$13,945 in the first three months without being featured by Apple

drewolbrich · June 2012

In my spare time over the last year and a half, I wrote an app and it made $13,945 in the first three months. I never got featured by Apple. I wrote up a page explaining what worked and what did not:

The Fourth Dimension - $13,945 in the first three months without being featured by Apple

Maybe this will be useful to some of you. I have a bunch of questions at the bottom regarding iOS marketing. If you can help me answer them, that'd be great.

vilgus · June 2012

Great article! I suspected that banner advertisement wouldn't normally work for promoting iOS applications. I think the only reason mobile apps developers/publishers use banner advertisement in Internet (I mean ordinary banners like 200x200) is that they are new players on the mobile apps market. As soon as they get first feedback from this kind of promotion they refuse to use banners. It seems like the best promotion furmula is "great application + great reviews". I'm pretty sure that your idea of releasing your next app as a free one with 15% of content unlocked with the possibility to unlock 100% via an In-App purchse is great. It will definitelly lift your application up in charts. You will have 100x more downloads of your free app. And I think that people who download applications from Education category make purchases more willingly than for example people who download games. You should get good convertion ratio and more revenue.

drewolbrich · June 2012

vilgus;439126 said:
I'm pretty sure that your idea of releasing your next app as a free one with 15% of content unlocked with the possibility to unlock 100% via an In-App purchse is great. It will definitelly lift your application up in charts. You will have 100x more downloads of your free app.

Sometimes I have second thoughts about the free with in app purchase idea, but if it goes poorly, I could always back out of that and make the app paid instead, without any big architectural changes to the app.

vilgus · June 2012

drewolbrich;439199 said:
Sometimes I have second thoughts about the free with in app purchase idea, but if it goes poorly, I could always back out of that and make the app paid instead, without any big architectural changes to the app.

That's what I did for my game. At first I released a free version with an In-App purchase to unlock all game features. I don't know what was wrong. Probably price was too high ($2.99). Probably in-game marketing was poor. It just didn't work. Then I decided to discontinue the free version three days after its launch. A week later I launched a paid version with all features initially unlocked for $0.99. But now I wish I made an update of the initial version instead. Having two versions (even if one is discontinued) is kind of confusion at least for search engines. The free version of the game was initially downladed by several thousands of people - I just didn't want to give them the game for free with its next release. Now I think it'd be even better to make them such a present in sence of promotion. Moreover I had many game achivements and leaderboards integrated (translated into several languages) so I had to register them once again for the paid version - that was not a fun. But in the case of your application (interactive book in Education category) In-App purchases should work, I think.

drewolbrich · June 2012

vilgus;439263 said:
That's what I did for my game. At first I released a free version with an In-App purchase to unlock all game features. I don't know what was wrong. Probably price was too high ($2.99). Probably in-game marketing was poor. It just didn't work. Then I decided to discontinue the free version three days after its launch.

If you release an app as free, is it possible to switch it to paid later, or is that forbidden by the App Store?

vilgus · June 2012

drewolbrich;439283 said:
If you release an app as free, is it possible to switch it to paid later, or is that forbidden by the App Store?

I think you can set whatever price you want whenever you want. You can even make your app free for a couple of days - there's a scheduler for this.

KarlJay · June 2012

I didn't read the whole post, but I did notice that after the 1st few months, the sales went flat.

It looks as if the bounces were short lived and didn't have any lingering sales.

What was the highest rank that you got?

How much total time did you put into it and what costs did you have for graphics, software and other expenses?

drewolbrich · June 2012

KarlJay;439846 said:
I didn't read the whole post, but I did notice that after the 1st few months, the sales went flat.

It looks as if the bounces were short lived and didn't have any lingering sales.

What was the highest rank that you got?

How much total time did you put into it and what costs did you have for graphics, software and other expenses?

Sales were driven mostly by reviews on web sites that have a lot of traffic, like BuzzFeed, The Verge, and Cult of Mac, and then dropped as soon as those articles fell off the front page of the respective web sites.

The Fourth Dimension reached #5 in Education twice.

I probably put in 400 hours of work in spurts over a year and a half, and I spent about $250 on software and fonts and other miscellaneous things.

I estimate that I consumed 50 donuts at the local donut shop that has free wi-fi.

Drew

rocotilos · June 2012

Thanks for sharing your story. It is difficult to get featured these days. Your app needs to be polished and boasts the iOS features as well.Your app seems very interesting to me bcause of the geeky nature of it. As an educational app, I think it is good. Congrats on your indie success!

drewolbrich · July 2012

rocotilos;439914 said:
Thanks for sharing your story. It is difficult to get featured these days. Your app needs to be polished and boasts the iOS features as well.Your app seems very interesting to me bcause of the geeky nature of it. As an educational app, I think it is good. Congrats on your indie success!

Thanks.

Drew

KarlJay · July 2012

Given what you've said, I'd be pretty happy with that outcome!

It's not enough to retire on, but I can't tell you how many unpaid hours I have invested, so you can count yourself ahead of the game.

If the appstore wasn't so flooded, you probably would have done better.

Congrats!

hd-marketing · July 2012

Thank you for sharing all this data !

I'm preparing the launch of a first application from a great developper in the "Reference" category, and it's great to read your success story !

Best of luck with your further testing about the price !

(by the way, if you see a sale in France today : it's me ! ;)

peterthomas · July 2012

vilgus;439126 said:
Great article! I suspected that banner advertisement wouldn't normally work for promoting iOS applications. I think the only reason mobile apps developers/publishers use banner advertisement in Internet (I mean ordinary banners like 200x200) is that they are new players on the mobile apps market. As soon as they get first feedback from this kind of promotion they refuse to use banners. It seems like the best promotion furmula is "great application + great reviews". I'm pretty sure that your idea of releasing your next app as a free one with 15% of content unlocked with the possibility to unlock 100% via an In-App purchse is great. It will definitelly lift your application up in charts. You will have 100x more downloads of your free app. And I think that people who download applications from Education category make purchases more willingly than for example people who download games. You should get good convertion ratio and more revenue.

You are absolutely right, a great app + some great reviews are the secret path to the success in the itunes and other app markets!

DaveDee · July 2012

drewolbrich;439904 said:

I estimate that I consumed 50 donuts at the local donut shop that has free wi-fi.

Would you put the success down to the donuts? ;)

Congratulations and thanks very much for the informative write-up!

KimioApps · July 2012

Thanks for the great post! This is my first time posting here but I have a few apps on the market that I have been experimenting with while learning as much as i can about marketing.

#1: Banner ads and ads online in gerneral are for HUGE budgets (think brand name awareness) They dont look at how many downloads a campaign produces but rather how much recognizable their app has become to the general public.

#2: It would be hard for you to find 1,000,000 (scaling the buzzfeed effect) as that would have t be 1,000,000 targeted users but i think you could get some traction approaching websites with similar geeky topics.

I would try small campaigns on adMob and inMobi as you Pay Per Click and can target your campaigns to US, CA and a few other countries like Germany, UK, AUS, etc that actually pay for apps ($100 can get you 5,000 clicks and if the ad is worded well so as not to mislead the user than you can get pretty good Install Rates. A 1% IR would be sufficient)

#3: The freemium model for interactive books should work well as all the big players do that.

#4: Use your existing userbase to boost your next app (as long as it somewhat relevant or in the same genre).

Hope that helps. I havent made the same money as you have but I have been experimenting alot and playing around with lots of different tools, tactics etc.

Oral B · August 2012

Thanks a lot for that, great read. Did you have to pay these review sites, and if so, how much?

drewolbrich · August 2012

I have not paid for any reviews.

paulyan · August 2012

I have not paid for any reviews.

Then how do you get connected with the reviewers? I've written several emails to various writers and no one replied. Do you have special channel to touch them?

Maybe my app is not interesting. But i see other similar apps get featured. I guess there is at least one chance for me but the reality disappoints me a lot.... My app can be seen here and here.

Thanks,

drewolbrich · August 2012

I tweeted about my app to a few of my friends, who posted about it on Twitter and Facebook. I posted about the app on Reddit, and got a little exposure there. I believe that the people at larger web sites who reviewed my app saw the app in these places and thought it would make an interesting story to write about the app, because its subject matter is unique.

I also tried writing to a bunch of reviews and news writers directly. I spent a lot of time searching around for writers who had written about apps that demonstrated that they might have an interested in the kind of app I had written, and I emailed them directly. This worked a few times, but generally only on smaller web sites that didn't get as much traffic as the web sites that carried the reviews that occurred organically.

I'm pretty sure the reviews only happened for me because the app was unique and made a good story, so it qualified as "news" on sites like theverge.com and buzzfeed.com, which have large user bases. In comparison, when my app appeared on the web sites that only review apps, this did not generate a particularly large amount of sales.

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$13,945 in the first three months without being featured by Apple

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