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Show HN: I made $8000 in one day on the Mac App Store

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Re: Show HN: I made $8000 in one day on the Mac App Store

#41

Post by blantonl »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
jws wrote: post #9

Extrapolating your day on day sales figures, you should see about 600k copies get sold tomorrow and 54M the next day.[1] Morgan Stanley probably isn't too busy now, you should get their Facebook team to run an IPO based on that, before tomorrow's number come in. EOM [1] by July every particle in the universe will own a copy, that might cause sales to taper off.

You're just jealous ;) Valid point though, if you have a small part of a large graph for a new product it somehow always looks like a hockeystick. But if he can maintain this for even three weeks or more then he's on to something. Stranger things have happened. A word of advice for the OP: keep it quiet. Bragging like this is going to bring copycats and unwelcome attention in large quantities. If you're making 'easy…

One thing I've learned about the app ecosystem is that when your app gets attention and becomes popular, the copycats come out in full force - relentlessly, shamelessly, and often fraudulently.

My organization doesn't develop mobile apps, but we provide APIs that power many of the top apps in the "News" categories on the various app stores. We've seen apps that are solely designed to just consume our API reach #1 in categories a few times. And we love to see that.

But, when an app gets popular as described above...? Copycats come out in full force, stealing API keys, decompiling apps for data and info, and other completely nefarious techniques with zero innovation. And they release exact copies of competing applications.

No doubt about it, while "controlled", the app stores are still a wild-wild-west.

Re: Show HN: I made $8000 in one day on the Mac App Store

#42

Post by christoph »

jacquesm wrote: post #37
christoph wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in principle. However, it's not "easy" money, he produced a quality, well thought out app and then got lucky (or executed a well thought out strategy) with marketing.

Something that has already been made can be copied much quicker than it was originally developed.

Touché.

"Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal"

Re: Show HN: I made $8000 in one day on the Mac App Store

#43

Post by amishforkfight »

tinylittlefish wrote: post #32
Turing_Machine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily -- it could be different market segments. There might well be one group who will gladly pay full price, and a different group who'll gamble two bucks just to check something out. Personally, $0.99-1.99 falls into impulse buy territory, while $14.99 means that I won't buy it unless I'm positive it's exactly what I need.

The impulse buy thing is a really important reason this works. For example, I adore Transmit and have no need for any other FTP app. I bought Forklift anyway when they discounted it to $1. Haven't even launched it yet.

Same here. I'll buy two or three $6 and I start thinking about my budget, and slow down. Same issue with Steam sales. The advantage of the AppStore is the payment integration and instant install, it works really well for the impulse, "I need a nifty new tool" type of personality.

Re: Show HN: I made $8000 in one day on the Mac App Store

#44

Post by adrr »

nextparadigms wrote: post #26

At $1-$2 prices, purchases are made mostly on impulse. This is why I think e-books should come down to that price, too. For many authors the sales would just skyrocket, because people will just start buying 10 books at a time, without even thinking that it may take them a full year to read them all. But they will just "want them there" for a later read.

If it was that easy to get additional income, they would have done it. They probably have a bunch of MBA types with fancy spreadsheets that came up with the pricing strategy not mention Amazon's pricing 5x to 10x additional sales over the long term is probably not realistic.

Re: Show HN: I made $8000 in one day on the Mac App Store

#46

Post by haberman »

blantonl wrote: post #41
jacquesm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just jealous ;) Valid point though, if you have a small part of a large graph for a new product it somehow always looks like a hockeystick. But if he can maintain this for even three weeks or more then he's on to something. Stranger things have happened. A word of advice for the OP: keep it quiet. Bragging like this is going to bring copycats and unwelcome attention in large quantities. If you're making 'easy…

One thing I've learned about the app ecosystem is that when your app gets attention and becomes popular, the copycats come out in full force - relentlessly, shamelessly, and often fraudulently. My organization doesn't develop mobile apps, but we provide APIs that power many of the top apps in the "News" categories on the various app stores. We've seen apps that are solely designed to just consume our API reach #1 in…

Wow how awful. I guess I always wanted to believe that people bright enough to be programmers would create things instead of shamelessly ripping off other stuff. But I guess that was horribly naive of me.

Re: Show HN: I made $8000 in one day on the Mac App Store

#48

Post by cageface »

Congratulations on your well-earned success and thanks very much for your forthrightness about your numbers.

But I think this really shows just how hard it is to make real money in the app store. You have been as successful as any of us could hope to be there, yet your peak bounce is $8k/day. This is nothing to sneeze at, of course, but chances are very high it will quickly taper off the way these bumps usually do. In comparison, a decent engineer can pull in $8k/month easily, month after month. So my guess is that over a year you will be lucky to make anywhere near what you could have made at a salaried job with the same effort, and you're probably in the top 1% of earners.

The independence and freedom the solo dev enjoys is certainly worth something, but if you're considering abandoning a salaried job for a crack at the app store market be advised that you're likely to pay a tremendous premium for that freedom.

Re: Show HN: I made $8000 in one day on the Mac App Store

#50

Post by ja27 »

nextparadigms wrote: post #26

At $1-$2 prices, purchases are made mostly on impulse. This is why I think e-books should come down to that price, too. For many authors the sales would just skyrocket, because people will just start buying 10 books at a time, without even thinking that it may take them a full year to read them all. But they will just "want them there" for a later read.

My current understanding of psychological price barriers, at least for mobile apps, is that once you're over the 99 cent barrier, there isn't much of a difference (at least to Americans with our $5 bill) between $1.99, $2.99 and $3.99. It's only when you hit the $4.99 that they think of that as a different price class. There will still be people that balk at paying $3.99 instead of $1.99, but supposedly not 50% of them.
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