My First Year in the App Store

[dhruvmittal]

I was actually really excited by the "...you can get the next 9 posts delivered to your email by signing up here:" at the bottom. I like it. I like email, because I can read it anywhere and filter it any way I want. I dislike unsubscribing from email updates about as much as I dislike getting updates I'll never read. By making it easy to get emailed only about a story I've already demonstrated interest in (by reading all the way through), you've made sure I'll come back for your next 9 posts.

I'd like to see more people use something like this.

Or, if I've misunderstood how this works...well, the concept was exciting.

[trevmckendrick]

Very kind words. Glad you liked it. Indeed, fewer people sign up, but you know they're the ones who value the content the most.

[drivers99]

That's what I use spamgourmet for. I give out a different address to various sites without fear. The address you give out includes a number which is the number of emails you will allow them to send to you at first. You can reload that number whenever you want to allow them to send more messages, or you can whitelist the sender if you want to keep receiving messages without it counting down.

[firekesti]

I use Blogtrottr to email me when my RSS feeds update, for much the same reason.

[andrewljohnson]

Whenever anyone complains to me that its hard to make money on software, and/or the App Store is rigged, I always tell them I think anyone can make a living by making a bible app. You don't even have to be the best one, just pretty good, and iterate - it's the canonical product that you know has a big audience, willing buyers, and poor competition on the low end of the market.

Case proven by this guy! The next time you think to yourself that there is anything needed to make money on software besides persistence, thoughtfulness, and picking something you know people want, you're in a trap of your own creation.

People who don't make money on their apps typically fail because they try to be too novel, try to make the app too good, or they don't stick in there long enough.

[Felix21]

Perhaps the best thing about this is that you released a "good enough" (not PERFECT) first product.

Too many people don't try because they don't have the resources to make their apps as awesome as they want it to be right out of the gate.

Just get it out there. If people find it useful it'll gain traction and you'll get the resources you need to make it awesome.

[gwern]

Patio11 has argued forcefully that developers systematically neglect women and underserve that large market; I wonder if we can add to that 'and developers also ignore religious markets too'?

[trevmckendrick]

I agree with everything except your last clause. :)

Most people do over think. But it really depends on your goals. If you're only looking for a small side income there's no reason to try something 100% new.

Sticking it out too long on these small projects can be dangerous though. We probably agree here more than not, but the trick is knowing when to drop something. If it's not selling and there's nothing fatally wrong with it, I say stop and move on.

Just my two cents though.

[zerr]

Yes, but what about those "lucky" developers who live in countries where selling apps is not available in both - apple appstore and google play markets?

Are there any other channels for selling apps?

I "Ask HN"-ed this but didn't get much attention...

[kyrias]

  > The next time you think to yourself that there is 
  > anything needed to make money on software besides 
  > persistence, thoughtfulness, and picking something you 
  > know people want, you're in a trap of your own creation.

Well you do also need money to actually put the app up ;)

[jkira]

I'd be interested to hear how you marketed the app. Just building an app seems to be only half (or less) of the battle these days, as far as App Store success goes.

I've got seven apps on the App Store, and combined they usually don't even bring in $200/mo. Discouraging.

[trevmckendrick]

I'll talk about that in one of the upcoming posts, but basically:

I started with an app niche that I knew people were already searching for. And I knew that because there were crappy Spanish Bible apps already making money in the App Store.

Since then I have started collecting users' email addresses which helps with promotions and new app launches, but initially all my traction was through search.

[danenania]

Thanks for writing this. It's very insightful.

One question - do you have any interest in spanish and/or the bible, or is this purely a business exercise?

[alexvr]

It's a good reminder to me, as a developer, that people simply buy (or use) what they want, not what I think they want.

[trevmckendrick]

Amen! (no pun intended :) )

[callmeed]

I'm curious what translation you used (I signed up for the rest of the posts but haven't got through them).

Most modern English translations of the Bible are copyrighted and often you can only quote/print a limited number of verses without paying licensing. (I think the best public domain version is probably the ASV from 1901).

Did you license a spanish version of the Bible? Pay someone to translate a modern one? If so, were there legal hurdles to translating a copyrighted version?

[trevmckendrick]

You're right that most well known Bible translations are copyrighted. I found one that is in the public domain so it was game on.

[prewett]

The NET translation (bible.org) is widely used in free Bible apps, so while it is not public domain, it seems to be free. It's a nice translation, and also has lots of notes (if the app provides them).

The ESV translation has a free app, too, although that might not help someone trying to add it in their Bible app.

[timack]

I thought the App Store had a rule that you couldn't submit an app that was essentially a 'book or a film' how did you get around that?

[trevmckendrick]

Great point. I've actually run into that problem. On some updates they would reject me and I'd have to add a few features to be approved.

That's part of the reason I'm redoing the entire app from scratch with tons of extra functionality, etc.

[aeontech]

Fascinating example of finding and successfully filling an under-served niche. I would have never thought of creating this kind of app.

It makes me contemplate - how can you break out of your filter bubble to come up with and test product ideas for markets you can't even imagine exist because they are so far from your experience?

[trevmckendrick]

My two cents: I scrolled through tons and tons of top ranking apps in each category. That was where the initial brainstorm began: profitable apps that didn't look very good.

[austenallred]

The coolest part of this post, IMO, is that by finding that niche you freed yourself up to work on whatever you want to work on. Legitimate residual income.

[trevmckendrick]

Thanks, and yes and no. When I realized I'd found a decent sized niche I had to make a decision: do I let it sit and coast/build something else, or do I invest more here?

I've decided with the latter, which will play out for at least the next year. Jury still out whether it was the right decision.

[orangethirty]

Religious products are big sellers. Specially anything that has to do with the bible or prayers. I used to sell bibles as a teenager. Made more money than drug dealers. It was funny. But then I went ad turned atheist. I could no longer sell itwith a clean conscience.

[jordan_clark]

Is there a link to the app on the app store? Or did I miss it?

[trevmckendrick]

My server is struggling, here's a cached version for the interested:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

[scottluptowski]

This sounds very interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more.

How much time did you spend researching potential app categories?

Was your category decision driven by any hard data, other than anecdotal knowledge that Spanish bibles were a category that was selling and had search volume?

[trevmckendrick]

Great question.

No hard data. I saw that Spanish Bibles were ranking in the Reference and Book categories, like you said.

Also important (but not "hard data") is that when I searched "la biblia" relatively few apps appeared in the search results compared to other search phrases.

[fuddle]

Great idea, did it cost much to record the Bible as an audiobook?

[trevmckendrick]

Yes. The most expensive part of the app by far.

[mansigandhi]

trevmckendrick - good to see the app do well! If you remember I (Sleepyhead) helped with the email forms. We pleasantly surprised to see the post here :)

[trevmckendrick]

Hello! You guys did great work; those forms have done perfectly... over 30,000 signups so far.

Thanks for saying hi!

[nicholassmith]

Nice work for sure.

One thing that rang true, $73k isn't the sort of money that gets VCs going but that's full time salary for a lot of people. Making money on the app store is definitely possible, but we're no longer seeing the half a million in sales in one month figures we did at the start. Does that mean you can't make living from the App Store? No, it just means being realistic.

[speedyapoc]

Very surprised by that type of revenue. What kind of marketing did you put into it?

Without marketing, my first app on the store went as follows:

> The next morning (and literally every day since) I woke up and first thing checked my email for that magical message from AppFigures. My total day one net sales? $0.70. Admittedly not very much.

[trevmckendrick]

As far as I know, all downloads are based on search.

[ronyeh]

Congrats on the success! Can you share a link to your app?

Also, do you think the only way to get discovered (for indie devs) is to pick app ideas that will match nicely to keywords that users search for? If you don't have a marketing budget, is there any other way to get discovered?

[monkey_slap]

I'm going to be doing a similar writeup as my app launches in 2 weeks. I've got a small budget. All the design+dev was me, but I'm spending about $300-$400 on marketing. We'll see how that goes.

If anything I believe you should be spending more on marketing nowadays. There's no real way, at least to my knowledge, to search for a niche hole with keywords. I do, however, like to think of an app idea and then spend an hour search various keywords and seeing the results/competition. https://appstorerankings.net/ is a good website to find the keywords of an app. I combined common keywords in the app that I'm releasing with common keywords that are missing among competitors that yield few results.

Again, I haven't launched this app (my 7th) yet, but I'll be doing some analysis of its success using the marketing budget and keyword research.

[jacoblyles]

Is that a scroll bar down the right side? Seems poorly placed if you expect people to touch on the right side to advance a page.

[trevmckendrick]

Great point. The navigation between chapters is still being decided.