After the first week

This post is part of my “10 Apps in 12 Months” journey. Follow the tag to keep updated about my progress.

Exactly 7 days ago I’ve released my first ever Android app to the Play store. It is a silly video poker app and to be fair I didn’t have high hopes for it, but I thought it will be a good learning experience for my upcoming projects.

The app itself is a modernized version of a slot machine widely popular in Eastern Europe, so I thought it will do OK in the region’s app store, however I never expected the actual results. Spoiler alert: It is doing REALLY well.

The initial “marketing” push was easy. I do own a Facebook page with over 360,000 likes from Hungary (about 5 years ago I did sort of a media hack, that pissed off some people but a bunch of people liked it, hence the following). So I started off easy, just by posting the app’s web version to the page. Now if you ever been an admin of a Facebook page you must know how much of a dick Facebook is about page posts. Back in the days page posts had full visibility for everyone who liked the page. These days it is not true at all. Lately if you post with your page you are lucky if about 1% of your following see the post. Luckily advertising for Hungarians is cheap so I “boosted” my post for about $50 for a week. In exchange I got over 5,4k post “engagements”. Not bad

If you visit my app’s web interface via an Android device it will redirect you to the Play Store, otherwise you can play the actual game via the browser. If you run out of credits the app offers you to share the game via Facebook to get extra. This turned out to be a vital part of making the game viral. People love free stuff, even if it means spamming their friends.

Within a week I hit almost 10k users (I’m sure by the time I finish this post it will be over 10k)

That is a mix of web users (people who bet at least once) or Android users (people who downloaded the app). Not too shabby at all. And these users are pretty active. The average length of a session in the app is just shy of 7 minutes and the number of screens / session is 9.5 (which is interesting considering I only have 2 screens.

Ok, so I half expected having a decent user base, however what shocked me is the revenue. I’ve monetized the app with two methods:

• Rewarded video: used Chartboost to allow my users to watch videos and gain 300 in app credits for each of them. Chartboost pays for apps installed by my users (and a small amount for impressions)
• In-app purchases: initially I added three tiers of in app credit packages to purchase. Since I’ve extended this to 5

For the first 3 days I only checked Chartboost revenue numbers. The thing about Hungary at the moment is that the economy is pretty messed up, so I didn’t expect people spending money to purchase silly make-believe credits in a video poker app. So anyway, checking Chartboost I came to the conclusion that it won’t make me rich. The number of app downloads were decent, however as pretty much every ad company they don’t pay a decent PPI (price per install) for Eastern European traffic. For example: for a download in the UK based on my tests they pay around $2-$7. Meanwhile for about ~30 daily Hungarian downloads they pay a grand total of $5. So yeah, it is pocket money but I’m ok with $150 / month.

And then I checked the In-app sales stats and I couldn’t believe it. First day: £59, 2nd day £120, 3rd day almost £200. And it doesn’t seem to be a one off thing. After a week (even with the Easter factor) it still averages around £110 / day. That is actually a decent passive income, from a silly app. And the iPhone version is still not out (messed up some stuff so it got rejected, working on it)

Even though I’m not (just) in this for the money it is very motivating to see my app being used. Also I’ve already learned a lot about not just the technology side but how this whole app economy works.

Things I (think) did well

• The difficulty of the game is spot on. You want people to win, but not to win too much
• The viral element is there. They are incentived to share the app and bring in new players.
• The original paid packages (by pure luck) were well selected. You want to give the users the opportunity to buy a small amount of credits for cheap (most of the people will buy this) however you also want to have expensive packages. Right now the revenue from my bottom package sales (£0.79 each) are pretty much the same as my most expensive package revenues (£10.49 each)
• Picked some good keywords for my app store listing. I picked easy to rank, low search volume keywords (“fruit poker”) as well as highly competitive ones (e.g. “video poker”) and used them in my title and description. Since my download volume is pretty high at the moment the app is climbing steadily on the rankings and I’m receiving a good % of organic downloads
• Analytics! Correct measurement is key. I’ve used Google Analytics since that allows me to measure both the Android and the iOS versions and the web version too.

Things I didn’t do so well

• Underestimated the negativeness of the Hungarians. We Huns love to complain. If something is not perfect we will express our opinion about it. This is very visible on my app store listing. Received lots of 5 stars, but no written review for those. And some 1 stars, with very expressive reviews.
• The first version was not translated to Hungarian. English is widely spoken in Hungary, however the app’s main target market is not the highly educated people. Received some complaints that they don’t understand what is going on. Thankfully it is extremely easy to translate Android apps so I already pushed a new version
• No sound. The last game I built was in the 90’s and back then I always had crappy PCs without a sound card, so sound never been a part of my gaming experience. I failed to realize that in this game the nostalgia factor is massive and the original slot machine had loud 8 bit sounds. I managed to find the original sound files and since then I pushed a new version. This small change actually managed to turn 2 one star reviews into 5 stars.

What is next?

I have the Hungarian market down. The app ranks number 2 in the Casino category, number 47 in Games and 87 across all apps and climbing steadily.

I’m going to do some light Facebook advertising for the Hungarian market still, just because it is cheap. I’m going to target people who liked relevant pages and are in my target demography.

Then it is time to expand my reach. Based on my research the original slot machine were also popular in Austria, Slovakia, Romania and a bunch of post Soviet countries. I’m going to push Facebook adverts to these countries until the app starts ranking decently in those app stores. The good thing is that advertising for these countries are pretty much as cheap as advertising for Hungary. However that also means that ad revenue will be low as well.

My plan to bring up the Chartboost income is this: There are tons of Hungarians who emigrated to western countries (countries with good ad CPM / PPI), I’m one of them. They tend to be my generation (25–45) with relatively high disposable income. I’m going to target these people specifically with my ads. If all goes well that will bring up my ad revenue + help the app rank higher in western app markets, which should result in more western downloads hopefully. The cost of advertising will be bit higher for these people but I do think it worth it for the long term.

In terms of development my main focus today and the upcoming couple of days is to push the iPhone version out. After that I’m only going to do some minor incremental fixes and focus on the next app on my list. I already did a prototype for it and it will be exciting (it features machine learning and OCR)

Thanks for reading, will keep you posted