I'm thinking of that story a couple months back about the Bible app, how there were a few but they all sucked, and people had decided that downloading the bible onto their phones was something they wanted to do.

The app only took a total of $12 hours of development time and fluctuated between $20-30 a day as a paid app. If he could crank out several more in that same time frame he could get a quasi-steady income going. But honestly, that sounds like a grind, constantly replacing older apps that have run their course. I can understand your discouragement and the same feeling keeps me on the fence as to whether I would like to try earning extra income through a web SaaS or try my luck in the app store casino.

I wish we could have seen revenue numbers if he had put ads on the app the day after he shot up the popularity charts and was doing 10s of thousands of downloads a day.

I think what isn't understood, even though it is completely obvious, is that people need to know about your app. Emailing a few blogs really isn't going to do it. For anyone to know about your app, it has to hit a major, major website. (Some fluff piece mentioning "app store" in the title seems a good way to get on to HN)

I think what happened here is that one of the major sources of app discovery now are the "Apps Gone Free" apps. It was precisely because it used to be a paid app that suddenly was free that suddenly put it in front of so many people.

Now, if the app is truly worth recommending then it could become paid again and word of mouth will generate sales.

Again, this is all completely obvious but there's still some magical thinking when it comes to the app store that somehow normal rules of selling a product don't apply.

His article doesn't really follow through on anything.

He says he wanted to experiment on how to make a successful app in the app store. He theorizes that "making a story" behind your product is most important.

He neither explains how he "made a story", nor does he attempt to explain why his app became successful. Doesn't he have any insight into why switching to 'free' had such a large impact?

He went free and only had seven other apps in his category, and he made a few dollars.

My question is what does it take to build a real business in the app store? Companies have to pay employees, etc. Are 1% of the companies making most of the money? I think it's going to be hard to build a company 99 cents at a time.

This post from flurry [1] suggests that a big chunk of revenue is going to a small proportion of very successful developers (there was a HN post about which companies they were but I can't find it now).

That said it also suggests that revenue is increasingly moving down the long tail which may be a sign small app companies may become more viable.

[1] http://blog.flurry.com/bid/88014/The-Great-Distribution-of-W...

It's basically the top .1% of apps on iOS - the top 1000 overall or so - that make around $1000/day.

There are close to 1,000,000 apps - 9,999,000 support one person or less.

$1000/day isn't a company. It's a one or two man shop. It doesn't sound like the economics are there to build the next EA, id Software, etc.

You are thinking from your New York or Silicon Valley bubble? Don't worry, I live there too.

Actually, if you are bringing in $1000/day in the Ukraine, you might have quite a little startup indeed.

$30k/month pre-tax?

Forget the bubble -- what makes a company a "real" company is offering things like health insurance and PTO, which are not cheap. That's one or two folks max.

There are no taxes if you spend it all.

And as a person who runs what you think of as a "real" company, I still don't like the sentiment that people who are trying aren't real companies.

> There are no taxes if you spend it all.

Tell that to EDD & the FTB ;)

A 1 or 2 person company can be a "real" company. I would love to co-found a 2 person company that did $30k/month, and I'd be proud of it.

But let's not pretend that trying is enough. Being a "real" company is hard. It takes a lot of planning and effort to be square with EDD/FTB/IRS/insurance, cut paychecks on time, pay your partners/vendors, keep PTO records & pay set aside the right way, and so forth. Doing those things is something to be proud of, and something a lot of startups that call themselves companies and give eachother CxO titles don't do.

I think companies who actually take the time, effort, and expense to run those things right -- and have the scale that makes doing those things make sense -- deserve to be called real companies. Just one man's opinion.

Based on how it was said, I assumed corporate taxes. So sure, you need to pay your 800 bucks to the state of California (if you even operate here), and a couple points for payroll tax.

But it's just the sentiment I don't like. If young entrepreneurs give themselves trumped up titles and dream of grandiose things, that doesn't disgust me at all. Perhaps a wry smile, along with some encouragement.

> My question is what does it take to build a real business in the app store?

Conventional wisdom is that the money is in development work and not selling apps by yourself on the store.

If that's true, what's the longterm viability of the market as a whole? Intuitively for dev services to succeed here it must be true that [shrink-wrap app model profitability] >> [service model profitability].

That only works if you think of apps as traditional software with the App Store as a traditional store. Apps are closer to websites: a few are very profitable on their own, most are just a neccessary part of a larger business.

Now he has the story he needed for his app.

I'm mostly blown away that he had the app put together in 5 hours. I can't get a development environment set up in 5 hours. I've spent five hours chasing down a trailing comma bug. Teach me, sensei.

It becomes much easier over time. I'm at a point where I could certainly accomplish this, especially now with great projects like CocoaPods. Experienced web developers can create a simple CMS lightyears faster than I can, its all relative.

Now what I find most interesting is that the author doesn't seem to have a large portfolio of apps. The "More by this Developer" link only shows this app, while his website only points to Discovr (http://discovr.info/) which I can't imagine he's the only developer for. I'd be curious to learn more about his expertise.

From experience, if you stick with standard UIKIt navigation schemes (i.e. use nav bars not FB/Twitter style pop-unders) and, critically, standard Apple approved color schemes (i.e., light not dark UI elements) then crafting an app within Storyboard is incredibly straightforward, especially if you consider PaaS solutions like Parse.com integration[1]. The problem seems to be managing the complexities of non-standard UI elements.

For what it's worth, Jony Ive seems to be pushing us to all adopt the design approach of the OP. Wonder if 'deference to content' will become the new normal?

[1] http://blog.fieldforceapp.com/post/32922733018/weekend-proje...

I actually prefer doing all of the design and drawing myself and avoid things like NIBs and Storyboard. It's not really difficult, just takes time to absorb all that there is because there is so much customization you can do. And watch out for iOS 7, especially with animations, there are loads of new options.

Great story! But am I understanding this correctly that all the author did was approaching a few blogs with promo codes? And after a few days with relative low traction pretty much gave up on promoting it, just setting it on free? Not even slapping a few ads on it?

Is there some general "formula" on how much ad revenue one can expect from a (relatively straight forward) free app per 1000 users? Meaning some help on at what point would it make sense to move from sales based monetization to an ad based monetization model.

From my experience, you really don't make much on ads from apps and they tend to drive people away. To do well on mobile app ads, you need a fairly massive audience and then you need to market your ad space directly. In particular, video ads on mobile can be very lucrative, but you'd need a very engaging app to keep people around when you start showing those kinds of ads.

More than likely the reason his free app did so well against the others is that the others likely had ads or nag screens or similar, while his was genuinely free.

My free app is seeing about 500 downloads/day. When it was featured in the "New & Noteworthy" it was about 1500/day. However my IAP conversion is holding at about 2% which, to me, is quite bad.

Another thing to point out is that the author has about 4k Twitter followers, so he does have an existing network of people to expose this app to. It's not much, but its a (free) start.

How funny that I also done quite exactly the same app which came out something like 2 days after this one... I blogged about it too : http://alexiscreuzot.com/#!/scribble/4

Congrats! Would you be willing to post anything about your success post launch? I'm an app developer as well and I love reading about other people's strategies such as this.

Good idea, I'll think about that. It's not that much of a success though (not even near Stuart's app), but I guess it's a good start for a first app without any marketizing strategy.

Your post prompted me to download the app and my first impressions are that the simplicity of the app is a huge selling point.

No pointless nav bars, no curious looking buttons, no walls of text, simple, effective UI. I really like it. Hopefully it will help me drop a few kg's!

"huge selling point" is exactly the problem. I liked the post as well, it was very descriptive. But, I feel like he gave up by making it free. I'd be more interested if he can turn it around to profit. Although this was much easier to do in the early days of the app store. Less so now.

Yeah, I still suspect there was another, unknown factor at play when the app was made free. I've seen tons of paid apps trickle along at the same rate of downloads after reverting to free. I'd love to know what the catalyst really was.

He said that 2nd step (marketing, promotion) was useless and sales didn't change. But perhaps it was the catalyst. Perhaps people were made aware of the app and added it to their mental wish list. Then, when they noticed it became free, they wanted to get it ASAP.

Perhaps, without the "useless" 2nd step, going free would've been equally flat.

Just a thought.

This is my thought as well. Even at his previous $20-30/day seems quite reasonable. If the author could keep that sustainable, that's adding nearly $10k/year in passive income, definitely not a figure to shy away from. If adding a $.99 IAP with a 2% conversion works as well, that would be even more.

As an app developer, overall I feel these posts only encourage the current app store ecosystem of free or freemium.

I'm surprised that no-one here appears to have mentioned the option of monetizing such an app by in-app upgrades. In this case, adding videos (like Nike Training Club [1]) or other extra content would be an option.

Isn't that the standard approach App Store for making money off free apps?

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/nike-training-club/id3015214...

The author said that's his next step.

Yes, understood - I was just surprised it wasn't being discussed here.

Thanks for sharing your story. Looks like your position in the AppStore search results are rising nicely too. And fortunately they are all high volume keywords... http://www.straply.com/app/apple/bytesize/7-minute-workout

I'm slightly confused, he made his app free on June 15/16, and two days later he's got a tonne of reviews from users stating this application has helped them lose weight, and sounds like they've been using it a while. If the surge in downloads happened just two days ago, those reviews all sound very fishy.

Off-topic.

>It's a great way to kick off the day, and I'm 3kg down.

The OP says he is in Australia. How widely is the metric system used there (in comparison to the imperial one)?

Australia is almost completely metric, people only use imperial occasionally for old recipes and the like, also we often use pounds per square inch for car tire pressure, but weather related pressure is in pascals.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly comprehensive article on Australia's metrication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Australia

Also for height, quite oddly.

Pretty much exclusively metric - the only thing I use the imperial system for in Australia is clothing (34") and height (6'4")

This sounds like about the same situation as in Canada, for what it's worth: metric for everything except human measures (weight, height, clothing sizes) and some cooking.