In November of 2011, I shipped an app for reading Hacker News on iPads. Launch week was surprisingly successful. The day of the launch it was the number 5 top paid app in the News section and stayed there for a couple days.
Now things have slowed down. Over 80% of my total sales happened in November, and most of those happened within the first two days of the app's life. Realisticly I don't expect this app to pay my bills, but still there are many small things I can do to try to increase my app's sales. So Whats the plan?
The usual next step is to focus on conversions. However, since its an app store app most of my purchases come from users buying directly through the App Store. I'm going to try gathering statistics about how long a general user uses my app. My next goal will be to increase this number.
I'm pretty excited about this, because I was completely surprised by my users when I launched the App. I have a short list of features that I thought were very important that didn't make it to the 1.0 release. However, this list and the features that users actually asked for were completely different. I'm excited to find out which ones really matter.
My main thought on Search Engine Optimization has always been that if you follow web standards properly you will be 80% there. I still think this has some truth to it, but I also think there are some small changes I can make to increase traffic. In short, my goal for the next few months is to double traffic to the Hacker News Paper's site, and double app usage. I am very interested to see how directly this will relate to sales.
The truth is this app is never going to pay my bills, but hoping that if I can double its sales I will be able to use similar techniques to double any project's sales. I am currently working on a larger project with a much larger market, and I hope I can use some of these techniques in that project.