
My First Year in the App Store - trevmckendrick
http://www.trevormckendrick.com/my-first-year-in-the-app-store/
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dhruvmittal
I was actually really excited by the "...you can get the next 9 posts
delivered to your email by signing up here:" at the bottom. I like it. I like
email, because I can read it anywhere and filter it any way I want. I dislike
unsubscribing from email updates about as much as I dislike getting updates
I'll never read. By making it easy to get emailed only about a story I've
already demonstrated interest in (by reading all the way through), you've made
sure I'll come back for your next 9 posts.

I'd like to see more people use something like this.

Or, if I've misunderstood how this works...well, the concept was exciting.

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trevmckendrick
Very kind words. Glad you liked it. Indeed, fewer people sign up, but you know
they're the ones who value the content the most.

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grecy
Given that you're using wordpress, is that a plugin for the "sign up by
email"?

Thanks,

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trevmckendrick
It's just HTML that Mailchimp gave me that I stuck in the post.

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andrewljohnson
Whenever anyone complains to me that its hard to make money on software,
and/or the App Store is rigged, I always tell them I think anyone can make a
living by making a bible app. You don't even have to be the best one, just
pretty good, and iterate - it's the canonical product that you know has a big
audience, willing buyers, and poor competition on the low end of the market.

Case proven by this guy! The next time you think to yourself that there is
anything needed to make money on software besides persistence, thoughtfulness,
and picking something you know people want, you're in a trap of your own
creation.

People who don't make money on their apps typically fail because they try to
be too novel, try to make the app too good, or they don't stick in there long
enough.

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gwern
Patio11 has argued forcefully that developers systematically neglect women and
underserve that large market; I wonder if we can add to that 'and developers
also ignore religious markets too'?

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soup10
Really, developers ignore every demographic that they aren't a part of.
There's a reason "suits" are often at the head of large creative focused
corporations and compromise artistic integrity to make things more palatable
to their target markets. Market research and knowledge is a very real thing
that product focused developers often completely ignore or rely on instincts
of unknown quality.

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gwern
> Really, developers ignore every demographic that they aren't a part of.

Unfortunately, that is not really a meaningful thing to say as a guide to
behavior: it's like suggesting that someone sell non-apples - meaningful, not
wrong, and useless advice. You need to know what demographics developers
_aren't_ before that can be useful; you need to know, say, that developers
tend to be male, white/Asian, First Worlders, before you can say 'ah, females
may be underserved!'

And you need to think of the categories in the first place, like this religion
example shows. If someone asks you if developers might tend to not be fans of
religion than the general population, it might seem obvious, but 'being
atheists' is not the most salient feature of developers.

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jkira
I'd be interested to hear how you marketed the app. Just building an app seems
to be only half (or less) of the battle these days, as far as App Store
success goes.

I've got seven apps on the App Store, and combined they usually don't even
bring in $200/mo. Discouraging.

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trevmckendrick
I'll talk about that in one of the upcoming posts, but basically:

I started with an app niche that I knew people were already searching for. And
I knew _that_ because there were crappy Spanish Bible apps already making
money in the App Store.

Since then I have started collecting users' email addresses which helps with
promotions and new app launches, but initially all my traction was through
search.

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SurfScore
Sounds like any successful business I've ever heard of. Find a niche with an
unsatisfied need, then grow organically. Good for you.

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trevmckendrick
Thanks!

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danenania
Thanks for writing this. It's very insightful.

One question - do you have any interest in spanish and/or the bible, or is
this purely a business exercise?

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alexvr
It's a good reminder to me, as a developer, that people simply buy (or use)
what they want, not what _I_ think they want.

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trevmckendrick
Amen! (no pun intended :) )

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callmeed
I'm curious what translation you used (I signed up for the rest of the posts
but haven't got through them).

Most modern English translations of the Bible are copyrighted and often you
can only quote/print a limited number of verses without paying licensing. (I
think the best public domain version is probably the ASV from 1901).

Did you license a spanish version of the Bible? Pay someone to translate a
modern one? If so, were there legal hurdles to translating a copyrighted
version?

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trevmckendrick
You're right that most well known Bible translations are copyrighted. I found
one that is in the public domain so it was game on.

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timack
I thought the App Store had a rule that you couldn't submit an app that was
essentially a 'book or a film' how did you get around that?

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trevmckendrick
Great point. I've actually run into that problem. On some updates they would
reject me and I'd have to add a few features to be approved.

That's part of the reason I'm redoing the entire app from scratch with tons of
extra functionality, etc.

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aeontech
Fascinating example of finding and successfully filling an under-served niche.
I would have never thought of creating this kind of app.

It makes me contemplate - how can you break out of your filter bubble to come
up with and test product ideas for markets you can't even imagine exist
because they are so far from your experience?

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trevmckendrick
My two cents: I scrolled through tons and tons of top ranking apps in each
category. That was where the initial brainstorm began: profitable apps that
didn't look very good.

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austenallred
The coolest part of this post, IMO, is that by finding that niche you freed
yourself up to work on whatever you want to work on. Legitimate residual
income.

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trevmckendrick
Thanks, and yes and no. When I realized I'd found a decent sized niche I had
to make a decision: do I let it sit and coast/build something else, or do I
invest more here?

I've decided with the latter, which will play out for at least the next year.
Jury still out whether it was the right decision.

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sillysaurus
If you completely abandoned the project as it currently exists, do you think
your income would drop off sharply?

In other words, how much of an ongoing effort is it to ensure your income
stays high? Does search favor apps that are being updated constantly? Or is
there any reason not to eventually just stop working on the app?

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trevmckendrick
It wouldn't drop off. In fact there's many apps in the App Store that haven't
been touched in years that continue to bring in money.

My thoughts are that I have so much to improve upon, and there's a lot of low
hanging fruit left for me, so it's likely worth the additional investment.

I compared investing more time/money in this niche, vs in other unvalidated
ideas I have and it made sense to stick with this for now.

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orangethirty
Religious products are big sellers. Specially anything that has to do with the
bible or prayers. I used to sell bibles as a teenager. Made more money than
drug dealers. It was funny. But then I went ad turned atheist. I could no
longer sell itwith a clean conscience.

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jordan_clark
Is there a link to the app on the app store? Or did I miss it?

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trevmckendrick
My server is struggling, here's a cached version for the interested:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.trevormckendrick.com/my-
first-year-in-the-app-store/)

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scottluptowski
This sounds very interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more.

How much time did you spend researching potential app categories?

Was your category decision driven by any hard data, other than anecdotal
knowledge that Spanish bibles were a category that was selling and had search
volume?

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trevmckendrick
Great question.

No hard data. I saw that Spanish Bibles were ranking in the Reference and Book
categories, like you said.

Also important (but not "hard data") is that when I searched "la biblia"
relatively few apps appeared in the search results compared to other search
phrases.

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fuddle
Great idea, did it cost much to record the Bible as an audiobook?

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trevmckendrick
Yes. The most expensive part of the app by far.

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jacalata
So the $73k is net revenue after Apple but before costs, correct?

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trevmckendrick
That is correct.

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mansigandhi
trevmckendrick - good to see the app do well! If you remember I (Sleepyhead)
helped with the email forms. We pleasantly surprised to see the post here :)

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trevmckendrick
Hello! You guys did great work; those forms have done perfectly... over 30,000
signups so far.

Thanks for saying hi!

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nicholassmith
Nice work for sure.

One thing that rang true, $73k isn't the sort of money that gets VCs going but
that's full time salary for a lot of people. Making money on the app store is
definitely possible, but we're no longer seeing the half a million in sales in
one month figures we did at the start. Does that mean you can't make living
from the App Store? No, it just means being realistic.

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speedyapoc
Very surprised by that type of revenue. What kind of marketing did you put
into it?

Without marketing, my first app on the store went as follows:

> The next morning (and literally every day since) I woke up and first thing
> checked my email for that magical message from AppFigures. My total day one
> net sales? $0.70. Admittedly not very much.

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trevmckendrick
As far as I know, all downloads are based on search.

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ronyeh
Congrats on the success! Can you share a link to your app?

Also, do you think the only way to get discovered (for indie devs) is to pick
app ideas that will match nicely to keywords that users search for? If you
don't have a marketing budget, is there any other way to get discovered?

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monkey_slap
I'm going to be doing a similar writeup as my app launches in 2 weeks. I've
got a small budget. All the design+dev was me, but I'm spending about
$300-$400 on marketing. We'll see how that goes.

If anything I believe you should be spending more on marketing nowadays.
There's no real way, at least to my knowledge, to search for a niche hole with
keywords. I do, however, like to think of an app idea and then spend an hour
search various keywords and seeing the results/competition.
<https://appstorerankings.net/> is a good website to find the keywords of an
app. I combined common keywords in the app that I'm releasing with common
keywords that are missing among competitors that yield few results.

Again, I haven't launched this app (my 7th) yet, but I'll be doing some
analysis of its success using the marketing budget and keyword research.

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trevmckendrick
I agree it's hard to do really detailed research similar to, say, the Google
Keyword Tool. It's mostly a gut check. "Does this have a lot of competition?
Does this keyword appear to get a lot of searches?"

What's your app name?

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monkey_slap
Poetreat. Aiming for May 7. Week of polish then submission.
<http://poetreatapp.com/>

~~~
trevmckendrick
Nice landing page for sure. Maybe this is obvious, but they key is finding out
a solid upgrade that makes IAP's worth it to customers.

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monkey_slap
Agreed. Doing a freemium model where you can save only save 1 poem. Unlocking
adds theming, Facebook+Twitter connection, and unlimited poems. Worth $.99?
That's subjective, but this entire app is more of an experiment than a
business. Just going to iterate and improve on the next one.

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jacoblyles
Is that a scroll bar down the right side? Seems poorly placed if you expect
people to touch on the right side to advance a page.

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trevmckendrick
Great point. The navigation between chapters is still being decided.

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nathanbarry
Nicely done! I'd love to hear more about the marketing efforts that went into
promoting the app.

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trevmckendrick
Thanks for the comment Nathan. Initially it was all via search.

Since then I've started collecting email addresses the very 1st time the app
launches. I'm up to over 30,000 emails now so every new product launch starts
relatively well.

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nanijoe
Impressive...How do you collect the email email addresses? Do you just ask
people for their addresses?

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trevmckendrick
Yep. When the app launches the very first time I ask for their 1st name and
email if they want to hear about deals/offers, new apps, etc.

They can cancel out easily and never see the form again. But when you have a
free app that quite a few people download, email addresses start accumulating
pretty quickly.

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Paul_D_Santana
I was under the impression that this was a paid app. How does it generate so
much revenue while still being free?

I signed up for future posts ( _extremely_ well-placed sign-up form by the
way!), but I didn't see a description of in-app purchases or other revenue
model as a topic for a future post, which is why I ask. I am also using
Android.

Thank you for this post by the way. This is amazing and I'm excited to read
your future posts!

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trevmckendrick
Great questions. Revenue is where it's at!

Initially it was just a paid download for the text of the Bible.

With more research in the App Store though I realized audio Bibles were
selling much more than I was.

So I outsourced the audio (mentioned in the post I think) and now the model is
that users download the original app (with the text) for free, and then can
buy the audio as an IAP.

This works great on multiple fronts: I collect more email address, I rank
better in search because I get more downloads, and the audio sells better as
an IAP than as a stand alone app.

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Paul_D_Santana
Wow, you are incredibly ingenious! Thank you for responding!

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trevmckendrick
:) You bet

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jebek
I'm sure you'll make it clear in later posts, but are you a developer?

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trevmckendrick
I'm not a dev or a designer. I'm tech savvy enough that I'm still the computer
repair guy for my entire extended family, but I'm def not fluent in Objective
C.

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tachion
If so, and only the later posts are about hiring, what, I assume, means you
were hiring only after you've found about initial success, how come the first
version ever came out?

Beside that, great story, great spirit, congratulations, I admire everyone
actually getting things done :)

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trevmckendrick
I'm not sure I understand the question, but I think you're asking how I made
the app at all if I'm not a dev/designer?

I outsourced 95% of it. I created the initial mockups by hand and did some of
the debugging, but the core app development was done by contractors. And yes,
for $500.

The point is it wasn't great, but it was good enough to test the market.

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unreal37
Great first article in the series. Can't wait for the rest.

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yoster
Nice! Even the most frugal of people will shell out some money when it comes
to religion.

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trevmckendrick
True about the copycats. Although there are a few things you have to do right
in the app that most people don't know. Most versions of the Bible are
copyrights for example.

And I also speak Spanish. I can't imagine doing this app in a different
language. The text has to be perfect and it's (obviously?) hard to tell what's
wrong when you can't read it.

