Jul 24
I had never imagined that I would have done very well selling an iPhone app in the app store; it’s just so crowded and being noticed is notoriously difficult. I had realistically only hoped to cover the $99 developer’s license. On the peripheral of my hopes lied covering the cost of the mac mini I had bought to write code on (though my mac mini has wormed its way into my office as my primary machine when not doing graphic design or 3D animation/modeling ). Never did I imagine the cold, dark reality that are my sales numbers.
I’ll cut to the chase; In two months, Robodamus has only sold 60 copies at $.99. Apple takes $.29 out of each dollar, so after two months (May 22 – July 23) I have generated a grand total of $42. That’s right; I’ve only made $42.
Below is a graph of my sales; and “yes” the y axis only goes up to 6….
Underwhelmed?
I was at first, but one has to understand that Robodamus isn’t a game and it isn’t a utility; It’s a step above a fart app, for sure, but it really isn’t something that someone needs. It is a novelty app, and that makes it hard to sell. The second thing to understand is that I am guessing on what to do with regard to marketing this app; I’m just doing the most obvious things. The third thing, which I knew going in, is that the app store is huge; my app is merely a grain of sand on the app store beach. With nearly a quarter million apps in the store, as of this writing, getting noticed is fairly difficult.
So, if you hadn’t been following this blog until this point here’s the backstory:
Origins
I started looking to coding for the iPhone the day I bought my first iPhone in June 2009. I opted for the 32 GB iPhone 3Gs and managed to get mine the first day it was released. I just had to code for this thing. I write code for a living, but the work I do isn’t nearly as sexy(depending on your perspective) as writing for the iPhone. I enjoy my work, but it isn’t something that you can demonstrate to friends and family.
Two months later I ordered a mac mini and began learning how to develop on the iPhone. Since I was working full time (and sometimes more than full time depending on the project) I had limited time during the evenings and the weekends to start learning the ropes. Fortunately I wasn’t too phased by using a mac, as I some limited to exposure to them in ‘98 or ‘99 when I attended an art school. Additionally I had been exclusively using linux at work, so at least the command line was pretty familiar.
My bought two books to use as a guide on my iPhone development path, “Beginning iPhone Development” by Mark LaMarche and “iPhone Application Development for Dummies” by Neal Goldstein. Both books are excellent in my opinion.
Coding
For the first few months I did a lot of reading and experiments casually as I felt my way around the iPhone SDK. I got comfortable with xcode, the iPhone SDK APIs, the debugger, and, most importantly, objective-c. Most of the tutorials I worked through were related to the project I had in mind, so there was a lot code from various “learning opportunities” that I was able to use in “Robodamus – Robotic Fortune Teller”. In particular, much of the SQLite classes I had designed ended up being used in my app.
Other methods which seemed solid in the experimental phase, did not pan out when being used in the context of my app. An example of this was using [UIImage ImageNamed] when loading png images for a flip-book style animation. With a small number of images, this method worked fine, but when the number of images I needed to load and release became larger memory did not seem to be managed very intelligently by the OS.
Marketing
When I finally got all of the art and coding done for my app, it was time to look into marketing my app. This was definitely more of a mystery to me than anything.
When it came to pricing the app, I’ve read that apps with higher price points often make more profit; I believe I heard that on an episode of “The Mobile Orchard” podcast. Regardless, could not imagine my app doing well at a high price point; it is really only an entertainment app that has a very limited utility. Since, I, personally download $.99 apps as readily as I download free apps, this seemed an appropriate price point. My app, in all honesty, is not the sort of app you enter the store to buy, but rather the impulse buy that might be placed near the cash register at the grocery store like gum or mints.
With the price set, and the app completed it was time to submit it and begin collecting the names of websites and youtube channels to write to and hopefully convince that my app was worthy of a review, or even a mention. I ended up with a list of about 50 youtube channels and websites. From those 50 about 35 were appropriate to contact; many sites either focused on gaming, or expected payment in exchange for a review.
Pay to Play?
Sadly, a large number of the sites and youtube channels I contacted actually wanted to charge a fee in return for a positive review. One site even solicited me to spend money on a positive review.
Another tactic I used was creating a Facebook page for Robodamus, and inviting random people (who were part of iphone groups) to be friends. I only ended up with about 70 friends and probably none of them translated into sales.
Something I was doing wasn’t working as I only ended up getting two reviews, one from slappapp.com and one from applesauceblog.com. They were both positive reviews and I was thrilled to get what I could, but neither site had huge number of daily visitors (I’m guessing obviously) when compared to tuaw or engadget, for example.
Oddly, I couldn’t get anyone on youtube to do a video review, or even a mention. I got plenty of promises, but never did I get any action. Even some of these channels with low quality and/or low viewership didn’t give me the time of day.
Ultimately I failed to market my app. I tried, but probably spent a lot of my energy and time doing ineffective things. If I were ever to do this again on a non-hobbyist level I would definitely outsource this part of the project.
What’s Next?
I’m sure I’ll do an update eventually. I’ve got plenty of features in mind that I want to add and things to improve upon. I think I would also like to do a version with another character and a set of different animations; I really like modeling an animating, so this provides a good outlet for that.
BTW, you can find “Robodamus – Robotic Fortune Teller” in the app store here.
August 10th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
Don’t forget you have to pay tax on that $42 too
August 16th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Thanks for all your generous contributions! I found your screencast fascinating (and horrifying, Objective-C is a bit of a pig isn’t it). Also your candour with numbers was interesting too.
When judging the effectiveness of the store I’d also probably want to take into account the intrinsic value of the app as well as the distribution channel (AppStore). With the skills you’ve picked up — maybe your fortunes in future simply lie with the right concept that people love?