Posts
-
Rates, Ratings, and Response
Just wanted to share my observations on experimenting with different price points and the kinds of reviews and user response they attract. As I had mentioned earlier, I started out with pricing the app at 99 cents. Then decided to make it free during the last days of being featured. And once it hit 350K downloads, decided to experiment between the 1.99 and 0.99 price points.
First, the Obvious: If you give it away for Free. People will download it. And, Free + Featured = Explosive growth in downloads. You can figure out your monetization strategy (either Freemium or Free+Ads) later, and use the free price point to gain momentum for your app.
Just check out the download stats of Fotoyaki in the first 2 weeks. (As a side note, check out the L-shaped, or 1/x shaped for the mathematically inclined, download curve after each major event). Compared to the Free downloads, paid downloads are insignificant.
The major events in the charts above:
Oct 27th - App gets featured.
Nov 1st - I made the App free mid-day
Nov 3rd - App goes off featured list mid-day (The decline is a curve similar to the curve in paid downloads, when the app got featured). App became #2 photo app on the 2nd. App climbed up to overall #49 on the 3rd before declining, once off the featured list.
Nov 11th - App probably got featured in EU. Italy had 40K+ downloads, and france, 30K+.
Nov 12th - I wanted to throttle free downloads, so decided to make the App paid again.
Nov 13th through 15th - Still see a few Free downloads occuring. Probably Timezones catching up + gift codes being used up.Second, the not so obvious way in which human psyche works: User ratings and reviews tend to be more on the positive side when you charge for the app. If and when they are negative, they tend to be constructive, and based on real pain points. And when you give away the app for free, expect a flood of ill thought out reviews, with no regard to the effort you placed into developing an app.
Price contributes to your app’s intrinsic value in people’s minds. When the app was 99 cents, most reviews were 5 star and 4 star (Yes, those from strangers, and not just from friends), and the couple of 1 or 2 stars were from users who had pain points which I was able to address later. Now, when the app became free, I saw a lot more 1 star reviews flowing in with no constructive feedback. Prime example: “This app is so basic, it’s lame. I wish I could say dif.” (1 star, Free) vs. “This App is awesome. Simple to use…” (5 star, 99c). Even the 1 star reviews when the App is paid are more thoughtful and provide constructive criticism than just one liner disses. Since people have actually invested in your app, they have an interest in getting some value back, and in turn, provide you with valuable feedback.
Third, the mind bender. There are almost twice as many daily downloads of the app at 1.99, than at 0.99 (at least in the US, which is the largest paid market still). That’s 4 times the revenue. I’m guessing people take the app more seriously when it’s priced above the rest. Yet another glitch in the human psyche. This is just an observation based on a very small sample set. (4 days worth of data, where 2 days had mixed data of both $0.99 and $1.99 priced downloads). So, I might be entirely wrong, but I will run this pricing experiment for longer and let you guys know if my observations are in fact mind bending.
Here’s a relevant scientific study that might explain the above 2 not-so-obvious behavior: Higher prices make cheap wine taste better.
But here’s the catch. With a higher price point, come greater expectations. I better churn out new features soon before the reviews get flooded with a lot of constructive criticism.
-
A Year Later...
Today, I remembered that I had created this blog to rant about my tech adventures. And when I checked, It just so happened that my last update on this blog was posted exactly a year ago. So, what better date to pick up where I had left off.
A quick recap of the last year – I got busy interviewing and changing jobs, which was the reason the blog didn’t get any updates. I started working for mobclix beginning January, and have been learning a lot about the Ad Serving business, and Engineering by “doing” more than “thinking”. So, around August, I finally decided to learn iOS development by just “doing” an app for the iPhone. A friend (who also wanted to learn iOS development) and I picked up really simple concepts to work on. We chose to build a mosaic app. Snap a picture, make a mosaic out of all your other pictures in the library, then share it on facebook. Pretty simple idea, and the mosaic algorithm was already worked out in my mind within 5 minutes. The simple idea then grew into something slightly bigger, and more concrete, and I went a bit beyond the original plan of just learning how to make an app for the iPhone.
Almost exactly 2 months later, I submitted Fotoyaki to the App Store. 99 cents to start with. Daily downloads were about 10/day. Then a week later, Apple decided to feature the app on the App Store (I’m guessing it was because of the cool design), and sales shot up to 360+/day. And after 4 days of being featured, the app was selling around 170/day. I knew my time being featured on the store was very limited. One week to be exact. So, instead of making another 200 bucks in the next 2 days of being featured, and letting the app go back to a meager 10 sales/day, I decided to make it free. Free + Featured = 130K+ downloads in the next 2 days, with the app going all the way up the download ranks to #49 most downloaded app for the day at one point (App was in the top 100 list for 3 days), and the #2 Photo app next to instagram. I wanted it to be free for a week thinking I would be able to get a user base of about 20K with which I can strategize my organic growth strategy. But instead, I had over 200K. As of this writing, I have over 350K installs, and the app is back to being a paid app.
The App is still in it’s early stages, and I’m learning a lot about a lot of things with it. Everything from coding for the iOS platform, to growth & monetization strategies, and surprisingly, a lot about Human Psychology. Expect to see more posts about what I learn with Fotoyaki and the inferences that I make, as they occur to me.
This blog just got interesting! At least, for me to keep posting on it regularly. Go Foto!!!
-
Getting Setup!
First things first! Before getting started with any software development project, you need to have certain basic necessities taken care of.
First - Version Control Software! The ability to keep track of changes made to code, and the ability to go back to any version is of utmost importance to any software engineering project.
Second - A wiki to track design and progress is also necessary. Helps make collaborating easy (of course, at the end of this project, my notes app will replace the wiki).In my setup, I use Subversion & Mediawiki. Reasons? Just personal preference. Some of you may like to use git, or cvs. I chose Subversion because it comes pre-installed with MacOS, and also because I have prior experience using it for work. And I chose Mediawiki, because Wikipedia runs on it, and because its setup is plain & simple.
I will get into more details about how to setup a SVN Repository, and a mediawiki server in later posts. For now let me just leave with saying that these are absolute essentials.
-
Let's build something!
This is the first post on TechSmack, and since this blog is supposed to get pretty detailed about my trials in tech… let me first define a product scope, around which most of my work, and thus the content of this blog, will stay focused.
I wanna build an app on the cloud (Translation, a web-app). And a pretty simple one at that… a web based Note-taking app a la OneNote, except, only simpler. I love using my Mac for everything except taking notes and scribbling my thoughts. Because, I’ve gotten used to the simplicity of MS OneNote. OneNote is one of the few software marvels from Microsoft, and it still bewilders me to think that there is no valid alternative for it available on the Mac/iOS platform. So, initially I thought of building a native iPhone/iPad app. But, HTML5 support is gaining traction on all platforms. So, I’ve decided to create a web-app for it (with client side data caching for offline use).
So there it is! This is what I’m gonna build. A Note-taking app (written in HTML5) that resides on the cloud, but allows for offline editing. Let’s go build it!
subscribe via RSS