
Ask HN: got to 33 in the App Store. Now what? - allenbrunson
It seemed to me like my iPhone card game was making a suspiciously high amount of money per day. Over 100 bucks, four days in a row. So I checked the top paid apps list for my category, and I'm number 33.<p>Erm. This is thrilling, and terrifying. What should I do? My game is currently $2.99 -- should I make it lower, in hopes of getting higher up the chart? Should I make it higher, to take advantage of my sudden popularity?<p>Anybody with experience in this topic, please speak up.
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davidedicillo
The algo used by Apple to calculate the rankings take counts (most probably)
of the past 4 days of sales. My suggestion is now that you are up there to
push sales as much as possible. A sale would definitely help, maybe $1.99
($0.99 is synonymous of low quality) and see if you can get any friends or
people you know to download the app right now. See if you get at least in the
top 25, so that your app will show up in the first page of apps on the iPhone.

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allenbrunson
that's probably the right thing to do. i'm thinking about it.

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danielh
I can't comment on the pricing, but IMHO both the description and the support
website have room for improvement.

Half of the short description I see in iTunes describes what the app can't do
(no multiplayer over Internet). Only when I click on "more", I see the wealth
of features. You could write "play with your friends on a local Wifi" and move
the disclaimer to the extended description. Put a feature on top instead, like
"robot players are pretty good".

On the website, there is a lot of text, which is good because it shows you
care. But make sure the features don't get lost in the details. Make them
stand out and list the most exciting feature first. Strong robots and easy
multiplayer game setup are probably more interesting than a Default.png
graphic. Mentioning Default.png will only confuse them anyway, unless most of
your potential customers are iPhone developers.

Also, put the iTunes Store links on the bottom as well, so your visitor does
not have to scroll all the way back up.

Just my 2c, I hope you find some of it useful.

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allenbrunson
All good points. Working on the text now.

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colinplamondon
You're not stable yet, since volume goes WAY up once you're in the Top 25 of a
category. It then goes through the roof when you're in the Top 5. Even though
you're seeing great sales now, you need to push into the Top 25 to see
phenomenal sales. To be safe, get into the Top 15, that way you have more
margin to work with in the day to day rank fluctuation.

Drop to $1.99 for two days and see if you continue gaining in rank. We were
able to blast past tons of 99 cent apps with Free Audiobooks at $1.99 and get
to #2 in Books within three days, so it's not a big deal. Games is way
different from books, though, so try $1.99 for 2-3 days, then give 99 cents a
shot.

Also, grab Applyzer (applyzer.com) for this, it's awesome- hourly rank
tracking for $3/month. If you stall out or otherwise see your rank starting to
slide, drop to 99 to give a boost. That recovers your momentum and, after 24
hours or so, you can put your price back to $1.99. There's a LOT more to rank
management, but this is how we're able to maintain the #1 and #2 paid
positions in Books for weeks on end, barring when Apple features a competitor.

Good luck :)

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allenbrunson
Okay, consensus seems to be that I should drop it to $1.99 and see how that
goes. So I did. fingers crossed.

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aresant
Your application seems slightly more niche for your category, I'm not sure
that a lower price is going to necessarily drive up sales but I absolutely
encourage you to test - I dont see how lowering the price could send you
backwards.

I have experience with two completely opposite end of the spectrum apps in the
store – one puzzle game that is doing 7 – 10 sales a day on average for ~1yr
and one free app that’s been downloaded over 1 million times (after making it
free) and makes respectable money on advertising.

~~~
allenbrunson
Before I crippled it, my free game was getting downloaded between 50 and 120
times per day. Do you think I could get any kind of decent ad money on that?
What ad network do you recommend?

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aresant
Has much more to do with use and display.

Ad rate CPMs are good for mobile, use <http://admob.com/> (I spent months
testing) and integrate it right on top of the user experience.

EG - FORCE your users to see it.

If you have high application engagement (Eg lots of play) you'll earn some
decent money.

Average is $3 - 5 CPM (thousands of views) and if you have a sticky game that
can boil down to $3+ per uer lifetime value, which is better than app store.

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rubyrescue
just clicked through to your blog - the more interesting story is how you
crippled the free version that had 30k downloads and the subsequent fallout.
really interesting! don't back down now!

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wingo
Yes I enjoyed that as well. Nice hack!

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allenbrunson
Dang. It's nice to hear you guys say stuff like this. I've gotten a hundred
emails per day calling me a crook, a money-grubber, a cheat, and worse. I was
starting to doubt myself.

But it did indeed work. I forced a whole lot of those 30,000 Hearts Solo
players to upgrade. But at this point, that can't account for all of it. The
number of Hearts Solo downloads has peaked, and is trending down. But the
number of people buying Hearts Net is still going up.

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boucher
If your app just randomly stops working, and enough people tell Apple about
it, they'll pull the app. It's a violation of the app store terms.

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allenbrunson
huh. didn't know that. can you show me the relevant sections in the agreement?
maybe i can slightly un-cripple it in a way that would comply with their
terms.

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hyung
If I were in your position, I'd do a few things simultaneously:

\- Cut the price to $1.99.

\- Contact as many app review sites and forums as possible and tell them that,
thanks to support from the community, you've decided to reduce the price for a
few days, and give away a few copies of the game.

\- Give the sites promo codes that they can give away/promote for you.

Generally speaking, I've found that total revenue remains about the same
regardless of your price. But what you have is a relatively interesting
talking point (spike in sales) that you may be able to use to get other people
to promote the game for you.

(I've previously had a game in the top 10 paid games.)

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ajross
Number 33 in the App Store is only making $100/day?

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azsromej
And, of course, some categories do more volume than others. I hit the top 10
in a category and was making < $100/day

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allenbrunson
what category is that? seems like it would be a good optimization to try to
hit parts of the store that don't have much competition.

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dirtbox
Honestly? Make a sequel with more features/games ASAP and drop the price of
the first to $1.99. You'll have your very own cash cow.

Assuming of course that it didn't take you a year to create the first.

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varaon
I've read through your blog posts, and while I agree with your "crippling" of
the free version, I don't agree with how it was done.

With Hearts Solo, are there not better ways to make a trial version of a game
than to randomly interrupt a match? Most trial software makes the user aware
of how they will be limited - e.g. disabled features, time limits, and
limitations on the number of usages.

Wouldn't having a maximum of X hours of playtime (or a similar strategy) on
Solo have been more user friendly?

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allenbrunson
Well, I'm a total marketing n00b, twiddling knobs here.

I knew there was a great deal of demand for the game. For example, when I
briefly made Hearts Net free, it was being downloaded 3500 times per day. Then
I put it back to non-free, and it was barely ticking along at 5 bucks in sales
a day.

I looked at things like in-app purchasing and ad networks, but that seemed
like a lot of work. I was very frustrated with the experience at that point,
and was just about to quit altogether. Doing even more development didn't seem
like a good use of my time. So this seemed like the easiest way to stop
competing with myself, with the least amount of effort.

Now that I'm getting some encouraging signs, I'll probably reevaluate the
situation and see if I can come up with something better.

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allenbrunson
clickable link to my game:

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hearts-net/id353101111?mt=8>

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John212
Bought a copy.. good luck =)

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allenbrunson
thanks!

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gursikh
This is probably what you were going to do anyway, but here goes:

1\. Reduce the price by a dollar. Track for a week, see if profits increase.
If they don't jack the price back up.

2\. If they do, reduce the price even more, track the profits. If this causes
profit to decrease, jack the price back up.

The idea is to figure out where the ideal market price is. It might be lower
than you expect.

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charlesju
Buy some fancy clothes before the IRS takes half. haha

Congratulations. Breaking into any top ranks of the app store is always
exciting. I would ask yourself if there is a long-term, after-work, or short-
term play here and act accordingly.

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joeld42
I think the "words with friends" model works very well. There's a free
version, it's identical except that it shows a small banner add on the main
menu, and shows you a full-screen ad after every move. It's not very intrusive
but you can't really ignore it either.

It was enough to make me upgrade to the full ($2.99) version after playing for
a week. And if users don't upgrade, you still get the ad revenue.

Take a look if you haven't tried it yet.

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mikek
Please let us know the results of your experiment in a future HN post. There
is not much info out there on the results of these kind of experiments.

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allenbrunson
Man, you're telling me! I'm just shooting in the dark here. This sudden bit of
success took me totally by surprise.

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vijayr
Have a feature like "buy one get one free", so someone can buy a copy for
himself and gift a copy to a friend. Its better than lowering the price.

~~~
sonpo
Interesting idea - how can this be accomplished? Require the purchaser to send
an iTunes receipt and the email address of the friend (to whom a promo code is
sent)? I can't think of an automated technique, so perhaps that's the only
way.

Is there a smarter solution I am unaware of?

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gte910h
Toss out a new version with a "tell people about me" feature where they can
email a link or twitter about it.

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there
raise the price.

~~~
allenbrunson
is that based on actual experience? have you had a program in one of the top
100 lists?

you know what, i just looked, and my game is in fact in the top one hundred
list in every single country on the app store. my highest ranking is 17, in
lebanon. whew!

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hockeybias
I completely agree with davidedicillo.

