

FinalTouch Income Report #1 - ThomPete
http://000fff.org/incomereport/

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mladenkovacevic
I'm not sure how your app's interface works.. but there might be a potential
audience with digital artists/painters, who use Wacom tablets and often have
to go into very precise details on tablets that are generally much smaller
than their display monitors. Slowing down the mouse on-the-fly could give them
added creative flexibility.

Again i'm not sure how this works and perhaps simply zooming in gives them
this same advantage but just maybe something to explore. A good community to
start with is <http://www.conceptart.org>

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ThomPete
thnx

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mirkules
Great post, especially about the Accessibility niche. You might be onto
something there.

A quick note: "I am losing possible customers because it's not 100% clear what
FinalTouch is and how it works."

Nowhere in the blog post did I see a description of what FinalTouch actually
does -- I had to go to the product page to find out after reading about the
paralyzed man. Considering this is your first blog post about the product, it
would probably be beneficial to have one sentence at the top. Still, I can't
wait for the second post of the series.

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ThomPete
Duly noted. I have now changed the intro. Hope this helps.

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positr0n
Can someone please explain the graphs in this post? I am not familiar with
whatever software generates them and there is no legend.

What do the different colors mean? What are the red dots?

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ThomPete
Hey I can understand the confusion. Will add a legend.

First there are 4 data points.

1\. Total number of visitors 2\. How many of those are mac users 3\. How many
of those clicked on the "Buy" button 4\. How many bought (those are the red
dots)

As you can see in the vertical axis it's a laymans logarithmic scale since I
had high numbers of visitors compared to how many bought the app.

Second

I actually hand crafted the graph.

1\. Getting number from Analytics + numbers from App store

2\. putting them into a google document spreadsheet
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0As_7Yc_iucRqdGo...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0As_7Yc_iucRqdGoyU0ROUDhfRWcteE4wckhPaTlDNnc&hl=en_US)

3\. Then building the basic graph in illustrator 4\. Styling it in FireWorks

Do I wish there were an easier way for what I want to accomplish?

You bet!

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timeuser
Reviews and ratings are very important on the App Stores and you don't have
any for your app yet. It's a bit of a chicken and egg type problem to get
those first reviews but they are really important. I don't know of a good
solution for getting genuine user reviews reliably other than asking in-app.
That's something that's done often in iOS apps, but I haven't seen it in a Mac
app. It can be annoying and intrusive so it's definitely something to consider
carefully. I don't have your app, perhaps you could suggest a user review in
an intro screen that comes up the first time your app launches?

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chc
A non-App Store version is probably a good idea — I've heard from developers
who offer them that the website version is a decent portion of their sales.
But don't put in a lot of effort to cater to people on OS X versions older
than 10.6, and I say that as somebody who regularly uses Macs with 10.4 and
10.5. That's a demonstrably stingy demographic whose numbers are decreasing
all the time — not a good investment.

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ThomPete
Thnx for the feedback. Do you have any recommendations for "app store"
services I can use?

Alternatively I guess I have to use something like paypal.

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nicky0
I have used and recommend FastSpring.

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vorbby
As far as your conclusions at the end, you're right. You definitely need to be
better at letting people know what your app does. It took me until the
anecdote about the paralyzed man to even have the tiniest idea of what your
app did.

Of course, this also likely wasn't intended to be marketing material, but
considering it made the front page of HN, it very well is now.

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ThomPete
Yeah I agree. Probably a video is the way to go.

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pkamb
Do you feel having your own homepage is important? I wonder if the conversion
rate would be higher if you funneled people directly into the Mac App Store
web link.

I'm now two weeks in, selling two Mac Apps: one for $2 and the other for $99.
Thanks for the blog post, I'll be doing the same when I get back results for
the month.

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ThomPete
pkamb it's a good question. As someone pointed out, until I get the reviews
(and they are good) I have to do what I can to attract traffic.

From everything Apple is great it their reporting system is like waiting in
line in the Soviet Union pre 89. So unstable reporting and when it's finally
there so horribly lacking.

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karolist
Were there no natural sales from people just browsing the app store? Author
doesn't mention these anywhere.

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ThomPete
There where natural sales. In fact before i submitted to HN i had 5 sales.
Most probably because I was in the New category.

~~~
karolist
Thanks for getting back, this shoves some reality into the ideas I had about
relying on natural sales mostly in my upcoming app.

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ra
Sounds like you've definitely brightened up one mans life!

Congratulations on identifying a niche, I look forward to future installments.

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option1138
$630? Why is this on the front page? Why does anyone even care? This is not
important.

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dzine
adding a testimonial from the paralyzed man and any other satisfied customers
on your front page might go a long way to show how your app can be useful to
certain niche markets.

