

An App Store Experiment - appbot
http://stuartkhall.com/posts/an-app-store-experiment

======
citricsquid
I feel like I'm missing something, the post keeps saying you need to "create a
story around your product" and "you need to sell your app with a story" yet
the post never explains what this means, or does it, instead he has made a
cool app that wasn't selling and made it free instead and people installed it
and liked it. Doesn't this post demonstrate the problems with selling vs.
free, not story this or story that?

~~~
sgdesign
I think his point was that he _didn 't_ do that, and sure enough he wasn't
able to generate any intest around the paid version.

~~~
dmarusic16
I think you're all missing the point. His post is the 'story' behind the app.
This post is the marketing.

~~~
31reasons
Yeah. I guess now all those app review sites will cover his app.

------
thenomad
I really don't want to be That Hacker News Comment, but isn't the story here
essentially "made an app, tried to sell it, didn't get the success I wanted,
gave up"? Or is there some major benefit to the reviews and download figures
for the free version I'm not seeing?

(Although this does tell us one very interesting thing - that a topical app on
the App Store, with minimal marketing, can get huge downloads if it shifts
from paid to free.)

The part of this story that really impresses me is actually the $440 revenue.
That's not at all bad for an MVP, and demonstrates there's a market and that
the app sells. Those are the kind of indicators I'd look for before pumping a
lot more time into the app and attempting to turn it into a real business.

There's every chance - particularly given the subsequent good reviews - that
this app could have been an $xxxx/mo success.

Any chance OP can push an update and upsell his happy customers to a paid
version, I wonder?

~~~
jevinskie
> "didn't get the success I wanted"

I believe this whole project was an experiment in how successful your app can
be when you try out strategies X,Y, and Z.

------
andrewljohnson
I also made one of our apps free for a day. It was also 1st in the nav
category in the US, and many, many other countries.

People shouldn't misinterpret this bump. It's largely because there are a
billion robots monitoring prices, and you get a bunch of marketing from these
robots when you shift from paid to free. And there are "journalists" who watch
the bots and add to the clamor. And there are people who will never pay, but
will take a free app.

I don't think going free translates to sales later, though it can be useful
for reviews. It was also problematic for us because our app hit servers, and
was not self-contained.

Another time, Amazon made another of our apps the free Android app of the day.
This resulted in 120K downloads in a day, but only scant residual sales, most
of which came from an Amazon accounting error.

~~~
RealCasually
Was the accounting error that you got paid some % of your retail price for
each free download?

~~~
andrewljohnson
As far as I can tell, they kept the app free for a small amount of time after
the 24 hours was up, and paid us for those downloads. I was never sure I
interpreted the data right though.

------
sgdesign
I find it frustrating that you basically have no chance of getting coverage on
blogs unless you spend your life "building a relationship" with bloggers.
Look, I don't want to "build a relationship". I want to build an app!

And I know bloggers get a ton of email every day, and not everything is worth
covering, but it would be nice to get at least a reply saying "no thanks" once
in a while instead of just being ignored…

/rant

~~~
acgourley
Bloggers will not drive much traffic to your app, do not worry about this. You
need to be in the top lists or have a repeatable paid marketing strategy. And
usually bloggers will not give you enough of a bump to initially crack the top
lists, unless it's a huge amount of them and all synchronized... which would
never happen from cold tip submission anyway.

------
poxrud
If anything, I found his post discouraging. He's built a great app and only
managed to get people to notice it when he made it free. If a top20 app only
managed to earn under $500 what does it say about the current state of the app
market?

~~~
tomg
I'm surprised the author isn't putting ads on the free version.

~~~
kybernetyk
He should wait to see how the free graph will develop after a few days/weeks
because chances are that download numbers will fall pretty quickly to
~1000/day.

~~~
jbigelow76
Why wait until he's flamed out then? The same amount of dev time will have be
spent whether he adds ads on day 2 or day 20, why miss the bulk of his
opportunity at the top of the charts?

------
shimfish
I think what isn't understood, even though it is completely obvious, is that
people need to know about your app. Emailing a few blogs really isn't going to
do it. For anyone to know about your app, it has to hit a major, major
website. (Some fluff piece mentioning "app store" in the title seems a good
way to get on to HN)

I think what happened here is that one of the major sources of app discovery
now are the "Apps Gone Free" apps. It was precisely because it used to be a
paid app that suddenly was free that suddenly put it in front of so many
people.

Now, if the app is truly worth recommending then it could become paid again
and word of mouth will generate sales.

Again, this is all completely obvious but there's still some magical thinking
when it comes to the app store that somehow normal rules of selling a product
don't apply.

------
sockgrant
His article doesn't really follow through on anything.

He says he wanted to experiment on how to make a successful app in the app
store. He theorizes that "making a story" behind your product is most
important.

He neither explains how he "made a story", nor does he attempt to explain why
his app became successful. Doesn't he have any insight into why switching to
'free' had such a large impact?

------
melling
He went free and only had seven other apps in his category, and he made a few
dollars.

My question is what does it take to build a real business in the app store?
Companies have to pay employees, etc. Are 1% of the companies making most of
the money? I think it's going to be hard to build a company 99 cents at a
time.

~~~
talkingquickly
This post from flurry [1] suggests that a big chunk of revenue is going to a
small proportion of very successful developers (there was a HN post about
which companies they were but I can't find it now).

That said it also suggests that revenue is increasingly moving down the long
tail which may be a sign small app companies may become more viable.

[1] [http://blog.flurry.com/bid/88014/The-Great-Distribution-
of-W...](http://blog.flurry.com/bid/88014/The-Great-Distribution-of-Wealth-
Across-iOS-and-Android-Apps)

------
alexkearns
Now he has the story he needed for his app.

------
Pxtl
I'm mostly blown away that he had the app put together in 5 hours. I can't get
a development environment set up in 5 hours. I've spent five hours chasing
down a trailing comma bug. Teach me, sensei.

~~~
monkey_slap
It becomes much easier over time. I'm at a point where I could certainly
accomplish this, especially now with great projects like CocoaPods.
Experienced web developers can create a simple CMS lightyears faster than I
can, its all relative.

Now what I find most interesting is that the author doesn't seem to have a
large portfolio of apps. The "More by this Developer" link only shows this
app, while his website only points to Discovr
([http://discovr.info/](http://discovr.info/)) which I can't imagine he's the
only developer for. I'd be curious to learn more about his expertise.

~~~
fieldforceapp
From experience, if you stick with standard UIKIt navigation schemes (i.e. use
nav bars not FB/Twitter style pop-unders) and, critically, standard Apple
approved color schemes (i.e., light not dark UI elements) then crafting an app
within Storyboard is _incredibly_ straightforward, especially if you consider
PaaS solutions like Parse.com integration[1]. The problem seems to be managing
the complexities of non-standard UI elements.

For what it's worth, Jony Ive seems to be pushing us to _all_ adopt the design
approach of the OP. Wonder if 'deference to content' will become the new
normal?

[1] [http://blog.fieldforceapp.com/post/32922733018/weekend-
proje...](http://blog.fieldforceapp.com/post/32922733018/weekend-project-
ios5-storyboard-parsecom-hero)

~~~
monkey_slap
I actually prefer doing all of the design and drawing myself and avoid things
like NIBs and Storyboard. It's not really difficult, just takes time to absorb
all that there is because there is so much customization you can do. And watch
out for iOS 7, especially with animations, there are loads of new options.

------
1337biz
Great story! But am I understanding this correctly that all the author did was
approaching a few blogs with promo codes? And after a few days with relative
low traction pretty much gave up on promoting it, just setting it on free? Not
even slapping a few ads on it?

Is there some general "formula" on how much ad revenue one can expect from a
(relatively straight forward) free app per 1000 users? Meaning some help on at
what point would it make sense to move from sales based monetization to an ad
based monetization model.

~~~
RyanZAG
From my experience, you really don't make much on ads from apps and they tend
to drive people away. To do well on mobile app ads, you need a fairly massive
audience and then you need to market your ad space directly. In particular,
video ads on mobile can be very lucrative, but you'd need a very engaging app
to keep people around when you start showing those kinds of ads.

More than likely the reason his free app did so well against the others is
that the others likely had ads or nag screens or similar, while his was
genuinely free.

------
kirualex
How funny that I also done quite exactly the same app which came out something
like 2 days after this one... I blogged about it too :
[http://alexiscreuzot.com/#!/scribble/4](http://alexiscreuzot.com/#!/scribble/4)

~~~
monkey_slap
Congrats! Would you be willing to post anything about your success post
launch? I'm an app developer as well and I love reading about other people's
strategies such as this.

~~~
kirualex
Good idea, I'll think about that. It's not that much of a success though (not
even near Stuart's app), but I guess it's a good start for a first app without
any marketizing strategy.

------
Peroni
Your post prompted me to download the app and my first impressions are that
the simplicity of the app is a huge selling point.

No pointless nav bars, no curious looking buttons, no walls of text, simple,
effective UI. I really like it. Hopefully it will help me drop a few kg's!

~~~
sadkingbilly
"huge selling point" is exactly the problem. I liked the post as well, it was
very descriptive. But, I feel like he gave up by making it free. I'd be more
interested if he can turn it around to profit. Although this was much easier
to do in the early days of the app store. Less so now.

~~~
Peroni
Yeah, I still suspect there was another, unknown factor at play when the app
was made free. I've seen tons of paid apps trickle along at the same rate of
downloads after reverting to free. I'd love to know what the catalyst really
was.

~~~
shurcooL
He said that 2nd step (marketing, promotion) was useless and sales didn't
change. But perhaps it was the catalyst. Perhaps people were made aware of the
app and added it to their mental wish list. Then, when they noticed it became
free, they wanted to get it ASAP.

Perhaps, without the "useless" 2nd step, going free would've been equally
flat.

Just a thought.

------
wodow
I'm surprised that no-one here appears to have mentioned the option of
monetizing such an app by in-app upgrades. In this case, adding videos (like
Nike Training Club [1]) or other extra content would be an option.

Isn't that the standard approach App Store for making money off free apps?

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/nike-training-
club/id3015214...](https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/nike-training-
club/id301521403)

~~~
jacalata
The author said that's his next step.

~~~
wodow
Yes, understood - I was just surprised it wasn't being discussed here.

------
georgelawrence
Thanks for sharing your story. Looks like your position in the AppStore search
results are rising nicely too. And fortunately they are all high volume
keywords... [http://www.straply.com/app/apple/bytesize/7-minute-
workout](http://www.straply.com/app/apple/bytesize/7-minute-workout)

------
stahlkopf
I'm slightly confused, he made his app free on June 15/16, and two days later
he's got a tonne of reviews from users stating this application has helped
them lose weight, and sounds like they've been using it a while. If the surge
in downloads happened just two days ago, those reviews all sound very fishy.

------
vitalique
Off-topic.

>It's a great way to kick off the day, and I'm 3kg down.

The OP says he is in Australia. How widely is the metric system used there (in
comparison to the imperial one)?

~~~
akent
Australia is almost completely metric, people only use imperial occasionally
for old recipes and the like, also we often use pounds per square inch for car
tire pressure, but weather related pressure is in pascals.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly comprehensive article on Australia's metrication:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Australia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Australia)

~~~
megablast
Also for height, quite oddly.

------
lifeformed
So what's the proper way to monetize an opportunity like this?

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jeromecollomb
Excellent story - keep up the work Stuart.

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methehack
Plans to monetize the free version?

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Daniiltje
Great story!

