My progress - mobile apps dev business, online learning, etc.

[RJ the first]

Having problems. App 1 was up to 100+ downloads a day, and growing fast. Then I made a change to keywords and fell out of rank for some important long tail keywords - and downloads fell - they're now only about 20-30 a day for App 1. I changed the keywords back with my last update - it only helped a little.

App 2 has never picked up. But it is a special occasions app for Valentine's day, so I wasn't expecting it to do a lot of business, maybe around Valentines Day it will pick up.

I told myself anyway that I was not expecting the first 5 or so apps to make money, I am doing them to learn about stuff like product development, marketing and ASO. After App 5 I hope business will pick up. But App 3 has potential to make money - it is a 'photo stickers' app in a popular kids niche that doesn't have much competition. App 4, the one I'm working on now, is a Pokemon app - so it may make money since the market is there. App 5 is a game I'm reskinning - still waiting for the graphics for that one...

 

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[fhs8]

Having problems. App 1 was up to 100+ downloads a day, and growing fast. Then I made a change to keywords and fell out of rank for some important long tail keywords - and downloads fell - they're now only about 20-30 a day for App 1. I changed the keywords back with my last update - it only helped a little.

How much revenue does 100 downloads a day translate to in a month?

App 2 has never picked up. But it is a special occasions app for Valentine's day, so I wasn't expecting it to do a lot of business, maybe around Valentines Day it will pick up.

Should've never made the app if you weren't expecting it to do a lot of business. It was a big waste of time.

App 4, the one I'm working on now, is a Pokemon app - so it may make money since the market is there.

I would be careful with App 4 since the Pokemon Go Company has been sending out cease and desist letters.

Are you doing some of the programming or is it all outsourced? If you were hiring people to do everything how much money would you have lost so far? How long would it take for App 1 to break even?

 

[RJ the first]

How much revenue does 100 downloads a day translate to in a month?

I've hardly made anything on it. If you figure in costs like - legal fees, Apple Developer account, contractors to do things like graphics, etc. - I've lost money. It's kind of hard to swallow, but I tell myself it's a learning experience, and that the guys making the top money like Carter Thomas did not start making money until they had about 20 apps under their belt. I told myself I have to learn the market research and ASO part of the business, there's no way to learn that stuff if you don't release apps into the App Store and try things out for yourself. Noone's going to let you learn using their apps.

There is a lady in my 'mastermind' group who pulls in $20000 a month, she has 40 apps in the app store. Only half of those apps make any money at all - and the majority of that money is made by the highest grossing top 10-15 apps in her portfolio (one app that does $12000 a month). She has 20-30 apps that make $0 to a few hundred a month.

Also there is no ratio on how much number of download translates into revenue, because it would depend on your click through rate and average revenue per user. The days when I made the most money from ad networks were not the days where I had the most downloads.

But if we generalize and try to extrapolate using my current click through rate - what it boils down to is that 100 downloads a day for my App 1 would translate into roughly into $5 a day, or $150 a month. For me to consider this a successful app it would have to be pulling in at least ten times that much downloads, or $1500 at 1000 downloads a day.

For point of comparison - the top app in my niche is averaging about 1000+ downloads a day, and is making $4000 a month. This information is kind of sketchy because I'm not sure how accurate Apptopia is as far as revenue or download numbers. But if we are to take those numbers as true - this app is pulling in about 1000 downloads a day and has much higher revenue per user - meaning they spend longer time on the app, and click through ads more.

Should've never made the app if you weren't expecting it to do a lot of business. It was a big waste of time.

Well the way I work is - I never write or reskin an app just once - to make it worth my while I have to be able to reuse the code. App 2 was very quick and easy to put out - because it was basically the code for App 1 with different graphics, a new name, and a different database. I could reskin App 1 in a different ways using different themes, but I might just do it one more time because I'm sick of that code lol.

This was another experiment, and holiday apps can be pretty profitable. Right now there are a ton of Christmas and holiday apps that are making money consistently every year. Valentine's day too. And to get your app to rank in the top 10 for 'Christmas' or 'Valentine's day' keywords - you have to release it much earlier in the year.

I would be careful with App 4 since the Pokemon Go Company has been sending out cease and desist letters.

Are you doing some of the programming or is it all outsourced? If you were hiring people to do everything how much money would you have lost so far? How long would it take for App 1 to break even?

And yet I see tons of Pokemon apps on the app store! Minecraft apps too, etc. It would not be a big loss of time because App 4 would be a quick reskin of App 3 - with different theme and different graphics.

If I get a cease and desist I will just take it down. Like I said, I consider the first 5-10 apps just a learning experience, or just experiments. This would be my experiment to see how this type of app with a known 'trending' theme like Pokemon would perform, and what type of experience I'd have with it.

I'd say at this point I'm doing like 80% of the coding. The rest of the coding is template code that I hack on and change for my purposes. This situation is not ideal and does not scale if I eventually want to get to the point where I have 100+ apps in the app store. The reason I say '100+ apps in the app store' is - I find that most of the people who I study that are doing really good money have at least dozens if not more than 100 apps in the app store. It's only by releasing that many apps and trying a lot of things that you stumble onto the top 10 or 20 or so apps that will be making money for you.

But yeah, I can't spend all my time coding if I want to concentrate on market research and ASO, business development stuff. But at the moment I don't have much money coming in so I have to do it myself.

 

[RJ the first]

My App 3 is live on the App Store for one day. For this app I wanted to experiment with a Facebook Ads campaign for mobile to see if I can drive downloads to generate some organic growth. I started a 7 day campaign at 40$ a day for the age range of 13-40 worldwide. This app should probably be for a lower age range but 13's as low as I can go on FB ads. I just wanted to see if FB ads was worth the investment.

 

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[RJ the first]

Well I submitted app 4 and it got rejected. This was a 'Pokemon' app and it got rejected for trademark content. I have to figure out a way to reuse this code now.

 

[Andy Black]

I don't know anything about app development, or app marketing or sales.

From skimming this thread I understand you're releasing apps quickly to get better at creating them, and to learn marketing and ASO?



You mention someone is pulling decent MRR with 40 apps in the App Store.

Are all her apps related to each other?

Is she somehow getting the contact details of people who download her apps so she can notify them of a new app when it is released?

If she is building some sort of list/audience then I can really see how releasing more and more apps can help grow her monthly downloads. Otherwise, did she release 40 apps looking for lightning strikes and the law of averages mean she found a few?



Some things to consider:

You're experimenting with catching trends.

Following trends means you're competing in an overcrowded App Store against businesses who specialise in this.

What's your unfair advantage over them?

Do you know a vertical / app genre better than them?

Do you know that market better than them?

I get that you're "learning", but it also smacks a little of chasing money and less of chasing needs.


What would happen if your unfair advantage was the people you already knew?

Can you make this higher friction and engage the market more rather than see this as an exercise in selling electrons?

Can you go B2B and help a local business save money or make money? (With one eye on scaling to all businesses in that vertical?)

Would this make more money per app download than Pokemon apps (leading question)?



R + R = Profit. (Repeat business plus Referrals).

How will you get Repeat business?

How will you get Referrals?



Control?

Can you get banned from the App Store?

What happens when the App Store ranking algorithm changes (or new competing apps appear) and you drop ranking and downloads dry up?

Can you contact buyers of your previous apps?



EDIT: A trivial step to improving your marketing, sales, and business mindset is something as simple as hitting the Like button more. People are following and commenting because your taking lots of action (and big kudos for that btw). That's an audience you're building right there. Learn to engage your audience.

 

[RJ the first]

Hi Andy!

>From skimming this thread I understand you're releasing apps quickly to get better at creating them, and to learn marketing and ASO?

Yes. For the first quarter of my business's existence, I am not really concentrating on profits. My focus is taking care of legal paperwork to establish the LLC. I am focusing on streamlining my development process, using my own programming skills and any contractors I use to do additional programming or graphic design work, so that in the future I can turn over apps quickly. This is key because I already know that - the people who are really making money in the app store typically have dozens or hundreds of apps in the app store - I have observed that the majority of their money comes from the top 25% or a third of their apps, so it's a matter of releasing a lot of apps to establish the small subset of apps that really make money for you.

>What's your unfair advantage over them?

I would say - most of these app store 'speculators' are not programmers. They typically pay contractors thousands of dollars to create their apps for them. I would estimate the average cost to pay a contractor to create an app from scratch for you including configuration of ad network sdks, app analytics and notification sdks, the actual release and testing of the app etc. - would cost between $1000-$5000 depending on the app.

My advantage is, I myself am a good programmer and can take care of all of these things myself for free. Also, my intellect. I am not a marketing or business guru - but I am a very smart guy, and have been taking many business courses and reading books and blogs. Once I have these skills down, I don't have to rely on anyone for this.

>Do you know a vertical / app genre better than them?

I'm focusing on games, and photo apps with social sharing. I'm not an 'expert' on this stuff, I have to work a full time job so I'm not someone who spends 40 hours a week studying the marketing around these types of apps.

>I get that you're "learning", but it also smacks a little of chasing money and less of chasing needs.

What is the 'need' around games and funny photo apps with social sharing? Relieving boredom for games, and having fun and sharing funny pictures with your friend for photo apps. These needs are by nature very trend-based. I hear what you are saying though - this is definitely the aspect of my business that I need to really focus on if I am to really make money with this going forward.


>Can you go B2B and help a local business save money or make money? (With one eye on scaling to all businesses in that vertical?) . Would this make more money per app download than Pokemon apps (leading question)?

I am not sure - there are people with Pokemon and Minecraft apps that get through the app review process - which is based on luck. It all depends on who reviews your app frankly. If my Pokemon app got through, it might be making money by now. It was worth a shot, because I already had the code and could turn this app over in only a few days for no money.

But - I hear you and I appreciate you are making a very good suggestion. For what it's worth, I was contacted by an entrepreneur recently to partner on a sports betting app. I am considering that. I also get that in addition to chasing trends, I could make money as a freelance programmer who creates e-commerce apps for local businesses. So far I have not pursued this track - my thinking around this is, I am interested in 'fast lane', creating apps for 50/hour for a local business is not fast lane vs. creating an original app that could potentially bring in $10000 a month. The people in this business I admire the most are those with an original app portfolio of hundreds of apps, with the top 25% or so of their app portfolio pulling in tens or hundreds of thousands a month in revenue.

I also appreciate what you suggest could potentially be a way to make money right now while I am developing my original apps. This is valid, and I will definitely give some thought to it. I have observed on Upwork that the people who are really making money as freelance programmers also have pretty huge app portfolios they use to solicit business. I think I am almost at the point where my own app portfolio is impressive enough where I could do this myself.

>Can you get banned from the App Store?

Yes I've heard of it. I would probably not be banned for trying to submit a Pokemon app - the people I've heard of being banned have used illegal services that use 'bots' to fake downloads and post fake reviews for your apps to game the app rating system.


>What happens when the App Store ranking algorithm changes (or new competing apps appear) and you drop ranking and downloads dry up?

Yes the algorithm always changes, but what I observe is if your app has been a top app in its genre for some time, that your search ranking is almost impervious to these changes due to its historical data.

>Can you contact buyers of your previous apps?

Only if they contact you through your 'developer contact' link. Or maybe if they contact you through Facebook. The best way to study user feedback is to do 'review mining' through a service like App Annie to get useful information like what features users want the most. Or through using an analytics SDK like Flurry to gather metrics around user engagement.

 

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[David Kotevski]

Hi i recently moved to Chicago myself from Australia. I have a billionaire dollar idea basically for a app which I made a thread for before and feel it's suited for yourself as we both have similar goals.

If we could get Walmart with our no more waiting in lines app and used cashiers as sales/loss prevention people we would change the physical world of shopping forever and make a killing.

If we could further discuss my plan it would definitely be the way to go for our goals currently.

 

[eTox]

Hi i recently moved to Chicago myself from Australia. I have a billionaire dollar idea basically for a app which I made a thread for before and feel it's suited for yourself as we both have similar goals.

If we could get Walmart with our no more waiting in lines app and used cashiers as sales/loss prevention people we would change the physical world of shopping forever and make a killing.

If we could further discuss my plan it would definitely be the way to go for our goals currently.

lol......................

 

[David Kotevski]

lol......................

I made another thread previously but don't have the technological knowledge . But have the numbers and consumer knowledge to know it's a game changer so no one ever has to wait in a line again especially whole foods would work nicely. So instead of serving one person you can serve 10+ at the same time with the app.

 

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[Action Mike]

@RJ the first
Great thread. Do you still post on the forum? I would love to hear how things are going for you since I am learning app development now.

 

[RJ the first]

@RJ the first
Great thread. Do you still post on the forum? I would love to hear how things are going for you since I am learning app development now.

Well it has been more than 6 months since I worked on my app business. I have not come here in many months.

The reason is I have been hit w some really bad luck- major surgery, job change, and divorce. It's been overwhelming. I'm only now thinking about turning my attention back to my side business although I don't even know if that's a good idea w the divorce financials still being decided.

Right now I am just concentrating on improving my coding in my spare time, until I feel the time is right to start releasing apps again, or if that's still a viable business model in 2017.

So ... currently I'm writing some new code in Unity. No plans to release any new apps any time soon, just getting back into the Unity coding and generally getting back into keeping up with the app business after taking 7 months off...