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Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

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Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#91

Post by Crinus »

lerxst00 wrote: post #26
liquidise wrote: post #2

> “Snaplight serves an extremely niche need: mine.” There is a subtle brilliance in this sentence. With this recognition comes the permission to not try adding a mountain of features and complicating matters. Build something you will use. Solve a problem you have. Enjoy the process and accept the vulnerability that comes with shipping something to the world. Chances are good things will come of it.

I recently had a similar experience: I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I like reading through the comments. Often, comments quote specific timestamps from the video and I would find it a pain to keep scrolling between the comment section at the bottom of the page and the video at the top and then find the specific time in the video that the comment was talking about. So, I created a Chrome extension that surfaces Y…

I had a similar case... i want to be able to download interesting videos with youtube-dl in case they or me go offline but i found having to copy the url, open a command line, move the proper folder, etc, type youtube-dl and paste the url be a bit cumbersome, so i wrote a Firefox extension to do all that for me.

This is extremely specific (and i had to switch to Firefox Developer Edition to do that since the mainline one doesn't allow unsigned extensions) but it was helpful and i got to learn how to make extensions for personal use (though the whole process to call an external program was a convoluted PITA involving adding registry entries, writing Python scripts to parse JSON, etc... meh).

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#92

Post by papito »

liquidise wrote: post #2

> “Snaplight serves an extremely niche need: mine.” There is a subtle brilliance in this sentence. With this recognition comes the permission to not try adding a mountain of features and complicating matters. Build something you will use. Solve a problem you have. Enjoy the process and accept the vulnerability that comes with shipping something to the world. Chances are good things will come of it.

Something something eat your own dogfood.

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#94

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

Lots of motivational quotes in that article, and I guess it's appropriate considering the product.

People often criticise scientific studies for too small a sample size, sometimes even when the effect size is large enough to get significance at small numbers (i. e. n=2 is plenty when studying "can bullets kill").

Yet they'll lap up vague business wisdom with gusto as long as it generally agrees with what they want to believe.

In this case: they are millions of apps (and other businesses) far more successful than this that 1. Didn't scratch the founder's itch, 2. launched with far more than an MVP and even 3. are free either initially or permanently.

I don't think I could say which answer to any of these questions has higher chances of success, empirically. I'm most sceptical of "scratching your own itch" because it narrows your world to the restricted experience of, usually, middle-class white men from suburbia, USA, in their 20s and 30s, whose itch-scratching needs see plenty of competition while other demographics, non-consumer businesses, government and other groups have not just unscratched itches but plenty of pain (and money).

But people love to hear the minimal/what you like/charge a lot answers and that maybe points at the fact that "what would be more fun to work on?" is both the real question being answered, as well as a legitimate question to ask.

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#95

Post by sean-duffy »

rokalakt wrote: post #60
luke14free wrote: post #55

Just to be clear: the app makes ~20 downloads per day (checked on App Annie premium and Sensor Tower premium) except for the fact that you change the price from paid to free multiple times, causing multiple spikes in downloads generated by sites like https://www.148apps.com/ and https://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free which basically list all apps that have become free from paid. So claiming `about 10,000 downloads each…

I know at least a few apps that show little to no downloads on App Annie and Sensor Tower, yet their authors drive lambos. I wouldn't trust these two. Funny how office workers pop their heads up to point out the failure of someone who built something.

How do you know their wealth came from the apps?

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#96

Post by [deleted] »

Crinus wrote: post #91
lerxst00 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had a similar experience: I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I like reading through the comments. Often, comments quote specific timestamps from the video and I would find it a pain to keep scrolling between the comment section at the bottom of the page and the video at the top and then find the specific time in the video that the comment was talking about. So, I created a Chrome extension that surfaces Y…

I had a similar case... i want to be able to download interesting videos with youtube-dl in case they or me go offline but i found having to copy the url, open a command line, move the proper folder, etc, type youtube-dl and paste the url be a bit cumbersome, so i wrote a Firefox extension to do all that for me. This is extremely specific (and i had to switch to Firefox Developer Edition to do that since the mainline…

[deleted]

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#97

Post by svd4anything »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #94

Lots of motivational quotes in that article, and I guess it's appropriate considering the product. People often criticise scientific studies for too small a sample size, sometimes even when the effect size is large enough to get significance at small numbers (i. e. n=2 is plenty when studying "can bullets kill"). Yet they'll lap up vague business wisdom with gusto as long as it generally agrees with what they want to…

> middle-class white men from suburbia

I keep wondering why people always include white. Is the idea that non-white middle class men from suburbia have superior perspectives and life experience? If we removed “white” isn’t the point still accurate?

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#98

Post by frosted-flakes »

acollins1331 wrote: post #85
lerxst00 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had a similar experience: I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I like reading through the comments. Often, comments quote specific timestamps from the video and I would find it a pain to keep scrolling between the comment section at the bottom of the page and the video at the top and then find the specific time in the video that the comment was talking about. So, I created a Chrome extension that surfaces Y…

But when you click the timestamp in the comment doesn't it automatically jump the video to that point? It's worked that way for me for years...

Yes, and then you lose your place in the comments.

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#99

Post by DocTomoe »

gridspy wrote: post #87
SuperGent wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I hear that I'm always reminded of my father saying 'We put a man on the moon before we put wheels on a suitcase'

Perhaps wheels on a suitcase required modern plastics?

... because wheels necessitate plastic.

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#100

Post by luke14free »

mettamage wrote: post #76
luke14free wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on models like those of Sensor Tower and App Annie use to estimate downloads. They are extremely precise, the cross-validated error is << 10% for apps that are this small, and in the US (it increases with much bigger apps in countries where little data is available).

In general, could you tell a bit about how do app downloads get estimated? Now that I'm thinking about it, I think the first way to do it is to correlate the amount of comments in your particular app section to downloads numbers that you do know and extrapolate that out, assuming that comments/downloads ratio stay the same within a particular app category. One could test this hypothesis out on different YouTube video…

There is a public ranking of apps ranked by downloads in the app store. If you know how many downloads correspond to what position in the chart (e.g. number 100 makes ~1000 downloads), you can fit a log regression to determine the number of downloads given the ranking in the category. I am oversimplifying because you also need to take into account seasonality and time trends (e.g. the app store is always expanding), but overall fits are very very precise (unless you get near the top positions, which are those for which they have more problems in estimating). Ah, and if you wonder where the data comes from, App Annie and Sensor Tower get data for downloads to fit their models directly from tens of thousands of developers that share it with them in exchange for free analytics,
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