My First Year in the App Store • Hacker News Board

Re: My First Year in the App Store

#101

Post by kyrias » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 1:23 PM UTC

andrewljohnson wrote: post #22

Whenever anyone complains to me that its hard to make money on software, and/or the App Store is rigged, I always tell them I think anyone can make a living by making a bible app. You don't even have to be the best one, just pretty good, and iterate - it's the canonical product that you know has a big audience, willing buyers, and poor competition on the low end of the market. Case proven by this guy! The next time y…

  > The next time you think to yourself that there is 
  > anything needed to make money on software besides 
  > persistence, thoughtfulness, and picking something you 
  > know people want, you're in a trap of your own creation.

Well you do also need money to actually put the app up ;)

Re: My First Year in the App Store

#102

Post by d0mine » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 2:33 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #78

andrewljohnson wrote: post #22

Whenever anyone complains to me that its hard to make money on software, and/or the App Store is rigged, I always tell them I think anyone can make a living by making a bible app. You don't even have to be the best one, just pretty good, and iterate - it's the canonical product that you know has a big audience, willing buyers, and poor competition on the low end of the market. Case proven by this guy! The next time y…

Patio11 has argued forcefully that developers systematically neglect women and underserve that large market; I wonder if we can add to that 'and developers also ignore religious markets too'?

Being a domain expert helps to develop an app for that domain. But it is neither necessary nor sufficient (think: doctors, lawyers, etc).

Re: My First Year in the App Store

#103

Post by monkey_slap » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 2:41 PM UTC

trevmckendrick wrote: post #85

monkey_slap wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poetreat. Aiming for May 7. Week of polish then submission. http://poetreatapp.com/

Nice landing page for sure. Maybe this is obvious, but they key is finding out a solid upgrade that makes IAP's worth it to customers.

Agreed. Doing a freemium model where you can save only save 1 poem. Unlocking adds theming, Facebook+Twitter connection, and unlimited poems. Worth $.99? That's subjective, but this entire app is more of an experiment than a business. Just going to iterate and improve on the next one.

Re: My First Year in the App Store

#104

Post by rayvinly » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 6:04 PM UTC

trevmckendrick wrote: post #28

nanijoe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impressive...How do you collect the email email addresses? Do you just ask people for their addresses?

Yep. When the app launches the very first time I ask for their 1st name and email if they want to hear about deals/offers, new apps, etc. They can cancel out easily and never see the form again. But when you have a free app that quite a few people download, email addresses start accumulating pretty quickly.

I also recently started to use mailing list in my blog. I thought a mailing list will be useful in iOS and Mac apps as well. So I started a project building a universal framework for both the iOS and Mac platforms, complete with UIs. It illustrates the concept of code sharing between iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps with just one codebase. The fact that you got 30,000 emails proves its viability. The project is at https://github.com/rayvinly/DevNewsletter