

Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store - clarky07
https://medium.com/@clarky07/4-years-of-success-and-failure-on-the-app-store-195dd35bd6a3

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limeyy
There is alot of similarity between this story, making iOS apps and making
AdSense websites 7-8 years ago. One could slap a website together in a week,
and one would see the revenue slowly but surely coming in and going up. The
strategy of "making a website every week", and the total will make up for it
worked too, for a while. Nowadays, every niche is crowded, and often more
professionalised with several persons working on it, Google taking drastic
measures to penalise spam-techniques... and the 1-week effort websites (even
if you have good, quality content -- but it's just little) will get you
nowhere anymore. It is almost, exactly the same story.

~~~
clarky07
Yeah, it's definitely similar. Now, I would like to think I didn't cross into
the spam realm, but it's a very similar concept, and it's the same problem.
Without upkeep and continuous improvement the sites didn't last, and there is
a tipping point where you simply can't keep up with so many projects.

~~~
limeyy
Yeah, I didn't mean you were in the real of spam, neither was I. But you were
addressing "Chomp" update, hurting your sales, no idea what "Chomp" was but
with simple websites it happened the same, Google "improved" their search, but
while also hurting bonafide smaller websites, just seeing them as collateral
damage along the way to keep the real nasty stuff out.

Besides that, these days one needs to setup social media presence, monitor
that, be active there as well. And the whole thing of coding, design,
marketing... Is these days alot to handle as a one-man-band, doing this on
several projects. So yeah, focus, and go for 1-2 projects and develop those
really well, and hope for the best. But, I totally understand where you're
coming from.

~~~
clarky07
Yeah so Chomp was a small startup working on app store search that Apple
bought. End of June 2012 they did a huge update to the search algorithm, that
effected a lot of apps.

One of the biggest changes being that free app downloads were weighted much
higher. Until that point, I had only paid apps, and things were going pretty
well. Overnight, sales got hit really hard. One thing that I didn't really
include in the article, but I'm pretty happy with my ability to deal with
those changes as well as I was able to. I started adding free apps, and came
back pretty well.

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physcab
I'm wondering why you've chosen such a competitive category. You're in the
same league as Runkeeper, Nike, Fitbit, and all the other fitness trackers and
they make their income through the sale of devices so they can afford to put
their app up for free.

How about picking a niche that doesn't have their need satisfied yet and
charging money directly for that? Maybe designing a grader for teachers, or a
tool for gov workers to submit reports, or a business expense tracker. There
are lots of categories looking for a design overhaul and with just a little
bit of research and effort you can make your app stand out from the pack of
existing shitty solutions.

~~~
supercoder
On the flip side its competitive because there's a large market. It also means
people will be searching out such apps.

The problem with a niche, especially on the app store, is that if you can't
get people searching your app out then it's hard to break through.

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clarky07
OP here, feel free to ask any questions you might have.

~~~
jdrmar
Very interesting, and a bit similar to my entrepreneurial journey with
websites. Making a single very successful website is quite a challenge, as I
found out. What will be your main strategies making your apps successful? Pure
product focus? PR? Other forms of marketing?

~~~
clarky07
It'll definitely be a combination of product and pr. I've done lots of things
over the years with varying levels of success, but so far my success has been
mostly through product and App Store Optimization.

The new App Store Analytics Apple just released will be a big help though. I
have a lot of new ideas that I'll write about once I've given them a try.

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oisino
I built 6 apps for another ecosystem (Shopify
[https://apps.shopify.com/partners/socialproof-
it](https://apps.shopify.com/partners/socialproof-it)) and had very much the
same experience as you. We did the low fidelity approach like you and also
found that has diminishing returns as the app market matures. Once we started
focusing on one app for Shopify [https://apps.shopify.com/shopify-recurring-
payments](https://apps.shopify.com/shopify-recurring-payments) we found the
returns quickly dwarfed what we made before. For it allowed us to be the best
for thats all we did. I would recommend not focusing on two apps but just
doing one really well. Doing multiple apps means your mediocre in different
things takes all your energy to be the best. PS: Love the idea your going to
focus on Apple Watch no one is the market leader/expert so great place to be.

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cclogg
"The decline soon after? That’s the Chomp search update followed by iOS 6 and
the card app store layout. So sad."

Man, I do find that quite sad... the app store still has some major issues
with regards to discoverability. It's funny because you'd think as the app
store became more and more saturated, that they'd create more ways to deal
with that, but many of the changes have actually made it worse lol :/

~~~
clarky07
There is a lot of hate for the app store by developers, and i've dished out
some of it, but frankly with over a million apps it's not an easy problem to
solve.

I actually think the store is in a pretty decent state right now overall. You
can't possibly make everything very visible. It's a pretty good deal to be on
the shelves, now you just have to work harder on your own promotion.

~~~
MBCook
> ...but frankly with over a million apps it's not an easy problem to solve.

Maybe a perfect solution isn't easier, but it should be very easy to improve
the mess that is the app store. Let's start with a very simple suggestion:

Searching for an app by name should return that app.

Yeah. It's much better than it used to be (today when I search for Tweetbot it
pull up Tweetbot) but that hasn't always been the case. You still have the
issue that they clearly have a CDN with a slow refresh so that when an app is
first released you can find it via links online or features on the front of
the app store but not by searching the name.

~~~
nsxwolf
This was very disheartening to me when I was in the app store. Without a
direct App Store link it was difficult to get someone to download. You had to
swipe a random number of cards, sometimes quite a lot, to find the apps after
entering the exact name. The results were usually quite relevant - in that
they were competitors with similar but more popular apps.

It seems like an unjust reward for already successful apps - they're given the
right to steal search results for a competitor's app name.

~~~
clarky07
It's a balancing act. If you want to be found by searches for your title, you
have to have a branded title (that if needed you could trademark). If you want
to just use your top keyword as your name, it's going to be much harder to
rank for it. I think the best path is to use a small subtitle - "Branded Name
- Keyword Phrase"

That's a good way to be sure you can be found. If you type "Vima"[1] in the
app store, I guarantee you find my apps :-)

[1] Vima is greek for "pace", which is how we came up with it. Full title is
"Vima - GPS Run Tracker"

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jasonsync
You seem to have a fairly predictable sales cycle happening there.

Hope your next app is a "Winter App". Then you'll be able to sleep easy all
year long :-)

~~~
clarky07
Ha, yeah I've been working to fill in that gap. I did add a
skiing/snowboarding tracking app, but it doesn't have quite the same sales as
the others, and the skiing season doesn't really start until late
december/january. It is part of the reason january-march isn't as bad as oct-
dec.

Ideally, the next project will sell well year round :-)

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bhavvik
* do you work alone? * what metrics did you look at earlier and will look at going forward to justify starting to build a new app?

~~~
clarky07
I have a partner that does my graphic design, part time. I'm the only person
working full time.

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a3voices
Did your apps have viral, organic growth or was it mostly from your own
marketing efforts?

~~~
clarky07
I'd say organic mostly. I read stories of people making the most money they
ever made on launch day, and almost none after, but I've only had that
experience once, with Debt Snowball. And it still has made more over time than
it did at the launch.

~~~
a3voices
Interesting. How soon could you tell an app was going to take off and have a
lot of organic growth? Would you give up on an app if it didn't have enough
growth soon enough? Also how much was based on having the right search
keywords? Sorry if this is too many questions :).

~~~
clarky07
Usually pretty soon, but it definitely varied over time per app. I never gave
up too quickly, probably not quickly enough in some cases (I did an Apple
watch update last month for an app that hasn't made more than $10 a month in
the last 2 years.)

