I feel like I'm missing something, the post keeps saying you need to "create a story around your product" and "you need to sell your app with a story" yet the post never explains what this means, or does it, instead he has made a cool app that wasn't selling and made it free instead and people installed it and liked it. Doesn't this post demonstrate the problems with selling vs. free, not story this or story that?
I really don't want to be That Hacker News Comment, but isn't the story here essentially "made an app, tried to sell it, didn't get the success I wanted, gave up"? Or is there some major benefit to the reviews and download figures for the free version I'm not seeing?<p>(Although this does tell us one very interesting thing - that a topical app on the App Store, with minimal marketing, can get huge downloads if it shifts from paid to free.)<p>The part of this story that really impresses me is actually the $440 revenue. That's not at all bad for an MVP, and demonstrates there's a market and that the app sells. Those are the kind of indicators I'd look for before pumping a lot more time into the app and attempting to turn it into a real business.<p>There's every chance - particularly given the subsequent good reviews - that this app could have been an $xxxx/mo success.<p>Any chance OP can push an update and upsell his happy customers to a paid version, I wonder?
I also made one of our apps free for a day. It was also 1st in the nav category in the US, and many, many other countries.<p>People shouldn't misinterpret this bump. It's largely because there are a billion robots monitoring prices, and you get a bunch of marketing from these robots when you shift from paid to free. And there are "journalists" who watch the bots and add to the clamor. And there are people who will never pay, but will take a free app.<p>I don't think going free translates to sales later, though it can be useful for reviews. It was also problematic for us because our app hit servers, and was not self-contained.<p>Another time, Amazon made another of our apps the free Android app of the day. This resulted in 120K downloads in a day, but only scant residual sales, most of which came from an Amazon accounting error.
I find it frustrating that you basically have no chance of getting coverage on blogs unless you spend your life "building a relationship" with bloggers. Look, I don't want to "build a relationship". I want to build an app!<p>And I know bloggers get a ton of email every day, and not everything is worth covering, but it would be nice to get at least a reply saying "no thanks" once in a while instead of just being ignored…<p>/rant
If anything, I found his post discouraging. He's built a great app and only managed to get people to notice it when he made it free. If a top20 app only managed to earn under $500 what does it say about the current state of the app market?
I think what isn't understood, even though it is completely obvious, is that people need to know about your app. Emailing a few blogs really isn't going to do it. For anyone to know about your app, it has to hit a major, major website. (Some fluff piece mentioning "app store" in the title seems a good way to get on to HN)<p>I think what happened here is that one of the major sources of app discovery now are the "Apps Gone Free" apps. It was precisely because it used to be a paid app that suddenly was free that suddenly put it in front of so many people.<p>Now, if the app is truly worth recommending then it could become paid again and word of mouth will generate sales.<p>Again, this is all completely obvious but there's still some magical thinking when it comes to the app store that somehow normal rules of selling a product don't apply.
His article doesn't really follow through on anything.<p>He says he wanted to experiment on how to make a successful app in the app store. He theorizes that "making a story" behind your product is most important.<p>He neither explains how he "made a story", nor does he attempt to explain why his app became successful. Doesn't he have any insight into why switching to 'free' had such a large impact?
He went free and only had seven other apps in his category, and he made a few dollars.<p>My question is what does it take to build a real business in the app store? Companies have to pay employees, etc. Are 1% of the companies making most of the money? I think it's going to be hard to build a company 99 cents at a time.
I'm mostly blown away that he had the app put together in 5 hours. I can't get a development environment set up in 5 hours. I've spent five hours chasing down a trailing comma bug. Teach me, sensei.
Great story! But am I understanding this correctly that all the author did was approaching a few blogs with promo codes? And after a few days with relative low traction pretty much gave up on promoting it, just setting it on free? Not even slapping a few ads on it?<p>Is there some general "formula" on how much ad revenue one can expect from a (relatively straight forward) free app per 1000 users? Meaning some help on at what point would it make sense to move from sales based monetization to an ad based monetization model.
How funny that I also done quite exactly the same app which came out something like 2 days after this one...
I blogged about it too : <a href="http://alexiscreuzot.com/#!/scribble/4" rel="nofollow">http://alexiscreuzot.com/#!/scribble/4</a>
Your post prompted me to download the app and my first impressions are that the simplicity of the app is a huge selling point.<p>No pointless nav bars, no curious looking buttons, no walls of text, simple, effective UI. I really like it. Hopefully it will help me drop a few kg's!
I'm surprised that no-one here appears to have mentioned the option of monetizing such an app by in-app upgrades. In this case, adding videos (like Nike Training Club [1]) or other extra content would be an option.<p>Isn't that the standard approach App Store for making money off free apps?<p>[1] <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/nike-training-club/id301521403" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/nike-training-club/id3015214...</a>
Thanks for sharing your story. Looks like your position in the AppStore search results are rising nicely too. And fortunately they are all high volume keywords...
<a href="http://www.straply.com/app/apple/bytesize/7-minute-workout" rel="nofollow">http://www.straply.com/app/apple/bytesize/7-minute-workout</a>
I'm slightly confused, he made his app free on June 15/16, and two days later he's got a tonne of reviews from users stating this application has helped them lose weight, and sounds like they've been using it a while. If the surge in downloads happened just two days ago, those reviews all sound very fishy.
Off-topic.<p>>It's a great way to kick off the day, and I'm 3kg down.<p>The OP says he is in Australia. How widely is the metric system used there (in comparison to the imperial one)?