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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.
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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.
And as a person who runs what you think of as a "real" company, I still don't like the sentiment that people who are trying aren't real companies.
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?
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> 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].
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'm surprised the author isn't putting ads on the free version.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$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.
There are no taxes if you spend it all. And as a person who runs what you think of as a "real" company, I still don't like the sentiment that people who are trying aren't real companies.
Tell that to EDD & the FTB ;)
A 1 or 2 person company can be a "real" company. I would love to co-found a 2 person company that did $30k/month, and I'd be proud of it.
But let's not pretend that trying is enough. Being a "real" company is hard. It takes a lot of planning and effort to be square with EDD/FTB/IRS/insurance, cut paychecks on time, pay your partners/vendors, keep PTO records & pay set aside the right way, and so forth. Doing those things is something to be proud of, and something a lot of startups that call themselves companies and give eachother CxO titles don't do.
I think companies who actually take the time, effort, and expense to run those things right -- and have the scale that makes doing those things make sense -- deserve to be called real companies. Just one man's opinion.