Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally

It&#x27;s interesting that their views on competition run counter to what YC &#x2F; Peter Thiel advocate for in all startups - that is, avoiding competitive spaces and going for monopolies. Perhaps monopolies are necessary for huge growth and investor upside, but it should be made clear that there&#x27;s obviously space in startups for modest goals like a nice PDF reader, and I hope their employees makes a reasonable living off it at the very least.<p>Not sure if their business model will work out (given the sad state of affairs that is the Mac App Store) but I liked that they were transparent about it.<p>On another note... the Vimeo ad they released <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;145400917" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;145400917</a> features a white, well-dressed man working at an empty desk with nothing on it but a macbook, coffee mug, iPhone, and Moleskine notebook. I find this marketing trope hilarious and want to amass a collection of such images. Is someone already curating such a thing?

Purely from a user&#x27;s perspective, the Mac app store has a considerable advantage in centrally managing updates. Non-MAS apps each have their own eclectic ways of updating. Some support automatic update checks, while users have to explicitly check others. For the ones with automatic updates, there are a number of ways it&#x27;s handled. Users don&#x27;t generally want scores of update daemons running, and the whole business of &quot;On launch, check for update, notify the user and let them choose whether to update now&quot; really feels like the web page pop-ups that are so popular. (&quot;I launched the app to do work, not to see if there was an update. The update prompt is in my way.&quot;) This cries out for a better user experience.

It&#x27;s interesting how he says videos are important. I find videos to be much slower to parse than reading features or reviews from notable people within the industry the app is part of. For example, in the case of Sketch, I didn&#x27;t watch the video (didn&#x27;t even know they had them until I checked today) but instead read what it&#x27;s like to use the application from a couple different designers.<p>In the case of Dropbox (whoa, that was a long time ago), I think I just had it verbally recommended to me from techies or I just read about it on HN.<p>In fact, all of what I end up installing and using comes from the backs of people rather than videos. Maybes it&#x27;s a generational thing.

How do they get in touch with that &quot;App Store Business Management&quot; they spoke about? It&#x27;s not like they make their emails available for any Joe Developer to talk to them.

10. Release a quality app<p>It&#x27;s not a buggy, slow, unusable piece of crap that a lot of low-end software is. It&#x27;s easy to use and it works well.

The time-limited trial is essential for selling productivity software, unfortunately most companies are doing it wrong.<p>Beyond Compare[1] has a 30-day trial that is 30 days of use - not just 30 consecutive days. If I actually use a piece of software 30 different times on different days, then it&#x27;s definitely worth a purchase. It&#x27;s too bad more developers don&#x27;t design their trials this way.<p>[1] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scootersoftware.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scootersoftware.com&#x2F;</a>

Although not a top paid app for a side project my app is doing surprisingly well even outside the app store after I took it out recently.<p>The number one factor which he alluded to is which pricing strategy to follow. My app is not 70 but 9.99.<p>I too am using a time limited version and I am realizing that this isn&#x27;t the best approach for my app either. So I am working towards something like what Sublime is doing.<p>One of the biggest learnings I have gotten from this experience is that an app is rarely a business and that the MAS is rarely a good distribution channel if you are doing something unique.<p>I could make at a minimum double as much as I am doing right now if i spent som more time on it (I will make around $50K the first year) and there is money to be made if you have something unique. Unfortunately thats hard to do on the MAS with Sandbox.

<i>It was crucial to pick the right business model for PDF Expert. Since we are a privately owned company and never raised any capital, we have to make profit in order to develop great software — an expensive endeavor these days.</i><p>Kudos to someone else who actually wants to make money these days, not just spark investor interest, burn a ton of other people&#x27;s money and then retire to write a book while their company goes down in flames.

I&#x27;m trying to figure out what&#x27;s so great about this app. Is it just that it&#x27;s available on iOS and OSX?

Nice article. On a completely unrelated subject, the guy in the video left the machine unlocked. Bad guy.

&gt; PDF Expert is available at an introductory price of $19.99, but that will rise in the near future to $60–70 once we add PDF editing and OCR.<p>$60–70 for a fancy PDF reader ? By doing this you will get only the people that really, really need your software, the others will turn away unable to justify such an expense for a non vital software.<p>A bit like an iPhone in fact. I could afford one, but I don&#x27;t want to make sacrifices on other more important things. Sometimes I wonder if the peoples that make these prices live in a kind of &quot;rich people bubble&quot; where money grows on trees and 70 bucks for a PDF reader or almost a grand for a smartphone is just chump change.