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An App Store Experiment

stuartkhall.com

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Re: An App Store Experiment

#21

Post by shimfish »

I think what isn't understood, even though it is completely obvious, is that people need to know about your app. Emailing a few blogs really isn't going to do it. For anyone to know about your app, it has to hit a major, major website. (Some fluff piece mentioning "app store" in the title seems a good way to get on to HN)

I think what happened here is that one of the major sources of app discovery now are the "Apps Gone Free" apps. It was precisely because it used to be a paid app that suddenly was free that suddenly put it in front of so many people.

Now, if the app is truly worth recommending then it could become paid again and word of mouth will generate sales.

Again, this is all completely obvious but there's still some magical thinking when it comes to the app store that somehow normal rules of selling a product don't apply.

Re: An App Store Experiment

#23

Post by dmarusic16 »

sgdesign wrote: post #14
citricsquid wrote: post #7

I 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?

I think his point was that he didn't do that, and sure enough he wasn't able to generate any intest around the paid version.

I think you're all missing the point. His post is the 'story' behind the app. This post is the marketing.

Re: An App Store Experiment

#24

Post by andrewljohnson »

I also made one of our apps free for a day. It was also 1st in the nav category in the US, and many, many other countries.

People shouldn't misinterpret this bump. It's largely because there are a billion robots monitoring prices, and you get a bunch of marketing from these robots when you shift from paid to free. And there are "journalists" who watch the bots and add to the clamor. And there are people who will never pay, but will take a free app.

I don't think going free translates to sales later, though it can be useful for reviews. It was also problematic for us because our app hit servers, and was not self-contained.

Another time, Amazon made another of our apps the free Android app of the day. This resulted in 120K downloads in a day, but only scant residual sales, most of which came from an Amazon accounting error.

Re: An App Store Experiment

#25

Post by [deleted] »

talkingquickly wrote: post #17
melling wrote: post #6

He 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.

This post from flurry [1] suggests that a big chunk of revenue is going to a small proportion of very successful developers (there was a HN post about which companies they were but I can't find it now). That said it also suggests that revenue is increasingly moving down the long tail which may be a sign small app companies may become more viable. [1] http://blog.flurry.com/bid/88014/The-Great-Distribution-of-W...

[deleted]

Re: An App Store Experiment

#26

Post by sockgrant »

His article doesn't really follow through on anything.

He says he wanted to experiment on how to make a successful app in the app store. He theorizes that "making a story" behind your product is most important.

He neither explains how he "made a story", nor does he attempt to explain why his app became successful. Doesn't he have any insight into why switching to 'free' had such a large impact?

Re: An App Store Experiment

#27

Post by andrewljohnson »

melling wrote: post #6

He 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.

It's basically the top .1% of apps on iOS - the top 1000 overall or so - that make around $1000/day.

There are close to 1,000,000 apps - 9,999,000 support one person or less.

Re: An App Store Experiment

#28

Post by akent »

vitalique wrote: post #22

Off-topic. >It's a great way to kick off the day, and I'm 3kg down. The OP says he is in Australia. How widely is the metric system used there (in comparison to the imperial one)?

Australia is almost completely metric, people only use imperial occasionally for old recipes and the like, also we often use pounds per square inch for car tire pressure, but weather related pressure is in pascals.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly comprehensive article on Australia's metrication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Australia

Re: An App Store Experiment

#29

Post by monkey_slap »

Pxtl wrote: post #20

I'm mostly blown away that he had the app put together in 5 hours. I can't get a development environment set up in 5 hours. I've spent five hours chasing down a trailing comma bug. Teach me, sensei.

It becomes much easier over time. I'm at a point where I could certainly accomplish this, especially now with great projects like CocoaPods. Experienced web developers can create a simple CMS lightyears faster than I can, its all relative.

Now what I find most interesting is that the author doesn't seem to have a large portfolio of apps. The "More by this Developer" link only shows this app, while his website only points to Discovr (http://discovr.info/) which I can't imagine he's the only developer for. I'd be curious to learn more about his expertise.

Re: An App Store Experiment

#30

Post by monkey_slap »

1337biz wrote: post #3

Great 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…

My free app is seeing about 500 downloads/day. When it was featured in the "New & Noteworthy" it was about 1500/day. However my IAP conversion is holding at about 2% which, to me, is quite bad.

Another thing to point out is that the author has about 4k Twitter followers, so he does have an existing network of people to expose this app to. It's not much, but its a (free) start.

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