Confessions of an independent app developer: Doing app is a gamble, you're going to bet

Intermediary transaction SEO diagnosis Taobao guest Cloud host technology Hall

Author Jared Sinclair, an independent iOS app developer. The app she developed has Unread,riposte and whisper. This article comes from her blog,blog address: http://jaredsinclair.com. In the article, she carefully recorded the development process and data of unread, and drew some experience and reflection. I was very much in sympathy with her remark in the article: "Well-designed and developed any kind of app is a gamble." "Hopefully this article will bring some inspiration and help to app developers," he said.

As far as I know, other independent app design developers will not be able to publish the data that I will publish in this article. The purpose of writing this article is not to complain about anything, actually, I think I have unread. The app is lucky, so I want to thank all the people who supported me on blogs and Twitter, all the people who gave me encouragement, and all the people who paid to download my app.

I'm writing this article to share with my peers the story of unread's app, and I hope that the details of this story will help people who are interested in developing apps on their own. Maybe you'll find my story a lesson, and perhaps you'll get a better sense of how to do it, proving that there's still a chance of success in the independent app development market.

First of all, I have several basic assertions:

The market for apps that need to be downloaded is not as big as it seems;

As far as sales are concerned, the sharing of well-known bloggers is much more useful than the theme of the App store;

A paid-for-download business model does not produce sustained profits;

If you want to make a lot of money on a paid app, you'll have to sell your app for the first week.

Just online apps don't sell at a discount, so sales are likely to go on forever. Please price reasonably;

Sustainable revenue may come from the purchase of consumable items in the app, and may also come from ongoing subscriptions, but not from paid downloads.

Blood and Sweat and tears

Since July 13, I began to develop unread, six weeks to complete the overall design of the app, and then a plunge into the Xcode programming, until the next spring. I calculated that I worked 60-80 hours a week from July 13 to February 14, when the iphone version of Unread 1.0 was online. In the process I encountered many challenges: the production of custom user interface navigation and control, the production of large shareable library, production synchronization architecture, performance optimization and so on.

This is the GitHub (Punchcard) recording of the unread main library clicks over time diagram:

As can be seen from the diagram above, I worked 7 days a week for the development of unread, and worked almost 24 hours a day--my marriage and my physical and mental health were devastated. Although the quality of the unread 1.0 is guaranteed by these efforts, the process is too torturous, is not a long-term lifestyle, and is not worth recommending. However, if I take two days a week for nine or five weeks, unread may not be able to develop it for a year or even die in the womb.

Starting Week and marketing

Thanks to the generous support of many independent bloggers and push-master--federico Viticci, Shawn Blanc, Stephen Hackett, etc., unread's starting week was good. If you were watching iOS on RSS or Twitter, you had a great chance of seeing unread.

Sales, after the peak of the first day, followed a sharp drop in the general rules of iphone app sales. The first week of issue, Unread appeared in the App Store home page recommendation, but the sales did not rise after the recommendation, but stopped the further decline. From here, I conclude that a positive feedback or evaluation of influential bloggers and tweets is more effective than the App Store's homepage recommendation.

Cumulative sales

This is the release of the iphone version of the unread cumulative sales figures, the orange dotted line represents the average trend:

This chart has the following highlights: (note that the data here has been subtracted from Apple's 30% share but not deducted from the proprietary tax and Medicare)

February 3-unread Online

February 4-Cumulative sales of USD 10,000

February 8-Cumulative sales of USD 16,000 (half of total amount reached)

February 17-Cumulative sales of USD 20,000

June 7-Cumulative sales 30,000 USD

July 28-Cumulative sales of USD 32,000 (current total sales)

Half of unread's sales came from the first five days of the line, while completing the other half took 170 days (24 weeks). Unread initially priced 2.99 dollars, and two weeks later I raised the price to 4.99 dollars. In retrospect, this move cost me a lot of money because the first week of sales was the highest and I should have priced it more reasonably. If I had priced 4.99 dollars in the first and downloaded the same amount, sales could be 16,000 dollars higher than they are now.

iphone version Unread 1.2

The largest increase in sales in the unread medium term comes from the 1.2 update. This update is rich in content, adding two RSS services, an image browser, a quick view of the article features, and more. The update date is April 21, 9 weeks after the first online.

It's hard to count how much money you made in the 1.2 version. If you want to estimate, you can calculate the cumulative sales for the 1.2 version of the line to the average before the sales fall to the previous level. According to my estimate, the average return on sales is May 4, about two weeks after the update. In other words, the 1.2 version probably earned 4000 dollars, floating up and down 1000 dollars.

The 1.2 version of the development took two months, but also deducted from the sales of 40% of the self-employed tax and 350 dollars in health care, so I make this update net monthly income is 850 dollars.

Cumulative sales of ipad version unread

For brevity, I will not dwell on the ipad version of unread. The following figure is the cumulative sales for the current ipad edition:

In short, this is a scaled-down version of the iphone sales trend:

June 8-ipad version Unread online

June 10-Cumulative sales of 5000 USD (half of total amount reached)

July 18-Cumulative sales 10,000 USD

July 28-Cumulative sales of USD 12,000 (up to now)

Defeat

The iphone version of unread's total sales in the App Store is 32,000 dollars, and the ipad version is 10,000 dollars. Remove 40% of the self-employment tax and 350 dollars per month of Medicare (in 12 months), the total net income of the two apps is:

21,000 dollars, or 1750 dollars/month

Given the amount of effort I've spent on these two apps over the past year, this number is depressing. I simply don't want to imagine how much I can earn in a company at work every month. At the same time, it is also a practical proof that the App Store's paid downloads do not create sustained profits.

Conclusion

Objectively speaking, unread is still a good quality app. This app is a bit boring in nature, but many users have given it a positive rating and noticed many details and delightful features. This means that those who spend their money downloading unread are likely to be happy with the app and willing to recommend it to others. Currently, the unread in the App Store is 4.5 stars.

RSS still has a market. --daring Fireball, the most frequently browsed Web site for RSS readers, still has 200,000 subscriptions. This means that the target population of unread is not particularly narrow.

I'm not famous. Although I'm not completely anonymous in iOS, it's definitely not a famous geek. Unread's developer is a grassroots that has no appeal to potential users.

Unread exposure is OK. --unread has been recommended by several famous bloggers, and also on the homepage of the App Store. This means that unread is not an application that is completely neglected and submerged in an ocean of app stores.

Still, unread's total sales are only 42,000 dollars (after deducting taxes and 21,000 dollars in Medicare), and the future is unlikely to grow much. By all this, my conclusion is that an independent app designer must develop a sustainable profit-making app if he wants to make a living from the app. I think this pattern includes the sale of consumable items such as Candy Crush and tribal warfare (Clash of Clans), or WhatsApp such continuous subscriptions. In addition, I think it is difficult for a developer to undertake the work of development, operation and maintenance alone, and TA may have to collaborate with other independent developers. However, the marketing budget of our main competitors makes me feel that even such small-scale cooperation may not necessarily succeed.

Promote marketing

Since the last blog post, many people asked me why I did not promote unread. In fact, I did all the promotions I could afford. I didn't just naively throw the app into the store and wait for the money to come rushing in. Here are the unread (iphone and ipad) promotions, some directly from me, and some with luck:

1.2 Version of the push when the promotion: 400 U.S. dollars;

The ipad version on the launch of the Twitter promotion: 200 dollars;

Shawn Blanc's blog last week's RSS sponsorship (including a toolbar AD): 700 dollars;

several podcast interviews;

Many famous bloggers have generously recommended unread, and several have even recommended them several times;

My personal site has published a series of articles about the design process and behind-the-scenes stories of the ipad version of unread;

Two versions of unread are on the home page of the App Store, and they all appear in the "New Product" section.

Apple's social team has also several times recommended unread on TA's Facebook books and Twitter.

Twitter on the mouth. Many users will make positive comments on Twitter every day;

Design the updated content according to the most outstanding needs of the existing users;

Send notes that are interesting and meaningful and can be forwarded by others.

Unread more competitors? The answer is very much. But what kind of app is not competitive. Do I need to improve my marketing work?

But those who criticized me for 14 years foolishly doing an RSS-reading app did not capture the focus of my article. Designing and developing any kind of app is a gamble. Increased marketing spending may also increase the risk of failure by increasing income. It's more of a gamble.

Unread the biggest lesson in this case is that the size of the App store's 100 million credit cards doesn't necessarily make you profitable, even if your costs are low and high quality. Outsiders may think that a premium app that has been developed independently may produce a sustained profit, but the fact is that the pay-for-download model does not sustain a person's life. Loyal users will spend the first few days downloading, and then no more revenue. For the rest of the time, the app can only work to attract a small number of users and eventually die.