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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

By niche I mean the number of people looking for a solution they can buy for their iphone. Most of those millions are using something already and even with some prominence your app only got 62 downloads, maybe your best case scenario is less than 200 downloads in a day which will be really hard to convert into a business.

You can confirm this by looking closely at other apps in your class to see if there really is a scenario where you could get eg 4 digits of downloads in one day.

I also think it's a weakness that it's not available outside iOS as it would be very hard for any company to standardise around you vs something all their drivers can use. It may also be a drawback that drivers have to pay for you themselves, or are companies able to pay subscriptions for them?

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>> You can confirm this by looking closely at other apps in your class to see if there really is a scenario where you could get eg 4 digits of downloads in one day.

I am not sure how you could confirm this since Apple doesn't publish the number of downloads that an App gets in a day for a particular app or set of apps.

>> I also think it's a weakness that it's not available outside iOS as it would be very hard for any company to standardise around you vs something all their drivers can use.

It is also available on Android.

>> It may also be a drawback that drivers have to pay for you themselves, or are companies able to pay subscriptions for them?

Yeah, I am planning on making more of an offering for companies, however, in initial research it has been very difficult to 1) Find companies that need to do mileage tracking and 2) Find the right person to talk to and (3) actually sell them on a package.

Google Play tells you download number approximations, additionally on iTunes / AppAnnie you really want to see an app like yours ranking well in a bigger category, being featured by Apple etc.

You could also approach this market from the other end - everyone has to give someone this data, and that someone has to do stuff with the data, maybe you could streamline it on their end so it's about more than saving the driver a small amount of time. The app may even be superfluous in some cases if you can just process GPS data a company collects from all their vehicles?

Edit: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.esocialllc...

Seems like this is the biggest on Play, 100k - 500k downloads in 2 years, so there is hope, but it looks like unique differentiators and fast growth are a challenge.

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