
Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally - jerols
https://medium.com/developers-writing/how-to-launch-a-mac-app-and-become-1-top-paid-app-globally-4434bbfb51ee
======
ericjang
It's interesting that their views on competition run counter to what YC /
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'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.

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.

On another note... the Vimeo ad they released
[https://vimeo.com/145400917](https://vimeo.com/145400917) 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?

~~~
stevesearer
My office setup is almost exactly what you describe. Switch out the macbook
for an imac and then add a height adjustable desk, some headphones, and a
hydroflask.

The article though was pretty effective in making me want to try the app since
I make a handful of pdfs and exporting from photoshop is a pain since I always
forget the settings I want to use to make the file not gigantic.

But to your point, I kind of like the idea that people can make a business
like this and eke out a nice income and have happy customers. It reminds me of
a tooth whitening supply company I temped for a while back. They had 4
employees and were 100% happy with the number of customers they had and would
get more via tradeshows, dentists liked their product, and the profits were
really good. I imagine the owners knew that at a certain size managing the
business would not allow them to live the lifestyle they enjoyed, so they just
maintained it as is.

~~~
Denzhadanov
Well, PDF Expert can potentially bring $10M a year if we do it right. We just
feel that the PDF experience with Adobe isn't great... And for people who work
with PDFs that does matter.

Speaking about lifestyle business: we definitely decided not to do it. It's
been 7 years, we grew to 85 people and 45 million users... that is why we are
aiming for something that is much bigger and has much more impact! Have a look
at Spark!

~~~
maguay
Here's to hoping you bring Spark to the Mac ;)

On PDF Expert, one feature I'd love to see would be an option to add links to
sections of images in a PDF. That's the only thing I use Acrobat for, and it'd
be incredible to be able to quit using it forever.

------
petejansson
Purely from a user'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's handled. Users don't generally want scores of update
daemons running, and the whole business of "On launch, check for update,
notify the user and let them choose whether to update now" really feels like
the web page pop-ups that are so popular. ("I launched the app to do work, not
to see if there was an update. The update prompt is in my way.") This cries
out for a better user experience.

~~~
apineda
Update on the way out? ie. Pop up with two options "close" and "update and
close", at least this time you've already accomplished what you were after
with the application.

~~~
jonknee
Maybe it's just me, but when I am ready to quit an app the last thing I want
to do is go through an update process.

~~~
ascagnel_
Especially one that will relaunch the app when it's done.

Ideally, you'd want a system-level daemon that downloads and preps updates in
the background, and either waits until the system is idle (I think Apple has
some tech like this already for running Time Machine backups), with pending
updates optionally installed on system shutdown (am I shutting down to save on
battery, to restart, or because I'm about to leave the office and I don't care
how long it takes for the system to shut down).

~~~
seltzered_
I think Kelly Sutton (of the late layervault) figured this out with his fork
of sparkle, called "autosparkle" \-
[https://github.com/layervault/Sparkle](https://github.com/layervault/Sparkle)
. I haven't personally integrated it into my app yet, but supposedly it makes
updates a much more silent process - which is really important for 'always-on'
tray apps like layervault was, or the one I'm making.

Here's their announcement of it from 2013:
[http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/50501747774/open-
sourced-a...](http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/50501747774/open-sourced-
autosparkle)

------
colmvp
It'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't
watch the video (didn't even know they had them until I checked today) but
instead read what it's like to use the application from a couple different
designers.

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.

In fact, all of what I end up installing and using comes from the backs of
people rather than videos. Maybes it's a generational thing.

~~~
Denzhadanov
Thanks for your comment, but from my experience - a good video can benefit
greatly to the product. And true, younger crowd prefers video to the text :)

------
zkhalique
How do they get in touch with that "App Store Business Management" they spoke
about? It's not like they make their emails available for any Joe Developer to
talk to them.

~~~
pavlov
I'm wondering about the same thing:

 _Apple is being very helpful these days, and they want developers to succeed.
That is why you really should keep in touch with App Store Business Management
and keep them updated on what you’re building and when you’re getting ready
for a launch._

It's a highly rarefied group of developers who have a contact in App Store
management that would be interested in hearing about an upcoming launch.

~~~
zkhalique
And how do they achieve it? Where do they even start?

We have two apps that have had nearly 4 million downloads across both app
stores. Here's been the growth of our Mac app, for example:
[http://qbix.com/calendar](http://qbix.com/calendar) . Our average reviews are
very close to 5 stars out of 5 after thousands of reviews.

It's all organic. People just found us in the store. We were never contacted
by Apple to get featured, and we had no way of contacting them, that we knew
of. So I'm curious. It's not just about numbers.

~~~
pavlov
The article mentions that they've been on iOS for almost eight years, so they
must have been in the App Store at the very start. I imagine that helps to
build a relationship.

That also makes their advice on this point rather difficult to apply. It's
sort of like this marketing advice:

"It can be really helpful if the New York Times writes a two-pager about you.
You should call up your contact on the editorial team in advance and tell them
about what you're doing, so the story will be ready on launch day."

~~~
stevoski
The author of the article has an answer to this question: "Go to WWDC"

------
bluedino
10\. Release a quality app

It's not a buggy, slow, unusable piece of crap that a lot of low-end software
is. It's easy to use and it works well.

------
jobu
The time-limited trial is essential for selling productivity software,
unfortunately most companies are doing it wrong.

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's definitely worth a purchase. It's too bad more
developers don't design their trials this way.

[1] - [http://www.scootersoftware.com/](http://www.scootersoftware.com/)

~~~
babuskov
I find time limited trials useless. For user, it is inconvenient, because
maybe the time is not enough to test complex software. For developers it's bad
because user can simply reinstall the software again when trial period is
over.

In my apps, I limit the amount of data you can store in trial version. So, you
can try it as much as you can. For example, if your software was an e-mail
client, you could limit it to 30 messages in any folder (inbox, sent, trash).

~~~
SyneRyder
Depends how you do it. Many apps that use time trials will often leave behind
some preference file or registry key to block re-installing.

But it's probably not worth building that into your software (I don't) -
customers will either get so sick of reinstalling every 30 days that they just
buy your software, or they're so poor that they were never really going to be
a customer anyway, so you may as well let them continue with the workaround
until they can afford it.

Time trials can be useful though. While most customers buy within the first
day of use (and typically the first hour!), anyone who tracks metrics knows
that expiring the trial version also generates a boost in sales around day 29
/ day 30 of the trial.

------
ThomPete
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.

The number one factor which he alluded to is which pricing strategy to follow.
My app is not 70 but 9.99.

I too am using a time limited version and I am realizing that this isn't the
best approach for my app either. So I am working towards something like what
Sublime is doing.

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.

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.

~~~
zerr
How did/do you market/promote it?

~~~
ThomPete
A combination. HN was a good first boost
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007)

Then got in contact with a lot of websites. Was lucky to get som really good
reviews on LifeHacker and MacUpdate plus other places. And then people started
telling their friends about it.

Plus I have an email list now with +10K customers or potential customers.

------
FussyZeus
_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._

Kudos to someone else who actually wants to make money these days, not just
spark investor interest, burn a ton of other people's money and then retire to
write a book while their company goes down in flames.

------
hooloovoo_zoo
I'm trying to figure out what's so great about this app. Is it just that it's
available on iOS and OSX?

~~~
stevoski
It scratches an itch.

It is polished.

It works well.

They marketed it like hell.

~~~
ascagnel_
It's a few steps above Preview.app (Apple's built-in PDF viewer), but without
all the bloat and the high price of Acrobat.

And it probably doesn't have anywhere near as many security vulnerabilities as
Acrobat.

------
n0on3
Nice article. On a completely unrelated subject, the guy in the video left the
machine unlocked. Bad guy.

------
jmnicolas
> 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.

$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.

A bit like an iPhone in fact. I could afford one, but I don'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 "rich people bubble" where money
grows on trees and 70 bucks for a PDF reader or almost a grand for a
smartphone is just chump change.

~~~
flybirdx101
But other PDF editors cost a lot more. PDFpen is worth $75, and Adobe Acrobat
DC costs like $450 if purchased fully, not by subscription model.

Finally, it all depends on what exactly you need from the app. Fast, reliable
and well-designed software can't be cheap - and I don't think it should.

~~~
bigger_cheese
I must admit I found the proposed $60 price a bit shocking when I read the
article. Surely there are free software solutions which do much the same
thing. I believe Okular can do most of the things the article alluded to.

~~~
flybirdx101
That's true, $60 would be too much for current set of features. But this is a
supposed price for updated version, which will be released soon, which
includes powerful PDF editing features as well (similar to those in Acrobat
Pro, for example).

