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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

#61

Post by cageface »

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…

The only thing Apple's control of the app store achieves at this point is keeping out blatant malware. Maybe that alone is worth it but scams and cheap clones abound.

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

#62

Post by taybenlor »

haberman wrote: post #46
blantonl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most software is built by people being employed by someone who has enough money to pay for them to build whatever they want. If that person with the money wants to build a shitty ripoff then a shitty ripoff is being built.

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

#63

Post by cageface »

ja27 wrote: post #50
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 th…

Do you have any references for this theory? If true it would influence my pricing strategy for my own apps. I have seen more sales at $2.99 than $4.99 but I haven't tried anything in between.

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

#64

Post by ChuckMcM »

marblar wrote: post #59
ChuckMcM wrote: post #12

Interesting, so 6000 x 2 ($12,000) vs 300 x 14 ($4,200) a price elasticity factor of 3. If you are reading John, how did you pick $14 as the price? Pricing software is always difficult because you marginal costs are 0. One school of thought is to take the time needed to write something, pick an hourly rate of what you would have had to pay a person to write it (or use what it cost you to produce it [1]) and then divi…

Honestly, I don't think this is the right approach. Development time is a sunk cost at this point, and doesn't have any impact of the profitability of the app in the future. John's only concern now should be maximizing profit, and profit's going to be a function solely of the market for his app. The type of analysis you've described is more applicable to consulting work, where there's a hard limit to how much output…

Fair enough. I am interested in the general question "pricing software" and explained my reasoning for how I might go about pricing an App. If John is reading I would really like to know what his reasoning is. The data points we have from the article are "originally priced at $14" "Priced one day at $2" "Made $8000 which is more than they expected to make" these are all pieces of data regarding his reasoning but I'm truly interested in how he thinks about it. Why was $8,000 more than he expected, how much did he expect? If he had no idea how much did he guess? What reasoning did he use to inform that guess?

"App stores" are an amazingly disruptive power on software development costs. I find them fascinating both from a business perspective and from a more general economics perspective. Perhaps someone else reading this will some day post their experiences to HN as well and we'll another data point.

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

#65

Post by clarky07 »

tinylittlefish wrote: post #14
sparknlaunch12 wrote: post #8

Wow! What a great result! So how does one get featured in the two dollar deal? What have sales done now, back at the normal price? Would you consider dropping the price permanently?

I'm actually the maker of Two Dollar Tuesday. You can click go to developers area on the site if you're interested in featuring an app and we can talk. :)

That was apparently a great idea. Email is on the way.

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

#66

Post by danso »

esrauch wrote: post #57
tinylittlefish wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well he was in the #2 and #3 spot in the U.S. App Store, he was selling more than almost anything else there. :)

Sounds like the implication is that Mac App Store sales are lackluster in general then.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at

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

#68

Post by alvarosm »

I'm guessing your $14 price is not the sweet spot for you. Bear in mind you can't even try to price mobile apps as if there was a free market because there isn't. It's manipulated by Apple and Google, and low prices get tremendous benefits, because they want apps to be cheap so their mobile OS will have more value for the user (yes, it's a scam). Tell this to the people who blame developers for low app quality and whine about it all day: Apple and Google can have the apps they want, they just happen to want cheap and crappy because it makes their OS the best value for the consumer.

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

#69

Post by tzs »

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.

That might happen initially, but I think the effect will go away as people get used to dealing with e-books.

When I'm shopping in an actual physical bookstore it often makes sense to buy a book that I won't be ready to read for a while.

First, if I become ready for it at a time when it is inconvenient to get to the bookstore to buy it I have to wait to start reading it, and that could be annoying.

Second, it might no longer be stocked when I get around to going back for it. I then have to order it, wait for delivery, possibly go pick it up if I order for delivery at the bookstore.

Third, I might forget about it.

With an e-book, none of these apply.

First, the e-bookstore is for all practical purposes open 24/7/365, and the book is only a couple of minutes away.

Second, it is unlikely to go out of stock.

Third, when browsing at an e-bookstore there is usually an easy way to mark books you want to get back to later.

Putting these all together, there is very little point in buying an e-book when I'm not ready to start reading it soon, unless it is on sale.

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

#70

Post by pvidler »

n9com wrote: post #67

This is hardly anything to do with price elasticity. It's to do with the fact that 3 major websites picked up the story and linked to the app.

It's true that the websites would have driven most of the sales, but still interesting that the response was better than when Apple featured the app (which is also a big deal). I suspect the one-day-only nature of the sale might have helped quite a bit.
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