An App Store Experiment - Isolation, COVID-19 and the App Store
If you haven't already I recommend reading the previous posts to catch up on the story:
TLDR; In 2013 I made an app in a night, grew it to 2.3m downloads before being acquired in 2015. In 2020 I re-acquired the app.
Here's the results from experimenting over the last few months.
Product Hunt
Like all good (and bad) startups I thought I should give Product Hunt a go. In December, thanks to the awesome Robleh Jama from Shopify, it was listed.
It went pretty great, ended up on the front page. 483 upvotes and the #4 Product of the Day. It even got the shiny badge below.
I was pretty excited to see the results. I assumed front page and 400+ upvotes meant many thousands of downloads.
The results were pretty underwhelming. 257 people click through, 56 of those people ended up downloading the app, with a grand total of $12 in sales.
Is this normal for Product Hunt? Maybe it was a bad fit for my app \_()_/
Price Increase
Given I have had good success previously with price increases, I tried increasing the in app purchase from $1.99 to $9.99. It made zero difference, the volume of conversions went backwards at the same rate.
Apple Watch
An interesting book was released in February claiming to share valuable business secrets of the App Store.
Given my German is non existent I relied on other's interpretations. One that caught my attention was the requirement to support Apple Watch to have any chance of being featured by Apple. Unsurprising, but good validation.
This had also been been requested a number of times in my app reviews.
It took me until April to get around to it, but I added an Apple Watch app!
It didn't have any direct impact on downloads or sales. Unfortunately still no Apple feature yet!
COVID
The world turned upside down in mid March. COVID-19 meant many of us stayed home to work. Gyms closed and people started looking for alternatives.
This resulted in a big spike in downloads for the app.
And also a spike in sales.
There's definite signs of the spike easing as some countries start opening up again.
New Icon
Our amazing Appbot designer Corey Ginnivan offered to make me a new icon. He smashed this together in about 15 minutes and I loved it. Better than I could do in a lifetime.
It hasn't had any positive, or negative, impact on conversions so far. But I love it.
Ratings Progress
As mentioned in the previous post I implemented a ratings prompt. Lifting the app up to 4.8 stars in the USA.
The volume has been on an improved velocity as well.
Subscriptions
Going back to the book that leaked all the juicy App Store information it also mentioned how Apple loved subscriptions as a business model. This is pretty well known, but a good reminder.
A new update has been submitted swapping over my business model to subscriptions using RevenueCat (Thanks to Matt Comi for the recommendation).
Right now I'm stuck in a loop with App Review where they won't approve my IAP subscriptions because my app doesn't support it, but also won't approve my app because the IAPs aren't approved. I'd love to hear from anyone that's been stuck in the same situation.
I'll let you know how it goes in a few months :)
Observations
To me the most interesting stat is the change in sales per download. Back when I sold the app in 2015 it was averaging around 3,000 downloads a day, but each of those downloads would only average around 10c in sales. Now the downloads average closer to 500 a day, but on average generate 60c in sales.
Would 6x more downloads now result in 6x more sales? Hopefully I can find out in the future. Follow me on Twitter
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/7-minute-workout/id650762525?amp%3Bat=11l4LZ&mt=8