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Today’s post is from Scott & Brett, creators of DropCap, an iPhone word game. Â
Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.â€
- Paul Rand
In June of 2007, the first iPhone was released. Before that day, the App Store was non-existent. Yet, here we are in 2013 with almost a million apps in the App Store. With that many apps, it may be hard for someone to jump into creating their own because of how competitive the industry is.
You may think to yourself, “I have this great idea I want to make!†only to find out it already exists in five different forms. We encountered the same thing but what we learned is that no idea is unique. Everything has already been done before. In some form or fashion, every single idea ever conceived has spawned from pieces of other existing ideas. Once you realize this, the sky is the limit for what you can create. The challenge for you is taking the plunge to create something better. There are a few things to keep in mind with your first app launch that we learned from releasing our own.
I Can’t Wait To Be A Millionaire!
Everyone wants to make a quick million but the truth is this rarely happens. When we launched DropCap, we were hoping for what we thought were modest results, maybe 20-30 downloads a day. What we discovered is that number is more around 5-10 downloads a day.
The money does not come overnight. The objective here is to get your app seen by as many people as possible . Only a small percentage of the people who see your app will actually spend the money; your reach must be much broader than the number of sales you hope to generate.
When we launched the app, one thing that was important to us was adding share features for the score. When a round is completed, the user can share their score on Facebook and Twitter which links back to our website.
We have seen some decent results from this, but not nearly as much as we expected. There is a tipping point where these share functions will have the ability to grow your app exponentially, but until you hit that point, more aggressive advertising tactics must be used.
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We did learn that Reddit was a good source of downloads. We released 30 promo codes for a free download and 46 people downloaded it that day (meaning that 16 went ahead and purchased without a code). Certain subreddits, such as AppHookup [1] , have very good communities that will be more than happy to give suggestions or give reviews for your new app.
Unfortunately, Reddit is generally not a sustainable source of downloads, which drop as more posts start to bury your own. The best advice for a new developer is to continue promoting your app on social news sites, blogs, word of mouth or anything you can find on or offline.
The Waiting Game
The app is finished and you are ready to launch. You upload it to the App Store ready to send it out to all your friends and suddenly…you can’t. People often develop for the iOS platform first simply because it’s easier. You don’t have to design for a ton of different devices but the trade off is that you have to wait for a review. Apple has a review process with every app that comes through the App Store. We learned that this process can take anywhere from a week to two weeks. Be prepared to wait because it will happen.
The same goes for updates in the App Store. The time period is typically shorter but there is still a 3-4 day waiting process for the update to get accepted. This can be quite a lot of time lost and requires planning on your part to make sure all your marketing and everything lines up properly. Make sure you budget time for the wait.
In order to make use of that time, we used a service called Hockey Apps to beta test our app to a private group of individuals. So while we were waiting for the app to be reviewed, we were actively testing it with a small audience to prepare for another update. This allowed us to find some bugs we were able to resolve rather quickly after launching.
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The Power of Real Users
We later launched a campaign where we made the game free for three days. We were apprehensive to go this direction because we would not make any money and we did not want to discover a problem this sudden surge of users could experience. We found this method to be both good and bad.
It was good because in approximately three days we accrued over 20,000 downloads solely from making one post in Reddit and word of mouth taking over. However, while we made absolutely nothing from this campaign, it did increase awareness of our app. In addition, people started giving it lower reviews because this influx of people found a bug we had not discovered that resulted in a crash in iOS5.
Be careful when you run a free campaign because it opens your doors to a lot more real users which is a blessing and a curse. We do not know yet whether this free campaign will lead to an increase in sales but we are hoping for positive results.
Don’t underestimate the power of real people. Sometimes the best method is to make your app as polished as you can and release it, even if it is not finished. People will give you feedback. They want you to succeed because if you make a good app, they will want other people to join them in the experience.
Although the free campaign lowered our reviews, it helped us to discover a bug we otherwise would not have found. We took all the comments and implemented nearly every one because they were all great. It is amazing what your users will come up with that you never even thought of.
What’s Next?
The biggest question remaining after launching an app is “What do I do next?†Make another app of course! Our plan of action after release was this: make the app as perfect as it can be and plan some future updates with new features.
People like apps that stay updated because they know you care about the success of the app. We have released three updates in less than a month and our user base keeps on growing. It is also nice to add a little feature or two; it doesn’t have to be big just something to keep people interested.
Our next step is to make another game. Apps are great because they generate passive income. You can build it and the revenue keeps coming for your next set of projects. We plan on using a similar model for the next game but we will be using the advice given here to improve that release.
If you have not downloaded our game, feel free to check it out and let us know what you think either by leaving a review on the App Store or sending us an email at support@dropcapthegame.com. You can download it at our website: www.dropcapthegame.com [2] .
We wish you the best of luck with your next app!
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Links
- ^ AppHookup (www.reddit.com)
- ^ www.dropcapthegame.com (www.dropcapthegame.com)
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