
How our app went from $20,000/day to $2/day in revenue - twapi
https://medium.com/swlh/how-our-app-went-from-20-000-day-to-2-day-in-revenue-d6892a2801bf#.m5f6hnz1x
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no_wave
Next keyboard has a 2.5 rating on the app store right now for the current
version of the app.

Here's a comment from the article:

\--------------------

I appreciate this case study, but I feel it doesn’t cover everything.

I backed you on Kickstarter, and you didn’t deliver the features you said you
would, even ones that were mainstays of that campaign. Swipe to type, as an
example. After beta it just slowly… faded away with little or no communication
from you guys.

I believed you when you said you wanted to fix the keyboard, but yet-another-
theme won’t do that. More stickers won’t do that. What excited me about Next,
initially, was that it seemed like you were going to push the envelope on
input methods and keyboard user experience.

Unfortunately, every time I’ve used Next it’s been extremely unstable to the
point of being unusable, so you didn’t come close on the things you did
deliver. I actually think I had a better experience with it in test flight.

We can blame this on Apple APIs, but I’ve used a number of other keyboard
replacements and they haven’t had crazy issues. That includes GBoard, which
can be slow loading but then runs smoothly where it counts: when you’re using
it.

I know I’m being more than a little bitter, but I wanted you to win.

I’m very sorry to hear that you have to sunset this project, and I’m a big fan
of your previous work. I’m also looking forward to what’s next.

But I hope that you spend more time making it work than making it cute.

\--------------

Meaning that the answer to the byline - "How our app went from $20,000/day to
$2/day in revenue" \- is probably "the product wasn't very good".

The pertinent question for these articles is often why the founders thought
they could pull of what they were doing with the budget they had in the first
place.

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spoonie
A well written, sober reflection on a business venture that didn't pan out.
The author has deliberately made the title a bit baitey, though: $20,000/day
in the app store for a handful of days (based on the graph they posted),
maybe. It's not like they went from $20,000/day for months down to $2/day.

------
nanis
I was expecting an explanation for why they sold a bunch and no more after a
few days.

~~~
Fej
My guess: being on one of the top lists in an app store is a _ton_ of
exposure. One of the biggest problems with selling apps is getting people to
know it exists. Once it fell off the top paid apps list, it suddenly got far,
far harder for people to find it, thus the dramatic drop in sales.

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connorjburton
Wasn't really $20,000/day was it, more like $2/day with a $20,000 spike. These
articles are such crap.

