Extrapolating your day on day sales figures, you should see about 600k copies get sold tomorrow and 54M the next day.[1]<p>Morgan Stanley probably isn't too busy now, you should get their Facebook team to run an IPO based on that, before tomorrow's number come in.<p>EOM<p>[1] by July every particle in the universe will own a copy, that might cause sales to taper off.
Interesting, so 6000 x 2 ($12,000) vs 300 x 14 ($4,200) a price elasticity factor of 3.<p>If you are reading John, how did you pick $14 as the price? Pricing software is always difficult because you marginal costs are 0.<p>One school of thought is to take the time needed to write something, pick an hourly rate of what you would have had to pay a person to write it (or use what it cost you to produce it [1]) and then divide by the 'nominal' market to get a price.<p>Working a contrived example, lets say you write an App all by yourself, it takes you 3 weeks and you put in 300 hrs of work over those three weeks. Now you say "My time is worth $100/hr" so you've invest $30,000 into building that App. Now if the 'nominal market' which is people that you think need this capability at any cost is 1,000 people, you might charge $30/.3 or $100 ($99.95 if you're clever) for the app. After capturing your 1000 sales you've covered your development cost and are 'profiting' on the long tail with additional sales.<p>The danger of course is that you can over value your time and over estimate the number of people who might want your product.<p>[1] Cost to produce can be tricky if you are building several things, how much of your UI design developer do you charge to one project or another? Even fractions is a common technique but the designer will tell you that some projects took more of their time than others so its not a perfect strategy.
Congratulations on your well-earned success and thanks very much for your forthrightness about your numbers.<p>But I think this really shows just how hard it is to make real money in the app store. You have been as successful as any of us could hope to be there, yet your peak bounce is $8k/day. This is nothing to sneeze at, of course, but chances are very high it will quickly taper off the way these bumps usually do. In comparison, a decent engineer can pull in $8k/month easily, month after month. So my guess is that over a year you will be lucky to make anywhere near what you could have made at a salaried job with the same effort, and you're probably in the top 1% of earners.<p>The independence and freedom the solo dev enjoys is certainly worth something, but if you're considering abandoning a salaried job for a crack at the app store market be advised that you're likely to pay a tremendous premium for that freedom.
At $1-$2 prices, purchases are made mostly on impulse. This is why I think e-books should come down to that price, too. For many authors the sales would just skyrocket, because people will just start buying 10 books at a time, without even thinking that it may take them a full year to read them all. But they will just "want them there" for a later read.
The biggest point made here is the following: whatever perception you have about money, you are right. If you think you can't make more than $1k a month, you are right. Same with $10k, $100k, etc.<p>The author stunbled with this by accident. I bet you he will now focus on finding another product that will allow him to repeat that.<p>Another minor point is that marketing works. Its up to you to find what. So don't stop when your ad words campaign fails. Keep iterating.
The German stat is probably due to being mentioned on Heise, which is pretty much the go-to site for tech news in German:<p><a href="http://www.heise.de/mac-and-i/meldung/Reduzierte-Programme-im-Mac-App-Store-1581978.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.heise.de/mac-and-i/meldung/Reduzierte-Programme-i...</a>
It actually surprises me that so much promotion, and such a large price drop, didn't result in even <i>more</i> purchases. It'd be interesting to see the sales curve after you raise the price again.
I'm guessing your $14 price is not the sweet spot for you. Bear in mind you can't even try to price mobile apps as if there was a free market because there isn't. It's manipulated by Apple and Google, and low prices get tremendous benefits, because they want apps to be cheap so their mobile OS will have more value for the user (yes, it's a scam). Tell this to the people who blame developers for low app quality and whine about it all day: Apple and Google can have the apps they want, they just happen to want cheap and crappy because it makes their OS the best value for the consumer.
Wow! What a great result! So how does one get featured in the two dollar deal? What have sales done now, back at the normal price? Would you consider dropping the price permanently?
You mention a few things that you were concerned about:<p>"That it would reduce the perceived value of my app, that it would upset other customers who missed the discount and that the support burden would be too high."<p>But you don't talk about how these concerns played out after the sale. Would love to hear your thoughts on how valid these concerns were.
We participate in a weekly promotion like that for kid-friendly mobile apps, Moms With Apps "App Friday". Every Friday there's a joint promotion of quite a few discounted and free educational apps. <a href="http://momswithapps.com/app-friday/" rel="nofollow">http://momswithapps.com/app-friday/</a>
This is a great result for a single day, but isn't this a sign of a wrong initial pricing?<p>I would try to lower the price for a month or two, to see how the market reacts. I believe that you still have to find the sweet spot in the price/demand curve.
well, I just added $6.96 ($9.95 - 30%) to your revenue numbers for today. I had no idea about this application but it looks great and solves a pain point for me.<p>Some successful Hackernews marketing in action I suppose.<p>Good luck on future success in the App Store!
Similar App Store discount is happening today: <a href="http://zeroninetynine.com" rel="nofollow">http://zeroninetynine.com</a><p><i>Disclaimer: one of my apps participates as well.</i>
You should lower the price point to somewhere between $2-$5 and keep it there. It would be a shame to lose the top app store ranking when it goes back to $15.