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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

#71

Post by pvidler »

cageface wrote: post #60
johnw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! And I agree with what you're saying (although it pains me greatly to admit it). It really is difficult to make a sustainable living from the App Store. Even the top apps don't pull in all that much and sales always drop off very rapidly after the initial hype wears off. I think you'd be crazy to abandon a salaried job in the hope of making it big on the app store. I've been working on Dropzone pretty much…

I like writing apps too (iOS), although I'm slowly letting go of the idea that I can sell enough on my own to support myself. The job market for iOS/Mac developers seems strong enough, so you probably can pay the bills with those skills and consider your own apps as a portfolio. May your tail be long!

A little off-topic, but I'm curious: which apps are yours?

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

#72

Post by pvidler »

fjarlq wrote: post #45

Man, Wednesday is the worst day to learn about Two Dollar Tuesday.

Yes, I missed it too. I should probably read the verge more often, but their site design is just too beautiful to miss by putting it in my RSS reader. Ironically, the result is that I hardly ever remember to go there.

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

#73

Post by _b8r0 »

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…

To be fair, everything is a repost of a repost. The App stores are a copy of previous app stores, running on a gui, the concept of which was 'borrowed' from Xerox.

Copycats are the best (and worst) form of flattery, but it's a service problem. On the front page of the Mac App Store (here in the UK) there's a tool called Yoink which seems to be a similar product. If the author can compete with the attention the product will only get better for users.

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

#74

Post by cageface »

pvidler wrote: post #71
cageface wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like writing apps too (iOS), although I'm slowly letting go of the idea that I can sell enough on my own to support myself. The job market for iOS/Mac developers seems strong enough, so you probably can pay the bills with those skills and consider your own apps as a portfolio. May your tail be long!

A little off-topic, but I'm curious: which apps are yours?

Main ones are listed here:

http://www.plastaq.com

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

#76

Post by Wump »

You mention a few things that you were concerned about:

"That it would reduce the perceived value of my app, that it would upset other customers who missed the discount and that the support burden would be too high."

But you don't talk about how these concerns played out after the sale. Would love to hear your thoughts on how valid these concerns were.

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

#77

Post by 89a »

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.

But will the developers be able to support Forklift in the future if that's what they're going to sell it for.

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

#78

Post by hdctambien »

rmATinnovafy wrote: post #31
alanfalcon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But once they do realize that they have a year's worth (or more) on their reading list, why would they keep coming back to the store to buy 10 more books?

And that will lead to authors only publishing short books, or even sell individual chapters for $1. Not a good thing.

That's similar to how Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities[1].

"The 45-chapter novel was published in 31 weekly installments in Dickens' new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. From April 1859 to November 1859"

Likely more people will read a book in short chunks because it looks less imposing. And it gives you an opportunity to "pivot" your story if it's not going well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities

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

#79

Post by TylerE »

hdctambien wrote: post #78
rmATinnovafy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that will lead to authors only publishing short books, or even sell individual chapters for $1. Not a good thing.

That's similar to how Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities[1]. "The 45-chapter novel was published in 31 weekly installments in Dickens' new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. From April 1859 to November 1859" Likely more people will read a book in short chunks because it looks less imposing. And it gives you an opportunity to "pivot" your story if it's not going well. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tal…

Dickens' method had more do with economics. Most of his audience was not especially well off, and books were VERY expensive back then, as in over $100 in today's money.

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

#80

Post by aqme28 »

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…

If you're able to randomly divvy up your customer-base, then split-testing is a better approach.

("Better" in that it's easier and more profitable, but not necessarily as fair.)

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