Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store | Hacker News Reader

Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store

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91 pointsclarky0735 comments

There is alot of similarity between this story, making iOS apps and making AdSense websites 7-8 years ago. One could slap a website together in a week, and one would see the revenue slowly but surely coming in and going up. The strategy of "making a website every week", and the total will make up for it worked too, for a while. Nowadays, every niche is crowded, and often more professionalised with several persons working on it, Google taking drastic measures to penalise spam-techniques... and the 1-week effort websites (even if you have good, quality content -- but it's just little) will get you nowhere anymore. It is almost, exactly the same story.

Yeah, it's definitely similar. Now, I would like to think I didn't cross into the spam realm, but it's a very similar concept, and it's the same problem. Without upkeep and continuous improvement the sites didn't last, and there is a tipping point where you simply can't keep up with so many projects.

Yeah, I didn't mean you were in the real of spam, neither was I. But you were addressing "Chomp" update, hurting your sales, no idea what "Chomp" was but with simple websites it happened the same, Google "improved" their search, but while also hurting bonafide smaller websites, just seeing them as collateral damage along the way to keep the real nasty stuff out.

Besides that, these days one needs to setup social media presence, monitor that, be active there as well. And the whole thing of coding, design, marketing... Is these days alot to handle as a one-man-band, doing this on several projects. So yeah, focus, and go for 1-2 projects and develop those really well, and hope for the best. But, I totally understand where you're coming from.

Yeah so Chomp was a small startup working on app store search that Apple bought. End of June 2012 they did a huge update to the search algorithm, that effected a lot of apps.

One of the biggest changes being that free app downloads were weighted much higher. Until that point, I had only paid apps, and things were going pretty well. Overnight, sales got hit really hard. One thing that I didn't really include in the article, but I'm pretty happy with my ability to deal with those changes as well as I was able to. I started adding free apps, and came back pretty well.

The only people I know that make money on AdSense are those that have sites that provide not very good information, but just enough to get you there and click on the ad which might have what they are looking for. Can anyone tell me of a site that doesn't use this technique that makes money with adsense?

You can find lots via Google Display Planner:

https://adwords.google.com/da/DisplayPlanner/Home

I'm wondering why you've chosen such a competitive category. You're in the same league as Runkeeper, Nike, Fitbit, and all the other fitness trackers and they make their income through the sale of devices so they can afford to put their app up for free.

How about picking a niche that doesn't have their need satisfied yet and charging money directly for that? Maybe designing a grader for teachers, or a tool for gov workers to submit reports, or a business expense tracker. There are lots of categories looking for a design overhaul and with just a little bit of research and effort you can make your app stand out from the pack of existing shitty solutions.

Perhaps it's a poor choice, we'll find out I suppose. The reason is mainly that I know it well, and already have an app that is featured by Apple with great ratings already. To be fair I "picked" the category 4 years ago, and I've made a lot of money in it so far. As for the current choice I suppose I could start something new from scratch, but I felt like it made more sense to pick a current app that I think has the most potential.

Runkeeper, and most of the other competitors (outside nike) make their money on IAP's for advanced features. I don't actually consider fitbit a competitor per se, it's a slightly different beast.

On the flip side its competitive because there's a large market. It also means people will be searching out such apps.

The problem with a niche, especially on the app store, is that if you can't get people searching your app out then it's hard to break through.

OP here, feel free to ask any questions you might have.

Very interesting, and a bit similar to my entrepreneurial journey with websites. Making a single very successful website is quite a challenge, as I found out. What will be your main strategies making your apps successful? Pure product focus? PR? Other forms of marketing?

It'll definitely be a combination of product and pr. I've done lots of things over the years with varying levels of success, but so far my success has been mostly through product and App Store Optimization.

The new App Store Analytics Apple just released will be a big help though. I have a lot of new ideas that I'll write about once I've given them a try.

What type of marketing did you do (if any) for your apps? I've found building is a lot easier than getting the word out and attracting users.

As noted in the other comment, I've tried a lot of different things with varying levels of success, but for the most part working on the product and App Store Optimization have been the biggest things.

I do have a lot of new ideas that I'll be trying over the coming months though. It's a different strategy putting more focus into a bigger app than one off sort of things. Many of them didn't get any outside promotion other than maybe a tweet here or there. 4 years ago the App Store was a much different beast. It really was build it and they will come. As the market matures though, you have to change with it.

Dave Ramsey fan?

Yeah to an extent. I do think envelope budgeting and debt snowball methods work well.

I built 6 apps for another ecosystem (Shopify https://apps.shopify.com/partners/socialproof-it) and had very much the same experience as you. We did the low fidelity approach like you and also found that has diminishing returns as the app market matures. Once we started focusing on one app for Shopify https://apps.shopify.com/shopify-recurring-payments we found the returns quickly dwarfed what we made before. For it allowed us to be the best for thats all we did. I would recommend not focusing on two apps but just doing one really well. Doing multiple apps means your mediocre in different things takes all your energy to be the best. PS: Love the idea your going to focus on Apple Watch no one is the market leader/expert so great place to be.

"The decline soon after? That’s the Chomp search update followed by iOS 6 and the card app store layout. So sad."

Man, I do find that quite sad... the app store still has some major issues with regards to discoverability. It's funny because you'd think as the app store became more and more saturated, that they'd create more ways to deal with that, but many of the changes have actually made it worse lol :/

There is a lot of hate for the app store by developers, and i've dished out some of it, but frankly with over a million apps it's not an easy problem to solve.

I actually think the store is in a pretty decent state right now overall. You can't possibly make everything very visible. It's a pretty good deal to be on the shelves, now you just have to work harder on your own promotion.

> There is a lot of hate for the app store by developers, and i've dished out some of it, but frankly with over a million apps it's not an easy problem to solve.

Sure it is. Stop trying to funnel the entire marketplace through a single vendor-controlled retailer.

> ...but frankly with over a million apps it's not an easy problem to solve.

Maybe a perfect solution isn't easier, but it should be very easy to improve the mess that is the app store. Let's start with a very simple suggestion:

Searching for an app by name should return that app.

Yeah. It's much better than it used to be (today when I search for Tweetbot it pull up Tweetbot) but that hasn't always been the case. You still have the issue that they clearly have a CDN with a slow refresh so that when an app is first released you can find it via links online or features on the front of the app store but not by searching the name.

This was very disheartening to me when I was in the app store. Without a direct App Store link it was difficult to get someone to download. You had to swipe a random number of cards, sometimes quite a lot, to find the apps after entering the exact name. The results were usually quite relevant - in that they were competitors with similar but more popular apps.

It seems like an unjust reward for already successful apps - they're given the right to steal search results for a competitor's app name.

It's a balancing act. If you want to be found by searches for your title, you have to have a branded title (that if needed you could trademark). If you want to just use your top keyword as your name, it's going to be much harder to rank for it. I think the best path is to use a small subtitle - "Branded Name - Keyword Phrase"

That's a good way to be sure you can be found. If you type "Vima"[1] in the app store, I guarantee you find my apps :-)

[1] Vima is greek for "pace", which is how we came up with it. Full title is "Vima - GPS Run Tracker"

Users buy Apple phones (++aapl_profit), they browse or search the app store, they find something, and they spend a few more bucks on an app (++aapl_profit). Users remain blissfully unaware of the full situation or lost potential. No major user complaints and we can only speculate about lost potential Apple profits.

Sadly, I think Apple serves most users best by simply ensuring the "top" choices during an app store browse or search are good enough that users don't ever have to search deeper and really feel the pain of the App Store situation. And the top choices are often quite good.

My conclusion is Apple just doesn't feel enough pain to solve the discoverability problem that hurts developers (especially new developers).

Oh sure, and as long as devs aren't leaving (they aren't) apple is likely not doing anything "wrong".

They have unashamedly said their order of doing things is

1. Good for apple

2. Good for users

3. Good for devs (distant third too)

They have been nice lately though. I'm really excited about the App Store analytics and all that entails. It's really nice that they've finally added that for us.

Why should they be ashamed of that order? How would you reorganize it? I would say that ordering is pretty much required given the fact that they are a publicly listed consumer technology/software company.

I have no problems with it at all, and I think that is the order it should be. I know a lot of devs would prefer to be higher on the food chain though, or at least it seems that way sometimes.

You seem to have a fairly predictable sales cycle happening there.

Hope your next app is a "Winter App". Then you'll be able to sleep easy all year long :-)

Ha, yeah I've been working to fill in that gap. I did add a skiing/snowboarding tracking app, but it doesn't have quite the same sales as the others, and the skiing season doesn't really start until late december/january. It is part of the reason january-march isn't as bad as oct-dec.

Ideally, the next project will sell well year round :-)

* do you work alone? * what metrics did you look at earlier and will look at going forward to justify starting to build a new app?

I have a partner that does my graphic design, part time. I'm the only person working full time.

Did your apps have viral, organic growth or was it mostly from your own marketing efforts?

I'd say organic mostly. I read stories of people making the most money they ever made on launch day, and almost none after, but I've only had that experience once, with Debt Snowball. And it still has made more over time than it did at the launch.

Interesting. How soon could you tell an app was going to take off and have a lot of organic growth? Would you give up on an app if it didn't have enough growth soon enough? Also how much was based on having the right search keywords? Sorry if this is too many questions :).

Usually pretty soon, but it definitely varied over time per app. I never gave up too quickly, probably not quickly enough in some cases (I did an Apple watch update last month for an app that hasn't made more than $10 a month in the last 2 years.)

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