

Profitable but poor, am I doing it right? - shaunfs

I have recently released an iPhone app product that I am really proud of. So far it's been out for about 5 weeks and has consistently sold 5-10 units per day with no marketing behind it. I was wondering if this is a normal start or subpar for other iPhone app developers? It's generating income, although $15 a day obviously isn't going to retire me anytime soon. I plan on releasing some additional products soon but I wanted to ask some other developers their opinion.<p>Does advertising your iPhone app work on mass-market websites or is it better to advertise on other iPhone apps? Any additional marketing methods that you would recommend?<p>Did you find your app orders increased naturally over time as word-of-mouth spread or did it plateau and require marketing efforts on your part to increase order volume?
======
aaronbrethorst
Try sending promo codes to people who work at: TSR (or WOTC or whatever it's
part of these days); Steve Jackson Games; Palladium (or whomever owns it now).

If Dragon Magazine is still around, send them a few promo codes too. Get
involved in D+D discussion forums and (politely) plug your app.

Maybe $1.99 is too high. Maybe not. I can't really judge that. I can tell you,
though—from experience as a developer and consumer of iPhone apps—that $0.99
is much more of an impulse purchase than $1.99 is.

Heck, maybe you can mark the app as "ON SALE! $0.99 for two weeks only! And
use that as part of your pitch to the aforementioned companies, magazines and
web forums."

~~~
shaunfs
Thanks for the helpful suggestions, I'm looking into them now. The 0.99 sale
sound like a good idea to test the waters. I tried to price it on the low end
compared to most of the competition.

~~~
mortenjorck
I can't agree enough with the importance of trying to reach the taste makers
in the industry. You may never reach them, but if you do, and you make a good
impression, it can completely transform your market presence.

No reason not to try, especially when the cost of doing so is so low.

~~~
shaunfs
Good point, worse case scenario is they ignore me and I lose nothing.

------
alain94040
$15/day is not _profitability_. It's gross revenue. You incurred costs to
develop the app (time).

That being said, it's a good start. Now spend a few hours promoting your app
to review sites and other places. That won't hurt. Note how I didn't say
_advertise_.

~~~
barmstrong
Sort of - if he hired an employee to develop it, then it'd be a cost but I
don't think his time really counts here.

Opportunity cost? Sure. When reporting it to the IRS so they can get social
security from what an equivalent employee would have cost? Yes. But I think
most entrepreneurs would call that profit...and not count their own time
(especially if it's nights/weekends).

~~~
shaunfs
Unfortunately if I counted my time I would be in the hole about 4-6k right
now.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
If you're considering this work/business then you count your time.

------
einarvollset
Some thoughts:

1\. You don't have enough reviews. Your app store search rankings will improve
once an actual rating is computed. Give away some apps, or even make it free
for a few days. Note that free apps == crap ratings however..

2\. The name: Was "dice roller" or "Die roller" taken? With the way the app
store search works, the easiest way to get traffic is to have a name that has
a high natural search volume. Basically, high search volume on google == high
search volume on the app store (in my experience 1/10th-1/20th).

3\. Do a free version supported by iAds. The CPM there is still high, I'm
seeing $10-$20CPM, and with 5-10 units per day at $1.99, you should be looking
at 2-300 units for a free version easily. Might also increase sales of full
version.

~~~
shaunfs
Thanks for the feedback.

1\. I will try to persuade some of my customers to submit app ratings.
Unfortunately the ratio of purchases to review seems to be about 70 to 1, at
least for this app.

2\. Dice roller was taken although die roller I think is open. I'll try to
tailor the name,description, and keywords to more heavily trafficked related
search terms. I did include some game names in the description which seems to
help with search some.

3\. I have a free version with iAds waiting for Apple review now. I'm hoping
that will help supplement the revenue and also drive sales to the paid
version. $10-20 CPM sounds great. I'm from a web background and traditional
website CPM is nowhere near that.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
One way I've found to get more app ratings from users is to monitor the number
of app launches and after, say, 5 of them, pop up a UIAlertView asking them to
rate the app. Saying "OK" opens the App Store URL. Saying "no" prompts them
once more later on, and then never prompts them again.

~~~
shaunfs
That is genius! I never even considered implementing a suggestion into the
app, seems like an easy way to obtain ratings as long as it's not too
intrusive. I'm definitely including it in future updates.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
If someone is willing to launch your app five times, they probably find it
useful, and ought to be pretty willing to rate it highly. Or at least, that's
the theory right? :)

~~~
einarvollset
I do this, but found it _tons_ more effective to open the "reviews" section of
the app itself. Lower friction, etc.

I was actually thinking of releasing some code that does this - essentially it
monitor the ratings an app gets and dynamically settle on the best time to ask
for a review.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Can you say more about this?

~~~
einarvollset
Basically, to open direct to reviews, you want to construct an 'itms-apps://'
url.

Then, rather than setting the "check at" interval to something fixed (which
also works well), you can have the app check in the background what it should
do.

So you can do things like: performSelector:withObject:afterDelay with a custom
message after a custom number of starts, or a minimum number of starts after
the app has been used for such-and-such a long time.

At the same time, you can monitor the reviews (frequency & stars) and vary
over your stats over time. Unfortunately you can't straight A/B test at the
same time, as you don't know who wrote which review, but you can A/B test if
you separate them by time.

Hope that helps. Feel free to contact me directly: einar@lcrnd.com

~~~
aaronbrethorst
here we go: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3374050/url-for-
sending-a...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3374050/url-for-sending-a-
user-to-the-app-review-page-on-devices-app-store)

thanks for the pointer!

------
patio11
Have a sale on me for good design and geekery.

There are a few RPG based startups here. Consider tapping (pun absolutely
intended) their audiences for reviews. RPG sites have ungodly poor
monetization, so you should be able to get nice ad deals with them. They get
it because gamers are poor, which bodes ill for you, but still...

SEO prints free money, in this and other niches. You should rank for
iPad/iPhone dice roll within a week or two of trying for it. Might as well,
right?

Get email addresses of prospects if you are staying in this niche! Next time
you launch app, hit list with a blast email. App store dynamics are very
sensitive to early momentum.

If you want to get better compensated for your time, I suggest making things
for people who have money and enjoy spending it. Middle aged women in
suburbia, for example.

------
brianimmel
Sorry no wisdom here, but looks really polished, great design.

I even like the nod to the low AT&T signal bars. :)

~~~
shaunfs
lol, sadly it's an actual screenshot from my phone. I'm lucky to get a bar or
two.

------
Rickasaurus
It looks pretty but there's already a bunch of dice rolling apps out there.
Saved formulas does look cool though.

It might be worth it to take out an ad in a D&D mag or a site with high
traffic.

~~~
shaunfs
That's true, there are quite a few dice rolling apps out there. This was my
first time coding in objective-c so I wanted to keep the app concept simple
yet still related to D&D.

I've started looking into the magazine ads and related websites recently
although the minimum spend might require me to wait for a month or two since I
want to try and keep this business completely self-funded.

------
AmitinLA
So one of the major cake mix companies spent millions of dollars developing a
no-mix no-stir cake mix product that, though a great product, ended up being a
terrible failure largely because buyers of the mix felt like they weren't
doing enough work.

Even though this may be an apocryphal story (I can't find a link on Google), I
think it illustrates an important point about user experience. As someone who
has played tabletop games, physically rolling dice was an integral part of the
game because it was, to romanticize it, the closest physical analogue I was
going to get to actually slaying that diamond spider. Pulling out an iPhone to
roll dice doesn't have that same appeal, and in addition, you are trying to
supplant a long-standing ritual that is inextricably associated with tabletop
games.

This is, of course, merely a possibility to consider. Personally, I would talk
to more customers, if you haven't, or even test them out at local gaming
nights and see what people are reacting too. See what other products gamers
and DMs need -- after all there are over 20 million of them out there for D&D
alone according to Wiki, which is a big enough market to make money out of.
Maybe DMs would like a way to manage characters or stats, for example. Build a
brand out of related, high-quality products in the process.

~~~
nimblegorilla
From a player's perspective I think you are right that part of the fun is
physically rolling dice. If you run one of these games as a GM you might tire
of the romantic dice rolling.

------
d_r
Good luck on your quest!

You get 50 promo codes for each version of your app. Share them with everyone!
Number of daily downloads for your app affects the ranking (as may other
factors). Then, update your app often to get more promo codes.

There are forums on MacRumors and TouchArcade where you can post promo codes
of your app -- they'll be downloaded very quickly. You can ask people to leave
an honest review/stars (although most people don't tend to leave reviews after
downloading.) FWIW, on MacRumors you'll need to create an account and log in
to see the "Code sharing" forum.
(<http://forums.macrumors.com/forumdisplay.php?f=136>)

To get reviews you should do what aaronbrethorst wrote and make a popup after
N launches. The top apps (say, Angry Birds or Doodle Jump) also employ this
technique.

------
arn
Trying to succeed in the App Store is a whole different world in itself.

In general advertising is tough for any $1.99 product. For this particular
product I'd say it's even tougher. A dice roller is simply not a mass market
product. So most of your advertising dollars are going to be wasted on people
who don't care.

Asking sites for reviews and maybe even finding some D&D-type sites that would
be willing to look at it and review it would be your best bet -- and just
takes your time.

An ad-supported version may help visibility, but don't rely on iAds alone. The
fill rates are not high enough. Alternatively, if there's a simple way to make
a Lite version without giving away the whole thing, that can also be a way to
get increased visibility.

~~~
shaunfs
It is definitely a very niche product, possibly to my detriment. I'm in the
process now of requesting reviews from the larger related sites. I definitely
agree with the lite version, I have one waiting in the app approval process
now. It has some of the functionality and an ability to upgrade within the
application.

Thanks for the feedback!

------
gte910h
You might find the cost _is too low_.

The app store will buy more copies of an app at 4.99 than at 1.99 sometimes.

Try a 3.99 price point for a few weeks and see if your sales drop off at all.
Make sure you get a weekend in.

I suggest something like AppFigures/AppNanny to track the dailies.

------
iworkforthem
you are making some money from it, so you have to be doing something right.
next there are a few options; \- develop and grow existing user base. \-
create more apps. u have to decide which works best for you, i think marketing
is over rated. unless i want to create a brand name which i want to keep, it
can still pretty profitable focusing on the above 2 options.

but if u must market your app, make it worthwhile for your effort. e.g. i
would give out coupons or version of my paid apps for users who give me
feedback or ideas. it worked really well for me so far. i give something that
they want, and if the idea is any good i can create something that solve a
problem. that pays really well.

------
frossie
Do you mind saying what the app is?

~~~
shaunfs
<http://bit.ly/axJcJp>

------
sliverstorm
Perhaps (dare I say it) there just aren't enough table-top gamers left? It
certainly seemed to be on a steep decline as I exited my teenage years :(

~~~
shaunfs
It's sad but true, with MMOs and epic single player RPGs for the desktop and
consoles available tabletop gaming is on the decline. I'm hoping to build some
tools to help make tabletop gaming less about the math and physical
book/paperwork management and more about the social and imaginative experience
that is difficult to replicate in the video game space. All I have at the
moment is a dice roller though :)

