cribasoft

You make a valid point. My post does not talk about the product design, which seems to be mostly what your comment here is reflecting on. Some quick responses off-the-top-of-my-head:

* >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.

Wow, thanks for the amazingly kind words.

About 15% of the iOS revenue.

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

"Too many secrets" (from Sneakers) is certainly the intent. Pretty much the whole screenshot is full of Sneakers references.

No doubt. That could be a whole article by itself.

I track a lot of metrics and keep a custom dashboard that I can look at any time to see how things are going long-term/short-term/real-time.

When I'm considering tweaks to IAP strategy, any ideas that entrap the user's data are non-starters. The user owns that data, they should always be able to get out what they put in.

Supertop's Unread also has a great (similar) take on IAP: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/unread-rss-news-reader/id911...

Thanks! That is high praise.

A lot of it was just trying the wrong things to convert users to customers. Giving away too much for free or not enough, things like that. I can see the graph change directions when different strategies were at play.

Not jumping on the IAP train fast enough was probably the stand-out one. Over time, it seemed like people got used to buying via IAP and almost resisted doing anything else. Sometimes it was as simple as being afraid they'd have to start over with their data if they purchased a whole different app (they wouldn't).

I think its important to let people pay when they are ready with as little friction as possible. If you have the friction of returning to the App Store, you will lose a lot of them in the process.

HoursTracker was supposed to be app #1 of a shotgun approach to find something that stuck. Things worked out differently.

Things have definitely changed over the years, and I've had to pivot many times along the way. I think it remains a good opportunity today. In fact, maybe even better because the market is much more stable and the right way to do it is more evident. I made mistakes along the way that probably cost me a lot of money.