

Show HN: A side project possibly worth showing - Wordaholic on the android - achinb

Just to get experienced with the android platform, my friend and I came up with a game called Wordaholic.  Our aim was simple - create a game that would help us learn the platform, that would pay off our initial investment of $25 for the android market, that would help us see how we can market the app (that's not going too well), and create a rewarding side project separate from the day job.  A major reason we did get motivated to do this is after reading all the posts in HN telling us to get off our butts and do something - anything (sorry, long time lurker, first time poster here).<p>I am happy to say that after almost a month on the market most of the goals were met!  I post this today as we cross the $25 revenue generated via ads.  I still don't have a sense of marketing, but we do have approximately 1900 active users of the game, and is growing daily!  Any marketing ideas are greatly appreciated.<p>Some shameless self promotion - our game is on the android market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.smallsteps .  We also have a write up on my website: http://www.achinbatra.com/firstapp .  Any suggestions, comments are welcome.  Thanks!
======
EricR23
Oh! Random idea. How about having multiple levels of difficulty?

"Every 5 words you gain an additional 15 seconds. "

Easy would be, say, every 5 words gives you 20 more seconds. Medium would be
15 seconds, and hard would be 10 seconds. Something like that!

~~~
achinb
Yeah, that actually makes more sense right. Right now the normal, lightning,
and chaos modes have very little to differentiate each other from.
Essentially, the normal mode is 4 times as long as the chaos mode, with really
no other difference. At least varying the seconds would make the difficulty
more palpable.

------
achinb
Just to add, what are your ideas to promote such apps? We are looking forward
to create a lot more.

------
cstrouse
If you could include a tournament ladder that requires a paid version of the
app it might work.

~~~
achinb
We do have an online leaderboard. Is that what you are referring to ? For the
paid version, we were thinking to remove all the ads - price it around $1.99 ?
I think one thing we do have to improve is the speed of the submission of a
word. Seems like its quite slow on older gen phones.

------
EricR23
Cool! Nice job, looks great for a first app :)

