Building Sustainable Revenue in the App Store
If you’ve ever released a game or app in the app store, you are probably familiar with this curve:
For those who aren’t as familiar with the app store (hello, web developers!), you may be expecting something a little more like this:
When people think about building a business they think about growing their paying customer base over time. In kids apps and games the convention is that it’s all about getting hits. You spend months or years, invest a big wad of cash, promote the heck out of your app and then hope that you make enough money in those first crucial weekends to cover costs.
If your app is a real hit you might still be making money months (or years!) later but if you don’t get it right then all that work goes down the drain. Which leaves you either scrambling to release another app or worse, packing up shop.
At Shiny Things we’re trying something different.
The Release
After we released Quick Math Jr, we were ecstatic. It represented some fantastic achievements for us. We’d created a learning engine that adjusted its difficulty as kids played. We’d created a reward system that kids (and adults!) absolutely loved. We’d built games that taught numeracy skills in innovative ways that nobody else was doing. Most importantly, kids were having so much fun playing it.
But even after the release, we still had a bunch of ideas we wanted to explore. Generally these would be released in Quick Math Jr. 2 or Quick Math Jr Plus a year or so later.
Instead we bucked tradition and two months later released a new mini-game and a Christmas update. At this point, not only were kids hooked on learning maths, but we were hooked on improving Quick Math Jr!
Continuous Improvement
Since we originally released Quick Math Jr. in October 2014 we’ve released four major updates, each a massive improvement on the one before. These releases were based on what we saw kids doing in the classroom, the feedback our users gave us, the lessons we’ve learned since starting this company and how we see our business growing sustainably in the future.
These regular updates have been liberating. They’ve allowed us to try new ideas and build on the work we’ve already done without spending a lot of time building a completely new product. We know we can’t get everything right the first time, but once we see how our users react to something, we have a much better idea of where to go from there (though despite testing extensively in the classroom we can’t really know how kids “in the wild” will do with our games, and we don’t know what parents will understand and buy until we release).
Some great innovations have come from this process — the idea for our report card came from user feedback. We also altered our account-creation flow to further emphasise personal expression and engage our users, and we upgraded our progress screen to give children feedback about what they were learning. Most importantly, we decided to switch to a free to play model with in-app purchases to get more content.
The switch to being a free app was a big deal. We’d never tried the business model and only a few apps in our category were doing business that way.
First we decided to test the concept — we released an update that switched us over to free with one IAP. After a couple of weeks of data we came to the conclusion that, even though only a small percentage of our users bought the IAP, it was enough to beat our revenue from before.
With our proof-of-concept out of the way, it was time to get the real deal into the App Store. We had a hypothesis: with at least two individual purchases and a bundle we’d get many more conversions. We didn’t want to just throw some content together for a quick release, so we worked hard on developing some fantastic new content. After three months of sketching, classroom testing, implementing and re-implementing (and re-re-implementing), we were finally ready to unleash it on the public.
Our Mad Science Island update is huge. We’ve added a third island of content with three new games and a heap of new items to win. It’s by far the most polished product we’ve ever released and we’re very happy with it.
The best part of this approach has been making an app that really is great for our customers. Ultimately we don’t want to be in the business of one-off purchases — apps that are opened one weekend and never opened again. We want to be making apps that kids open all the time, turning their minds-off screen time in to minds-on (learning) screen time.
Rewarding Early Adopters
We’ve also done something else with this new release — if you buy our Island Pack, we don’t just give you a discounted price, we’re also including every island we release in the future. This is a tremendously good deal and for us it’s very exciting. We get to reward our early adopters, the ones who believe in us most!
Releasing continuous improvements is important to us; it lets us know we’re on the right track and it helps us make the best product possible. This means that, while we know our app is great right now, we also know it’ll be even better in the future and if you’re willing to pay to come on that ride, we’re willing to sweeten the deal.
This sort of approach has worked well for other indie developers in the past. Many of you would be familiar with Minecraft’s pricing structure. The Alpha releases were very cheap, then as they added more features and released more stable builds, the price rose to where it is today. Pinboard famously charged a fraction of a penny more for each successive user, though they’ve since simplified the pricing. Modern apps are always improving, so it makes sense for the price to go up as the product gets better.
It may be almost a year since our first release, but we still have a lot more to come! We have two new islands in the pipeline, both with their own exciting new games and items. We have a new system for guiding kids through our games in development, plus some other ideas we can’t wait to show you.
We think that by continuously improving our product we can build something really amazing and, by rewarding our customers who jump in early, we can make a sustainable income too!
If you’d like to try Quick Math Jr. with your children (3–8), we’re free on the App Store. You can learn more about the learning benefits on our website.
Post written by Ben Taylor. Stay tuned for Part 4 of our Making Apps for Kids blog series, coming soon!
