An App Store Experiment - Part 3

It's been over five months since I posted part 2 of this experiment, in that time I have done pretty much nothing on it.

It turns out that nothing has been pretty interesting.

Why Have I Done Nothing

The startup I was co-founder of Discovr went through a relaunch and eventual wind up. It's been a pretty draining and emotional time over the last few months. I love the team and expect them all to go on to great things.

Part 2

Part 2 of the experiment was really well received. Links from well respected blogs drove a lot of traffic:

• Marco Arment - Stuart Hall's App Store Experiment
• Mac Stories - Stuart Hall's App Store Experiment
• iOS Dev Weekly - An App Store Experiment

Downloads

For the rest of 2013 the downloads didn't achieve the levels of the early days:

But if we look past the early craziness, downloads are still strong and flat, in the vicinity of 2,500 per day.

Note, that all these downloads were achieved by either App Store discovery or word of mouth. I didn't do any other promotion.

Sales

So with steady downloads I'd expect steady sales numbers, right?

Sales were in steady decline over 2013, which can be seen even more easily with a cumulative graph.

Almost 70% of the profit was from the US.

In App Purchase Price

Here is the one place I did a little bit of work, I experimented with the in app purchase at 99c, $1.99 and $2.99. I ran each of them for one week and as you can see from the profit charts above it was very flat. Any increase (or decrease) in price was offset be the number of purchases.

Australian Feature

Apple were kind enough to feature the app on the front page in Australia, which isn't the biggest store but this still had a very positive impact on sales and downloads. The app even reach number two overall on the free charts, just behind Apple's 12 Days of Gifts.

Christmas and New Year - Resolutions

Christmas saw the millionth download and some significant spikes in both sales and downloads. The new year took it to a new level. Profits were steady through most of November and December at $50 a day. During the first half of January that figure quadrupled to $200 a day. New year resolutions are definitely a positive for fitness apps.

The Stats

• 1,412,803 downloads (5,697 per day)
• $27,317 in revenue

Part 4

Even though the stats look pretty healthy, the revenue per user is crazy low at at around 2 cents per user.

So the big unanswered question left for me is what would people be more willing to pay for? I've had complaints about having to upgrade for features, so would people be more willing to pay for more content instead?

As of today version 2 is available with two new workouts as in app purchases. The updated version also has some great new videos from efit30.com.au who are in the process of remaking all the videos for the app.

What will this do to sales? Stay tuned! You can follow me on Twitter - stuartkhall.

Continue to part 4

Other posts

• An App Store Experiment
• An App Store Experiment - Part 2
• An App Store Experiment - Part 4
• An App Store Experiment - Part 5 - The Finale