An App Store Experiment
stuartkhall.com
An App Store Experiment
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: An App Store Experiment
#2Excellent story - keep up the work Stuart.
Re: An App Store Experiment
#3Great story! But am I understanding this correctly that all the author did was approaching a few blogs with promo codes? And after a few days with relative low traction pretty much gave up on promoting it, just setting it on free? Not even slapping a few ads on it?
Is there some general "formula" on how much ad revenue one can expect from a (relatively straight forward) free app per 1000 users? Meaning some help on at what point would it make sense to move from sales based monetization to an ad based monetization model.
Re: An App Store Experiment
#4Your post prompted me to download the app and my first impressions are that the simplicity of the app is a huge selling point.
No pointless nav bars, no curious looking buttons, no walls of text, simple, effective UI. I really like it. Hopefully it will help me drop a few kg's!
Re: An App Store Experiment
#5Great story!
Re: An App Store Experiment
#6He went free and only had seven other apps in his category, and he made a few dollars.
My question is what does it take to build a real business in the app store? Companies have to pay employees, etc. Are 1% of the companies making most of the money? I think it's going to be hard to build a company 99 cents at a time.
Re: An App Store Experiment
#7I feel like I'm missing something, the post keeps saying you need to "create a story around your product" and "you need to sell your app with a story" yet the post never explains what this means, or does it, instead he has made a cool app that wasn't selling and made it free instead and people installed it and liked it. Doesn't this post demonstrate the problems with selling vs. free, not story this or story that?
Re: An App Store Experiment
#8Your post prompted me to download the app and my first impressions are that the simplicity of the app is a huge selling point. No pointless nav bars, no curious looking buttons, no walls of text, simple, effective UI. I really like it. Hopefully it will help me drop a few kg's!
"huge selling point" is exactly the problem. I liked the post as well, it was very descriptive. But, I feel like he gave up by making it free. I'd be more interested if he can turn it around to profit. Although this was much easier to do in the early days of the app store. Less so now.
Re: An App Store Experiment
#9Now he has the story he needed for his app.
Re: An App Store Experiment
#10Great story! But am I understanding this correctly that all the author did was approaching a few blogs with promo codes? And after a few days with relative low traction pretty much gave up on promoting it, just setting it on free? Not even slapping a few ads on it? Is there some general "formula" on how much ad revenue one can expect from a (relatively straight forward) free app per 1000 users? Meaning some help on a…
From my experience, you really don't make much on ads from apps and they tend to drive people away. To do well on mobile app ads, you need a fairly massive audience and then you need to market your ad space directly. In particular, video ads on mobile can be very lucrative, but you'd need a very engaging app to keep people around when you start showing those kinds of ads.
More than likely the reason his free app did so well against the others is that the others likely had ads or nag screens or similar, while his was genuinely free.