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A Candid Look at Unread’s First Year

blog.jaredsinclair.com

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Re: A Candid Look at Unread’s First Year

#11

Post by qzervaas »

Brushfire wrote: post #3

I really like this post, but I think the success (or lack thereof) is really more about the competition than the product or the app market in general. There are tons of RSS apps that are good, with great ratings, and are free.

Surely the fact that he's competing against a ton of excellent free apps is an observation about the app market? (That is, how do you compete against free apps that have different financial motivations)

Disclaimer: I also sell paid up-front apps in a crowded market with a bunch of free alternatives, so I feel his pain.

Re: A Candid Look at Unread’s First Year

#12

Post by qzervaas »

How big is the RSS reader market? If you could sell your app to every single person who subscribes to RSS feeds that also uses an iPhone, how many sales is that?

My hunch is it's not a huge market, comparatively speaking. I sell public transit apps, which although has many more competitors, has, I'm guessing, way more potential customers. I've had a healthy full-time income from these apps for a few years now.

One thing that's in my favour though is you're unlikely to use multiple feed readers, but many people have multiple public transit apps.

Re: A Candid Look at Unread’s First Year

#13

Post by freyr »

Arnt wrote: post #9
kylec wrote: post #2

I'm sure that Unread is a great app, but the author seems a little blind to the fact that being featured in the App Store and being written about by prominent bloggers only serve to introduce the product to an audience, not convince them to buy. I just went to the App Store and looked at the screenshots for the app. There's a surprising lack of functionality depicted in the screenshots. There's nothing about how feed…

I find this comment fascinating. Unread's greatness isn't like that of Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word has a thousand features, and they're all there to see on a screenshot. Tab dialogs with thirty tabs, windows with dozens of buttons, and so on and so forth. Which may or may not be good, but it definitely is neither small nor modest. Microsoft Word is great, like Ghengis Khan's army was great, and affords impressive,…

Regardless of the screenshots, when I search for "RSS reader," it first shows 8 free apps with many (mostly) excellent ratings.

It's not at all obvious why I should pay $4.99 for an RSS reader when popular free alternatives exist.

Re: A Candid Look at Unread’s First Year

#14

Post by eps »

kylec wrote: post #2

I'm sure that Unread is a great app, but the author seems a little blind to the fact that being featured in the App Store and being written about by prominent bloggers only serve to introduce the product to an audience, not convince them to buy. I just went to the App Store and looked at the screenshots for the app. There's a surprising lack of functionality depicted in the screenshots. There's nothing about how feed…

This first and foremost problem with these screenshots is they just don't look good, and this is primarily due to the use of a tacky dark-to-light gradient for the background.

First impression lasts. Steep grayscale gradient is firmly associated with an amateurish Gimp job and it's an exact opposite of polish. It's something that a noob designer would throw into an image to spruce things up.

I read his post, I went to the project page on his site and the app there indeed looks really good. It is polished, a total beaut. Then I followed a link to the AppStore and what do I see? A set of typical programmer-made screenshots. All that "polished" impression goes quickly down the drain and I leave the app's page in 2 seconds. Because the screenshots I see don't look good. Because of the cheesy background gradient :-\

Re: A Candid Look at Unread’s First Year

#15

Post by dreese »

kylec wrote: post #2

I'm sure that Unread is a great app, but the author seems a little blind to the fact that being featured in the App Store and being written about by prominent bloggers only serve to introduce the product to an audience, not convince them to buy. I just went to the App Store and looked at the screenshots for the app. There's a surprising lack of functionality depicted in the screenshots. There's nothing about how feed…

First, let me say that, in just a bit, I am going to criticize. I hope it's constructive. I also hope it's helpful, because I am in the same boat with my own screenshots. And I didn't realize it until WWDC this year.

In the iTC lab, the woman helping me said that every screenshot needs to stand alone in telling the story of the app. Every screenshot has to sell. And the app icon. And the title. And the description. She wanted me to pick one or two (no more) of the best, most compelling things about my app and change everything to highlight or focus on those two things.

She told me that potential customers have to "get it" in seconds. I was to make it as easy as possible for them to understand my app as fast as possible. She even told me what she thought the two things were for my app, which I agreed with, but she only got it after talking to me for 10 minutes.

While I agree the Unread screenshots are bad, I'm pretty sure that neither the gradient nor floating text is the problem. It's that the screenshots themselves are not focused on the one or two things that make this RSS reader worth buying.

There are actually 7 points made, in addition to the testimonial. But no one buys an RSS reader because of fonts, comfort, gestures, themes, sharing, OvershareKit, a testimonial, or even full-screen reading. They buy because they can read articles from their favorite websites. Why should I buy Unread? Not a single screenshot answers that question.

Again, I know I'm tearing into someone else's hard work here. But my own app's screenshots deserve the same criticism. Now that I know better, I hope others can learn from my mistakes.

Marketing an app well is just as hard as building one. I know how to do one and am still learning how to do the other.

Re: A Candid Look at Unread’s First Year

#16

Post by nicoschuele »

Although I agree with some things highlighted in this article, there's one that I strongly disagree with: the niche you choose has everything to do with success, however polished your app is.

If you want to be a profitable indie shop, don't make yet another todo-list, note-taking or rss-reader app. These are "student" projects or hobbyists side-projects. However polished your app is, you are not bringing any significant value to your potential customers. There are tons of alternatives and many free ones. Basically, you can code and manage a project, that's one side of the coin but you are also showing that you are not really creative in terms of building something new, that solves an existing issue and that people want to pay for.

Also, I agree with people mentionning the bad screenshots. If I'm going to pay $4.99 for an app, I want to feel it is a polished app and not a quick chinese knock-off of a popular one (which the current screenshots heavily convey).

When a niche market is already full, more thinking could have gone into the name. By not incorporating the word "RSS" in it, it is quite hard to do a search or even get at first sight what the app is. "Unread RSS" would have worked just fine.

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