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An App Store Experiment

stuartkhall.com

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Re: An App Store Experiment

#51

Post by RealCasually »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #24

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 neve…

Was the accounting error that you got paid some % of your retail price for each free download?

Re: An App Store Experiment

#52

Post by Domenic_S »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #45
melling wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1000/day isn't a company. It's a one or two man shop. It doesn't sound like the economics are there to build the next EA, id Software, etc.

You are thinking from your New York or Silicon Valley bubble? Don't worry, I live there too. Actually, if you are bringing in $1000/day in the Ukraine, you might have quite a little startup indeed.

$30k/month pre-tax?

Forget the bubble -- what makes a company a "real" company is offering things like health insurance and PTO, which are not cheap. That's one or two folks max.

Re: An App Store Experiment

#53

Post by Domenic_S »

nsxwolf wrote: post #41
poxrud wrote: post #19

If anything, I found his post discouraging. He's built a great app and only managed to get people to notice it when he made it free. If a top20 app only managed to earn under $500 what does it say about the current state of the app market?

I had the opposite reaction. He sneezed something onto the App Store in mere hours and it made quite a bit of return in a short time.

Agreed. I see a consistent story here; the formula seems to be 1) identify a current fad that doesn't have a lot of good apps 2) write the app quickly 3) profit.

I'm thinking of that story a couple months back about the Bible app, how there were a few but they all sucked, and people had decided that downloading the bible onto their phones was something they wanted to do.

Re: An App Store Experiment

#54

Post by a-priori »

mctx wrote: post #32
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)?

Pretty much exclusively metric - the only thing I use the imperial system for in Australia is clothing (34") and height (6'4")

This sounds like about the same situation as in Canada, for what it's worth: metric for everything except human measures (weight, height, clothing sizes) and some cooking.

Re: An App Store Experiment

#55

Post by wodow »

I'm surprised that no-one here appears to have mentioned the option of monetizing such an app by in-app upgrades. In this case, adding videos (like Nike Training Club [1]) or other extra content would be an option.

Isn't that the standard approach App Store for making money off free apps?

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/nike-training-club/id3015214...

Re: An App Store Experiment

#56

Post by megablast »

akent wrote: post #28
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

Also for height, quite oddly.

Re: An App Store Experiment

#57

Post by benjamincburns »

kybernetyk wrote: post #37
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.

> My question is what does it take to build a real business in the app store? Conventional wisdom is that the money is in development work and not selling apps by yourself on the store.

If that's true, what's the longterm viability of the market as a whole? Intuitively for dev services to succeed here it must be true that [shrink-wrap app model profitability] >> [service model profitability].

Re: An App Store Experiment

#59

Post by kirualex »

monkey_slap wrote: post #34
kirualex wrote: post #16

How funny that I also done quite exactly the same app which came out something like 2 days after this one... I blogged about it too : http://alexiscreuzot.com/#!/scribble/4

Congrats! Would you be willing to post anything about your success post launch? I'm an app developer as well and I love reading about other people's strategies such as this.

Good idea, I'll think about that. It's not that much of a success though (not even near Stuart's app), but I guess it's a good start for a first app without any marketizing strategy.

Re: An App Store Experiment

#60

Post by jacalata »

wodow wrote: post #55

I'm surprised that no-one here appears to have mentioned the option of monetizing such an app by in-app upgrades. In this case, adding videos (like Nike Training Club [1]) or other extra content would be an option. Isn't that the standard approach App Store for making money off free apps? [1] https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/nike-training-club/id3015214...

The author said that's his next step.
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