Ask HN: got to 33 in the App Store. Now what?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1137428

by allenbrunson • 16 years ago

37 38 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It seemed to me like my iPhone card game was making a suspiciously high amount of money per day. Over 100 bucks, four days in a row. So I checked the top paid apps list for my category, and I'm number 33.

Erm. This is thrilling, and terrifying. What should I do? My game is currently $2.99 -- should I make it lower, in hopes of getting higher up the chart? Should I make it higher, to take advantage of my sudden popularity?

Anybody with experience in this topic, please speak up.

there• 16 years ago

raise the price.

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

is that based on actual experience? have you had a program in one of the top 100 lists?

you know what, i just looked, and my game is in fact in the top one hundred list in every single country on the app store. my highest ranking is 17, in lebanon. whew!

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

clickable link to my game:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hearts-net/id353101111?mt=8

John212• 16 years ago

Bought a copy.. good luck =)

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

thanks!

davidedicillo• 16 years ago

The algo used by Apple to calculate the rankings take counts (most probably) of the past 4 days of sales. My suggestion is now that you are up there to push sales as much as possible. A sale would definitely help, maybe $1.99 ($0.99 is synonymous of low quality) and see if you can get any friends or people you know to download the app right now. See if you get at least in the top 25, so that your app will show up in the first page of apps on the iPhone.

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

that's probably the right thing to do. i'm thinking about it.

gte910h• 16 years ago

Toss out a new version with a "tell people about me" feature where they can email a link or twitter about it.

rubyrescue• 16 years ago

just clicked through to your blog - the more interesting story is how you crippled the free version that had 30k downloads and the subsequent fallout. really interesting! don't back down now!

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

you're right, that's, erm, "interesting." it's too bad that all those people are mad at me, but at this point, i'm wondering if the resulting firestorm is what pushed me into the top 100.

of course, it could also go the other way: those people could spread enough ill will that it would hurt my prospects.

wingo• 16 years ago

Yes I enjoyed that as well. Nice hack!

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

Dang. It's nice to hear you guys say stuff like this. I've gotten a hundred emails per day calling me a crook, a money-grubber, a cheat, and worse. I was starting to doubt myself.

But it did indeed work. I forced a whole lot of those 30,000 Hearts Solo players to upgrade. But at this point, that can't account for all of it. The number of Hearts Solo downloads has peaked, and is trending down. But the number of people buying Hearts Net is still going up.

ajross• 16 years ago

Number 33 in the App Store is only making $100/day?

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

not 33 among all paid apps, just 33 in my category, in the u.s. store.

azsromej• 16 years ago

And, of course, some categories do more volume than others. I hit the top 10 in a category and was making < $100/day

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

what category is that? seems like it would be a good optimization to try to hit parts of the store that don't have much competition.

charlesju• 16 years ago

Buy some fancy clothes before the IRS takes half. haha

Congratulations. Breaking into any top ranks of the app store is always exciting. I would ask yourself if there is a long-term, after-work, or short-term play here and act accordingly.

aresant2• 16 years ago

Your application seems slightly more niche for your category, I'm not sure that a lower price is going to necessarily drive up sales but I absolutely encourage you to test - I dont see how lowering the price could send you backwards.

I have experience with two completely opposite end of the spectrum apps in the store – one puzzle game that is doing 7 – 10 sales a day on average for ~1yr and one free app that’s been downloaded over 1 million times (after making it free) and makes respectable money on advertising.

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

Before I crippled it, my free game was getting downloaded between 50 and 120 times per day. Do you think I could get any kind of decent ad money on that? What ad network do you recommend?

aresant2• 16 years ago

Has much more to do with use and display.

Ad rate CPMs are good for mobile, use http://admob.com/ (I spent months testing) and integrate it right on top of the user experience.

EG - FORCE your users to see it.

If you have high application engagement (Eg lots of play) you'll earn some decent money.

Average is $3 - 5 CPM (thousands of views) and if you have a sticky game that can boil down to $3+ per uer lifetime value, which is better than app store.

gursikh• 16 years ago

This is probably what you were going to do anyway, but here goes:

1. Reduce the price by a dollar. Track for a week, see if profits increase. If they don't jack the price back up.

2. If they do, reduce the price even more, track the profits. If this causes profit to decrease, jack the price back up.

The idea is to figure out where the ideal market price is. It might be lower than you expect.

colinplamondon• 16 years ago

You're not stable yet, since volume goes WAY up once you're in the Top 25 of a category. It then goes through the roof when you're in the Top 5. Even though you're seeing great sales now, you need to push into the Top 25 to see phenomenal sales. To be safe, get into the Top 15, that way you have more margin to work with in the day to day rank fluctuation.

Drop to $1.99 for two days and see if you continue gaining in rank. We were able to blast past tons of 99 cent apps with Free Audiobooks at $1.99 and get to #2 in Books within three days, so it's not a big deal. Games is way different from books, though, so try $1.99 for 2-3 days, then give 99 cents a shot.

Also, grab Applyzer (applyzer.com) for this, it's awesome- hourly rank tracking for $3/month. If you stall out or otherwise see your rank starting to slide, drop to 99 to give a boost. That recovers your momentum and, after 24 hours or so, you can put your price back to $1.99. There's a LOT more to rank management, but this is how we're able to maintain the #1 and #2 paid positions in Books for weeks on end, barring when Apple features a competitor.

Good luck :)

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

Okay, consensus seems to be that I should drop it to $1.99 and see how that goes. So I did. fingers crossed.

hockeybias• 16 years ago

I completely agree with davidedicillo.

dirtbox• 16 years ago

Honestly? Make a sequel with more features/games ASAP and drop the price of the first to $1.99. You'll have your very own cash cow.

Assuming of course that it didn't take you a year to create the first.

vijayr• 16 years ago

Have a feature like "buy one get one free", so someone can buy a copy for himself and gift a copy to a friend. Its better than lowering the price.

sonpo• 16 years ago

Interesting idea - how can this be accomplished? Require the purchaser to send an iTunes receipt and the email address of the friend (to whom a promo code is sent)? I can't think of an automated technique, so perhaps that's the only way.

Is there a smarter solution I am unaware of?

Timothee• 16 years ago

As far as I know, it's not possible to gift apps to someone. Did that change? Do you have a specific way in mind?

hyung• 16 years ago

If I were in your position, I'd do a few things simultaneously:

- Cut the price to $1.99.

- Contact as many app review sites and forums as possible and tell them that, thanks to support from the community, you've decided to reduce the price for a few days, and give away a few copies of the game.

- Give the sites promo codes that they can give away/promote for you.

Generally speaking, I've found that total revenue remains about the same regardless of your price. But what you have is a relatively interesting talking point (spike in sales) that you may be able to use to get other people to promote the game for you.

(I've previously had a game in the top 10 paid games.)

varaon• 16 years ago

I've read through your blog posts, and while I agree with your "crippling" of the free version, I don't agree with how it was done.

With Hearts Solo, are there not better ways to make a trial version of a game than to randomly interrupt a match? Most trial software makes the user aware of how they will be limited - e.g. disabled features, time limits, and limitations on the number of usages.

Wouldn't having a maximum of X hours of playtime (or a similar strategy) on Solo have been more user friendly?

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

Well, I'm a total marketing n00b, twiddling knobs here.

I knew there was a great deal of demand for the game. For example, when I briefly made Hearts Net free, it was being downloaded 3500 times per day. Then I put it back to non-free, and it was barely ticking along at 5 bucks in sales a day.

I looked at things like in-app purchasing and ad networks, but that seemed like a lot of work. I was very frustrated with the experience at that point, and was just about to quit altogether. Doing even more development didn't seem like a good use of my time. So this seemed like the easiest way to stop competing with myself, with the least amount of effort.

Now that I'm getting some encouraging signs, I'll probably reevaluate the situation and see if I can come up with something better.

danielh• 16 years ago

I can't comment on the pricing, but IMHO both the description and the support website have room for improvement.

Half of the short description I see in iTunes describes what the app can't do (no multiplayer over Internet). Only when I click on "more", I see the wealth of features. You could write "play with your friends on a local Wifi" and move the disclaimer to the extended description. Put a feature on top instead, like "robot players are pretty good".

On the website, there is a lot of text, which is good because it shows you care. But make sure the features don't get lost in the details. Make them stand out and list the most exciting feature first. Strong robots and easy multiplayer game setup are probably more interesting than a Default.png graphic. Mentioning Default.png will only confuse them anyway, unless most of your potential customers are iPhone developers.

Also, put the iTunes Store links on the bottom as well, so your visitor does not have to scroll all the way back up.

Just my 2c, I hope you find some of it useful.

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

All good points. Working on the text now.

mikek• 16 years ago

Please let us know the results of your experiment in a future HN post. There is not much info out there on the results of these kind of experiments.

allenbrunson14• 16 years ago

Man, you're telling me! I'm just shooting in the dark here. This sudden bit of success took me totally by surprise.

joeld42• 16 years ago

I think the "words with friends" model works very well. There's a free version, it's identical except that it shows a small banner add on the main menu, and shows you a full-screen ad after every move. It's not very intrusive but you can't really ignore it either.

It was enough to make me upgrade to the full ($2.99) version after playing for a week. And if users don't upgrade, you still get the ad revenue.

Take a look if you haven't tried it yet.

Ask HN: got to 33 in the App Store. Now what?

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