I wonder if this is the common theme among many of us who try to put apps in the app store: figuring out what does not work. For our app: iEBT (which is an interface to a server allowing you to track your euro notes: eurobilltracker.com), we not only took a very tiny niche, but didn't think about marketing either.
What we did was this:
- picked a somewhat hight price point ($2)
This seemed to use like the sweetspot, with what we could live and what we would expect an
honest buyer to pay. (who knows?!)
- we wrote to the canonical forum, where we expected most of the potential users.
That resulted in an initial rush (two days after writing to the forum), but it wasn't
much at all.
- the domain iebtapp.com was registered prior to publishing, but contained nothing more
then a simple "Something's coming this december" string. Watching the server logs, there
seemed to be some who were trying to figure out where the link from the app pointed.
- after some time, we wrote the current, very limited text on iebtapp.com. Not even with images.
That seems to have resulted in a minor increase in sales.
- with some text on the website, we thought it was time to do some advertisement, and went with Google Ads.
This too seems to have resulted in a minor increase in sales.
And here's what we plan to do:
- add Appirater to the App. We have only a very few reviews, and they are not enough to get any star rating
on the AppStore. Maybe this helps, who knows. I will closely watch this.
Personal conclusion:
iOS development is really /a lot/ of fun. But I think we need to change two things:
- More marketing. But not all at once; results should be measurable.
- Niche markets, that are this tiny, can be a very high risk game. (Especially if someone
else, writes to the forum that he's going to release another iPhone app and lets people
sign up for the beta :-))
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[1]: see iebtapp.com