Short Thoughts

App Power: The First Week

Note: this article is part of a series of articles on my real-world App Store experiment: App Power: An Experiment, App Power: The Submission, and App Power: The Reveal.

I woke up this morning to find an email from appFigures containing yesterday’s sales reports and figures; with that, I officially have data for my first full week of Bowtie for iPhone sales. And the numbers were… somewhat depressing.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not really complaining: I don’t do this for the money, I do it because I love it. I had, however, hoped to use my App Store profits to visit a friend in Europe. While I may eventually earn the money to do that from the sales of my app, I’m fairly certain it won’t be in time (she’ll only be there for about three more months). Either way, it looks like there’s a little more to succeeding on the App Store than meets the eye.

The Results

I’ve always believed that graphs are incredibly useful, so allow me to present my week-one sales graph:

As you can see, sales started pretty promisingly: 170 downloads on day one, 202 on day two. Since then, however, sales have been steadily dropping as they look about to converge on 0. Yesterday, a mere 22 people downloaded Bowtie, netting me a grand total of $14.70 (accounting for conversions from other currencies, etc.).

So what does it all amount to? In all of week one, I made (estimate by appFigures) $454.78.

Now don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad sales figure or anything — if it was an average weekly sales figure. If trends persist, though, it looks like my average weekly sales figure will be somewhere between $40 and $70, if even that, which is hardly the goldmine I was expecting or hoping for.

Surprises

I ran across a few things that were a bit more than surprising during this first week. The first was that Windows users really don’t read. On day one, I received over 1,200 downloads of Bowtie Remote for Windows, an application whose sole purpose is to control Bowtie for iPhone. That would imply that each download of Bowtie Remote should be paired with a purchase of Bowtie for iPhone roughly 1:1. I was ready and willing to discount 30% of those downloads for stupidity, but not greater than 90%. As many of my friends (and Twitter followers) will tell you, I can now use this as anecdotal evidence as to why there are so many viruses on Windows: Windows users will download anything. In fairness, a couple of days after release, I changed the description on the Bowtie website to make it considerably clearer, and downloads have slowed (the rate is still considerably higher than the iPhone app download rate, however).

The other surprise was just how plain unreliable App Store reviews are. I’ve been very closely monitoring every review that gets written about Bowtie on the App Store: they range from one-star reviews calling the app “too limited to even be worth 0.79€” (translated roughly from Italian), and others alleging that my app is responsible for problems it simply couldn’t possibly cause; to glowing five-star reviews heralding Bowtie for iPhone as the Messiah of iPhone Apps. Personally, I don’t think either extreme is merited — I’m most fond of the four-star reviews, personally, many of which contain valuable feature suggestions (though I do appreciate two separate five-star reviews that say “this app solves a problem I didn’t realize I had;” that’s always the goal ). Anyway, I digress: I “grew up” in NewEgg culture, where the reviews aren’t just reliable, but they’re (in my opinion) some of the best indicators on the Internet of the quality of a tech product. On the App Store, that just doesn’t appear to be the case. It’ll certainly make me reconsider opting not to download the occasional two-star app that looks pretty cool.

What’s Next?

For starters, the app is really cool, but also very feature-light (mostly by design). People want more, and the biggest request is some sort of search feature that allows you to switch playlists or albums from your computer, rather than just skip forward/back and play/pause. That one’s already in the pipeline; it’s slated to be released with Bowtie 1.2 (Bowtie 1.1 will be out either today or tomorrow, with fixes for a number of bugs that cropped up during the first week) and Bowtie for iPhone 1.1. You’d be surprised how hard it is to design a good music chooser.

Also, as a part of my experiment, the only “advertising” I did was via my websites, my blog, and my Twitter: any third-party advertising that occurred (like a feature on Mashable) was on a completely voluntary basis, often unrequested by me. The fact is, that doesn’t generate enough exposure: I would have loved to believe that the App Store magically put your app out there for everyone to see, but it doesn’t appear to be the case. As soon as Bowtie/Bowtie for iPhone get a solid search capability, I think I’ll start pursuing some more conventional advertising routes.

Probably the most important thing I learned though (for next time) is that Bowtie for iPhone is still too niche. Certainly, the app isn’t quite as niche as Signals is, nor is it even as niche as TuneConnect is (my older, free app for Mac-to-Mac iTunes remote control, rather than Mac-to-iPhone like Bowtie). Regardless, not everyone wants to be able to control their iPhone’s music player from their computer; the app simply lacks the universal relevance that would cause it to become an “overnight app sensation.” If I ever really want to make money off of an iPhone app, it’ll have to be something considerably more appealing to a broader volume of users (or at least more entertaining).

Anyway, I’ll keep plugging away at making Bowtie for iPhone as awesome as possible, and we’ll see if it changes sales figures in either a positive or negative direction.

What about Bowtie 1.0? How’s that doing?

I’m so glad you asked! Downloads of Bowtie 1.0 have actually been going considerably better than those of Bowtie for iPhone. As of this writing, Bowtie 1.0 has been downloaded 14,158 times (7,497 by automatic update, 6,661 by manual download). That puts me only about 5,000 downloads short of the all-time download numbers for the first beta of Bowtie (though I still have quite aways to go before I catch up with beta 2). Either way, I’m fairly certain that this is the fastest I’ve ever hit this number of downloads with one of my apps, and I’m definitely very pleased with the results.

If you’re interested in keeping track of Bowtie downloads, you can view our public Mint. All of the files that make up the current version of Bowtie’s downloads (currently 1.0, will be 1.1 as soon as it’s released) can be found on the “Watched” tab of the “Files” pane.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s either downloaded Bowtie or purchased Bowtie for iPhone, and to everyone who’s been so supportive of this endeavor. I’ll continue to keep you all posted as things change. Until next time, enjoy Bowtie!