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$100K in 4 months: A niche app's path to App Store success

blog.endloop.ca

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Re: $100K in 4 months: A niche app's path to App Store success

#11
post #10

I understand this isn't really comprehensive, but money wise, 2 people spent about 1.5 years on the apps and finally made 100k. Seems like they are just starting to get decent ROI and the battle for profitability is yet ahead.

Technically speaking, we'd made about $40K in app revenue from our previous apps before we launched iMockups. That $100K is just iMockups revenue, not total for the company.

But you are correct that it was the best ROI so far for any of our apps.

Re: $100K in 4 months: A niche app's path to App Store success

#12
post #10

I understand this isn't really comprehensive, but money wise, 2 people spent about 1.5 years on the apps and finally made 100k. Seems like they are just starting to get decent ROI and the battle for profitability is yet ahead.

Note, though, the app is now generating a fairly steady income. If the app does not require much maintenance effort on their part they can go on and work on their next app.

I think that might be the path for most app developers to profitability--having many apps that generate steady income, rather than having a big hit.

Re: $100K in 4 months: A niche app's path to App Store success

#13
The single biggest weakness (or gap) in our ability to provide amazing customer service is that a lot of people still use iTunes App Store reviews to communicate their issues but there is no way for us devs to contact those people to help them resolve it. Apple needs to fix this one-way channel.

This is very frustrating. I don't think users realize there is no way for developers to get back to them and so many questions go unanswered. In the end I wrote a script to pull all the reviews into my apps site so I can post comments there and I let the users know that in the app. Plus now it's also easy for me to send myself a notification for a new/updated review. Seams to be working so far as some users have come back and added comments.

Re: $100K in 4 months: A niche app's path to App Store success

#16
post #8

If the author is here, could you comment on how often people use your app? Are these statistics commonly measured for iOS apps?

I'm not the author, but time and frequency usage statistics are commonly collected from application statistics packages.

Re: $100K in 4 months: A niche app's path to App Store success

#18
post #13

The single biggest weakness (or gap) in our ability to provide amazing customer service is that a lot of people still use iTunes App Store reviews to communicate their issues but there is no way for us devs to contact those people to help them resolve it. Apple needs to fix this one-way channel. This is very frustrating. I don't think users realize there is no way for developers to get back to them and so many questi…

Would love to get that script, Apple really needs to improve in this area, although I guess for the big sellers it is not so important.

Re: $100K in 4 months: A niche app's path to App Store success

#19
post #13

The single biggest weakness (or gap) in our ability to provide amazing customer service is that a lot of people still use iTunes App Store reviews to communicate their issues but there is no way for us devs to contact those people to help them resolve it. Apple needs to fix this one-way channel. This is very frustrating. I don't think users realize there is no way for developers to get back to them and so many questi…

Would love to get that script, Apple really needs to improve in this area, although I guess for the big sellers it is not so important.

I based it of this blog post. The last comment is me with a slightly updated PHP version http://blogs.oreilly.com/iphone/2008/08/scraping-appstore-re....

My site is Drupal 6 based and I wrote a module to do the scrapping and populate a CCK content type that I display with a Drupal view. I configured Triggers and Actions for the notifications.

If there are any other Drupal people out there I'm happy to share the code. Just needs a little polish before I could submit it.

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