Show HN: My side project just reached #6 on App Store music charts | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My side project just reached #6 on App Store music charts

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125 pointsdinnison62 comments

Congratulations! What did you do to market the app? Just stick it in the store? Or did you get blogs to do write-ups?

It seems like discovery has always been a huge problem for app developers.

I've built up a list of 14,000 subscribers to the free web app over the past year and also had a journalist at LifeHacker who wrote about the project before. I offered the journalist an exclusive write up and then sent an email blast to the 14,000 subscribers all within an hour (starting today at Noon) and the app shot up the app store within a couple hours.

Still don't know launch day numbers since app store reports don't update until later tonight.

For further coverage, I'm reaching out to app review sites and any journalists who have covered similar apps in the past.

Great stuff, thanks for the info.

This is not the first time I've heard of this strategy, and it seems to be quite profitable: "hook" a large number of users with a no-strings-attached free app or web app and get their contact info. Then create an app in the same niche, but charge for it, and email blast them all on launch day.

The last time I heard of someone doing this, they did it with a game. They released an ad-free, excellent game for free and popped up a dialog after a few starts saying "Enter your email here if you want to be notified when I release <App Name> 2!". After a year or so, he had tens of thousands of email addresses. Then he released a $2 sequel and did an "email blast" on launch day. Similarly, he shot up the charts very quickly.

That's a great story about the game. I'm interested to see the actual download numbers tomorrow to see what Apple factors into the rankings.

Any chance once you find the numbers you could post them on here? Very interested to know.

Sure, I'll see what numbers I can pull tomorrow.

Brilliant, look forward to it.

How important do you think the offer of exclusivity was to the LifeHacker journo?

More widely to anyone reading this, how standard is it to offer exclusivity when soliciting coverage from the press? It's something I've never tried.

It's hard to say, but it typically is easier to get the first article written if you offer exclusivity. It's kind of a 'better to be safe than sorry' approach when going to the journalists. If you don't have a huge announcement, there's a chance you dont get any coverage and then you're screwed, so 1 exclusive is better than none.

Thanks for your reply! Did you offer exclusivity for the "launch" as an entity, or for a certain time period?

Kept it vague when I worded it, so it was really just for the launch day.

Can you tell us a bit about how you managed your list? How often did you send out emails, and what kind of topics did you cover? Thanks!

So the newsletter is for the web version of Noon Pacific. I send out a weekly music mixtape every Monday at Noon (Pacific Time) with a link to the mixtape (with a pretty* album cover picture) and the tracklist.

How long did it take for you to build up 14,000 subscribers and how did you grow the subscriber list?

Took me a little over a year, and grew it through various means: press, social media, a lot of word-of-mouth.

Good job! It's on the App Store, so treat yourself to a full version number ;)

(I wonder if people would be less likely to buy it having "0.0.2", thinking it may not yet be worth buying. In any case, why not just call it 1.0.2, etc?)

It was my first ever app, so I admittedly wasn't 100% sure what I was doing in xcode. I agree with you though, it would have looked better to have a full release number. I'll bump it up next version.

Thanks for the feedback.

Remember, bumping your version number pushes all your current ratings and reviews below the fold.

That's a good tip!

There's a web version too. Handy for checking out the type of music: http://noonpacific.com/

edit: First song convinced me already.

Sweet thanks for checking it out. Working on a redesign for the web version too, not quite as slick as I'd like.

for some reason this makes my aurora+bunch of extensions lock up and crash

edit: extension-free version of aurora also spikes cpu and starts eating all ram. Must be somewhere within the 8tracks embed, if i block 8tracks with requestpolicy nothing happens.

Did you get 8tracks API permission for use in a commercial app?

http://8tracks.com/developers/terms: For commercial use of the API (including ad revenue) you must receive permission. Please contact api@8tracks.com.

Yes, 8tracks approved my API use and even promoted the app on their twitter: https://twitter.com/8tracks/status/435873866548662272

Loved the first song I heard on web version, +1 for Android.

Good example of non-technical value creation - can't fake good curation. That your project has done so well tells me that the streaming music players have not cracked the code yet.

Appreciate it. People seem to love the simplicity of having the music delivered to them instead of trying to search/browse through tons of artists. Huge fan of Spotify, 8tracks, etc. but I think you're right that the music discovery aspect is still lacking.

Pandora does me well with discovery, though I do appreciate some hand curated lists from time to time.

How are you handling issues related to copyright? I don't have an iOS device so I can't tell if the app simply streams the music from sources that have legal access or if its locally caching the music.

By ignoring them I'd guess.

ha sorry, his post got pushed down.

I don't make the songs available to download so it is only streaming the songs via 8tracks API. All songs are legally acquired through various blogs and sites like Soundcloud.

I figured as much based on the web player, but wanted to double check anyways. Thanks for answering my question.

I'd love to see an Android version of this. I'm an Android dev, so if you're looking to port this over at any time in the future please feel free to hit me up with any questions you have.

I have a friend helping me out already, but appreciate the offer and will definitely keep you in mind. Thanks again.

The concept and screenshots look great! Do you have last.fm support? Because (for me): If it doesn't scrobble it's not a music player :-)

Edit: Just downloaded the app. It doesn't scrobble but otherwise the app works as advertised. Thanks for posting here on HN! Not only music discovery but also app discovery is hard sometimes.

We don't currently have last.fm support, but the app uses the 8tracks API, so it might indirectly scrobble via that. I'll look into it, good feedback.

+1 for last.fm support - a lack of support this in Rdio sent me back to Spotify.

FYI, Rdio has Last.fm support: http://help.rdio.com/customer/portal/articles/58992-external...

Yeah, I did that on the web version but the iOS app doesn't have that setting.

Connecting on the website should cause mobile apps to scrobble as well: http://help.rdio.com/customer/portal/questions/952119-scrobb...

I don't use iOS, but this worked for me on Android.

Congratulations! Just trying this out now and I love the mix I've had so far.

It's so easy to make music these days that it can be difficult to find the gems in all the noise. For me, having places you can trust to do some curation/filtering for you is really important.

Thanks, that's exactly what I built it for.

The quality of the screenshots on App Store is pretty poor. You should save them as PNG files instead.

Thanks for the tip

This is an awesome app! Really nice unknown (at least for me) music!

If I can give you some feedback, the UI need some tweaks. the whole screen bounces when you touch it. Would be nice to have more details about the songs. A progress bar would be nice.

Really nice app!

Thank you for the feedback!

I liked the first song I heard on your website and signed up. Very nicely done!

Just saw your subscription, thanks!

Bought! To show support and so far the mixtapes are totally up my alley.

How long did it take till you felt comfortable with development on the app, as far as quality, amount of bugs, etc., to release it on the app store?

Thank you! It took about a week of QA to feel comfortable with it going live. It's a pretty simple app, but wanted to make sure everything would work great, especially since it was not a free app.

So basically hype machine in an app?

I'm actually a big fan of Hype Machine (and love their app), but I'm attempting to do something different with Noon Pacific. It's considered more of a music newsletter with hand curated tunes and hopefully more of a personal touch.

Thanks for the support so far! Appreciate all the feedback.

Nice work, now please can we have it on Android!

Thanks! and yes we will have one out for Android in the next month.

Great App. Thanks!

You just got a new fan! thanks for this.

nice work! Check out hoot.ch. A similarly minimalist music discovery web-app.

I'll check it out, thanks for the suggestion.

As fake as king.com's future valuation.

Yeah, 15 reviews for a Top 10 App Store app...

Use your fucking brain man...

Thanks, l really want use it.

Congratulations! I invite you to give a demo of your app @ http://demosquared.com

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