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heliographe | 8 months ago
I’ve been making iOS software independently for almost 2 years now (https://heliographe.studio) and am about ramen profitable.
A few notes in case OP (or anyone interested in making some money in the App Store) is reading:
- you have to make the app free to download, and quickly demonstrate value then show a paywall if you want any purchases. Paid upfront just does not work unless you’re an already recognized product.
I had some apps that were paid upfront, and would mostly get $0 days. Switching to free to download immediately brought me to a slow but steady trickle of daily downloads, and from there you just have to work on your conversion rate.
- but that's still going to be pretty low, if you want any meaningful user acquisition, you're going to have to go look for the kind of people who might be interested in your product. The broader your potential audience is, the harder that's going to be (but that's why TikTok ads can work so well). In my case, choosing to focus on a somewhat niche area (tools for photography) is helpful; there's a strong photography community going on Threads and regularly posting on there yields good results (for now...)
- $2.99 is dramatically underselling yourself, especially if you offer a quality product that you put time to craft to your standards and has no tracking, no subscription, no ads, etc. You should play with pricing to see what the sweet spot in terms of conversion is, but in my experience it's always worth it to start at least at $4.99/$7.99 for these sort of utility apps. Of course, the design of your funnel/paywall will make a huge difference (ie you'll likely sell more of an app marked as $4.99 at 50% off, than just $4.99)
- learn about what makes for good App Store screenshots, descriptions, how keywords work, etc. Ariel from App Figures has some good videos on YouTube about what they see and what seems to work based on their data.
The days where you could make a little app, chuck it on the App Store for $.99, and have it just blow up are well over. If you want to make any money on the App Store (even if to just pay back for your Apple Developer membership), you have to put as much effort, if not more, in the marketing and promotion of your product than you put in the design & development of it. It's a grind for sure — and don't count on Apple to help you in any way (by and large they seemed more interested to promote games and dating apps with $49.99/mo subscriptions than small indies doing interesting things).
Good luck! Eager to try your app :)
vachina|8 months ago
It’s not immediately clear to the layman, what value your app provides. Even to me, it got me asking what your app provides over Adobe Lightroom.
nikolayasdf123|8 months ago