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Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally

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Re: Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally

#31

Post by mikestew »

jmnicolas wrote: post #27

> PDF Expert is available at an introductory price of $19.99, but that will rise in the near future to $60–70 once we add PDF editing and OCR. $60–70 for a fancy PDF reader ? By doing this you will get only the people that really, really need your software, the others will turn away unable to justify such an expense for a non vital software. A bit like an iPhone in fact. I could afford one, but I don't want to make s…

Those that can justify the $70 need the software. Those that can't didn't need it in the first place, and probably wouldn't pay $1.99. If it saves me an hour, worth $70. YMMV, and it obviously does.

Re: Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally

#33

Post by rqebmm »

dubroff wrote: post #30
ericjang wrote: post #2

It's interesting that their views on competition run counter to what YC / Peter Thiel advocate for in all startups - that is, avoiding competitive spaces and going for monopolies. Perhaps monopolies are necessary for huge growth and investor upside, but it should be made clear that there's obviously space in startups for modest goals like a nice PDF reader, and I hope their employees makes a reasonable living off it…

Something I've been thinking about recently: does anyone think Slack followed Thiel's advice? It entered a space that already existed (didn't go from 0 to 1), with several competitors, solving a problem that was widely known (email is a broken way to get work done). Yet it's becoming a monopoly and will likely be a very valuable business. It seems like there can be tremendous value in making something really good whe…

Thiel doesn't advocate for an immediate monopoly because the alternative _can't_ work, it's because it's _harder_ to get a startup off the ground in an already-competitive market

Re: Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally

#34

Post by api »

ericjang wrote: post #2

It's interesting that their views on competition run counter to what YC / Peter Thiel advocate for in all startups - that is, avoiding competitive spaces and going for monopolies. Perhaps monopolies are necessary for huge growth and investor upside, but it should be made clear that there's obviously space in startups for modest goals like a nice PDF reader, and I hope their employees makes a reasonable living off it…

There's a lot of business advice that makes sense if you are a VC fund seeking to beat the market and that must "only invest in things able to return the entire fund" but that does not make sense if you just want to build a reasonable business. Hell, some of that advice doesn't even make sense if your goal is to build a very successful startup with a good but not quite "sure I'll take another airstrip on my island" exit.

Sometimes the domain specificity of advice is not immediately obvious from its context.

Re: Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally

#35

Post by Denzhadanov »

colmvp wrote: post #9

It's interesting how he says videos are important. I find videos to be much slower to parse than reading features or reviews from notable people within the industry the app is part of. For example, in the case of Sketch, I didn't watch the video (didn't even know they had them until I checked today) but instead read what it's like to use the application from a couple different designers. In the case of Dropbox (whoa,…

Thanks for your comment, but from my experience - a good video can benefit greatly to the product. And true, younger crowd prefers video to the text :)

Re: Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally

#36

Post by Denzhadanov »

stevesearer wrote: post #3
ericjang wrote: post #2

It's interesting that their views on competition run counter to what YC / Peter Thiel advocate for in all startups - that is, avoiding competitive spaces and going for monopolies. Perhaps monopolies are necessary for huge growth and investor upside, but it should be made clear that there's obviously space in startups for modest goals like a nice PDF reader, and I hope their employees makes a reasonable living off it…

My office setup is almost exactly what you describe. Switch out the macbook for an imac and then add a height adjustable desk, some headphones, and a hydroflask. The article though was pretty effective in making me want to try the app since I make a handful of pdfs and exporting from photoshop is a pain since I always forget the settings I want to use to make the file not gigantic. But to your point, I kind of like t…

Well, PDF Expert can potentially bring $10M a year if we do it right. We just feel that the PDF experience with Adobe isn't great... And for people who work with PDFs that does matter.

Speaking about lifestyle business: we definitely decided not to do it. It's been 7 years, we grew to 85 people and 45 million users... that is why we are aiming for something that is much bigger and has much more impact! Have a look at Spark!

Re: Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally

#37

Post by orky56 »

ericjang wrote: post #2

It's interesting that their views on competition run counter to what YC / Peter Thiel advocate for in all startups - that is, avoiding competitive spaces and going for monopolies. Perhaps monopolies are necessary for huge growth and investor upside, but it should be made clear that there's obviously space in startups for modest goals like a nice PDF reader, and I hope their employees makes a reasonable living off it…

Thiel also forced entrepreneurs to ask what they think is true that others don't. With PDF apps, the answer was that there is a gap in between where they can provide a better experience. As you noted, it may not be enough to take on Adobe but it fulfills a niche from which the vision could become broader. See Dropbox who wanted to replace thumb drives and rewritable CD-Rs to popularizing the cloud storage consumer option with all its additional possibilites.

Re: Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally

#38

Post by Denzhadanov »

petejansson wrote: post #15

Purely from a user's perspective, the Mac app store has a considerable advantage in centrally managing updates. Non-MAS apps each have their own eclectic ways of updating. Some support automatic update checks, while users have to explicitly check others. For the ones with automatic updates, there are a number of ways it's handled. Users don't generally want scores of update daemons running, and the whole business of…

So would you think that MAS is generally better in terms of perception and trust?

Re: Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally

#39

Post by Denzhadanov »

pavlov wrote: post #22
zkhalique wrote: post #19

How do they get in touch with that "App Store Business Management" they spoke about? It's not like they make their emails available for any Joe Developer to talk to them.

I'm wondering about the same thing: Apple is being very helpful these days, and they want developers to succeed. That is why you really should keep in touch with App Store Business Management and keep them updated on what you’re building and when you’re getting ready for a launch. It's a highly rarefied group of developers who have a contact in App Store management that would be interested in hearing about an upcomin…

Guys, I recommend attending WWDC in SF! You can meet all the Apple folks there.

For us, we launched our first web app in 2008 even before the App Store. Apple loved it - they called us and told about App Store that is being launched so they wanted us to be there on day 1. We consistently delivered great products that people loved. Here, I wrote a post on how to get featured on the App Store http://denzhadanov.com/2014/03/26/how-to-get-featured-on-the...

Re: Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally

#40

Post by Denzhadanov »

pavlov wrote: post #25
zkhalique wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do they achieve it? Where do they even start? We have two apps that have had nearly 4 million downloads across both app stores. Here's been the growth of our Mac app, for example: http://qbix.com/calendar . Our average reviews are very close to 5 stars out of 5 after thousands of reviews. It's all organic. People just found us in the store. We were never contacted by Apple to get featured, and we had no way o…

The article mentions that they've been on iOS for almost eight years, so they must have been in the App Store at the very start. I imagine that helps to build a relationship. That also makes their advice on this point rather difficult to apply. It's sort of like this marketing advice: "It can be really helpful if the New York Times writes a two-pager about you. You should call up your contact on the editorial team in…

True :) they asked us to be on the first day of the App Store 7 years ago!
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