How HoursTracker earns five figures a month on the App Store

Those who succeed in such a scenario are often insensitive to the unlikelihood of their success - so are those who fail.

They think it's sometimes easy to make money. The truth is that it is always hard to make money, and always will be. To see why, we can reverse it in our heads: do you think carefully about how you spend your money? Me too; and so does everyone else. That's the hump a product or service needs to get over before it can make much money. And it's true 100% of the time.

When a product or service looks like an easy way to make money, what's really happening is that it's a great product or service, so it gets over the hump more easily.

Another big misconception is that they think that ideas make money. They say, "there's already a great time-tracking app in the App Store," and think, "so it's not an idea worth pursuing, because it already succeeded."

The reality is that execution and operations are what make money--which means that many businesses executing on the same idea can all make money. How many dry cleaners are there in the U.S.? How many pen manufacturers? How many car companies? How many Mexican restaurants? Or car washes?

It's extremely rare that a concept is totally dominated by one large company. But because it is rare, those stories are endlessly told and retold within the culture. So if people are not thinking carefully, they can come to (paradoxically) perceive those rare types of companies to be the norm.

Here's a fun exercise: pull up the list of the Fortune 500 companies and see how many names you recognize. These are all huge businesses, but most people will not even recognize half of them. It gives you a sense that there is a big difference between being a famous business, and being a successful business.

The good news is that:

a) Persistence and hard work will usually pay off in the long run (assuming your product does indeed provide some sort of value)

b) There will always be new vacuums. If keep you a close watch on developing trends you might be able to climb on the tree when it's still young and sit back while it grows, instead of spending your resources building giant ladders...

You might recognize the power distribution curve, as it's the same as the graph of the long tail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#mediaviewer/File:Long...

What happens is that you have a handful of people who make a LOT of money, a small few who do OK, and the vast, vast majority starve. Since our economy is increasingly becoming an online, globally networked one, these effects are becoming stronger, and are a contributor to economic inequality.

Power Law phenomenon on the net has been observed for ages. Here's a post from 2003 where Kottke notes the distribution in the popularity of blogs on Technorati: http://kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws

I imagine the curve fits similarly for things like app store rankings, Reddit and Hacker News post popularities, top Steam sellers, Amazon rankings, etc.

> The world still rewards value, even if it takes some time. The people clamoring that it doesn't are doing so because they want to believe that it isn't their fault they didn't succeed.

The funny thing is, this is not entirely true. Quality is only important up to a certain threshold, after which you're at the mercy of what are essentially chaotic network effects early in the lifecycle of your product.

Salgankik, Dodds, and Watts performed an experiment that begins to provide some empirical support for this intuition [359]. They created a music download site, populated with 48 obscure songs of varying quality written by actual performing groups.

Visitors to the site were presented with a list of the songs and given the opportunity to listen to them. Each visitor was also shown a table listing the current “download count” for each song — the number of times it had been downloaded from the site thus far. At the end of a session, the visitor was given the opportunity to download copies of the songs that he or she liked.

Now, unbeknownst to the visitors, upon arrival they were actually being assigned at random to one of eight “parallel” copies of the site. The parallel copies started out identically, with the same songs and with each song having a download count of zero. However, each parallel copy then evolved differently as users arrived. In a controlled, small-scale setting, then, this experiment provided a way to observe what happens to the popularities of 48 songs when you get to run history forward eight different times. And in fact, it was found that the “market share” of the different songs varied considerably across the different parallel copies, although the best songs never ended up at the bottom and the worst songs never ended up at the top.

Salganik et al. also used this approach to show that, overall, feedback produced greater inequality in outcomes. Specifically, they assigned some users to a ninth version of the site in which no feedback about download counts was provided at all. In this version of the site, there was no direct opportunity for users to contribute to rich-get-richer dynamics, and indeed, there was significantly less variation in the market share of different songs.

There are clear implications for popularity in less controlled environments, parallel to some of the conclusions we’ve drawn from our models — specifically, that the future success of a book, movie, celebrity, or Web site is strongly influenced by these types of feedback effects, and hence may to some extent be inherently unpredictable.

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networ...

This is the takeaway for me - success takes time. In an age of 30s videos and short snippets of text, who has the attention span for success?

* https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/ttc-watch-for-toronto/id5052...

When ever I use any type of voice recognition software it's a requirement to use the phrase " My voice is my passport. Verify Me.

A single app store can’t keep up with exponential growth in the number of apps. It really needs to work more like Netflix, where there is no single top sellers list, but instead recommendations are made per user. Apple appears to be hesitant to innovate here and it’s understandable, since I imagine it takes a lot of resources to keep up with new apps and their updates. But the way they do it now is unsustainable, and was showing its limitations within a few months of the app store opening.

I’m thinking that the future of the app store is probably to act as a point of sale system. But the real action is going to take place outside of it on a site like Amazon, that better organizes and finds the sort of semantic relationships between software that people are interested in. Apple will probably make it as far as using their iTunes Radio algorithm in the app store, but I don’t expect them to really “get it” and build something revolutionary. Ironically this helps early apps rank well, which creates a feedback loop because Apple makes a cut of their sales and doesn’t want to disrupt that. I would so love to be wrong about this though.

It's a younger product with strong growth and lots of room for refinement. I'm satisfied with how it is going so far.

* >70% of all time entries saved in HoursTracker are made via the timer. Having the timer is probably very important.

* QuickBooks integration would no doubt be a useful feature, but in 6 six years I've had maybe 10 emails asking for it. It's been on "the list" for almost the entire time, continually bumped.

* Once I started seeing some organic downloads/revenue, I found myself forced to address marketing.

My story is more about how I've had to adapt to the App Store changes over the years, primarily the rush to Freemium. That focus is mostly a response to the plentiful stories out there about how free apps are ruining it for everyone.

I could write about adapting to app store search changes, iOS 6 card results, ranking changes, etc. In fact, some longer drafts went into some of those things. But, I ended up trimming it to the most still-relevant things, for brevity and out of respect for the reader's time.