My indie 2016
Some numbers in my charts are blurred out. Sorry about that, but I’m not ready to go that public with my business. If anybody in a similar place is interested in comparing our numbers, I would love to. Email me.
On November 30th 2015 I decided to go indie and get into the worst App Store category imaginable — productivity. It’s a terrible space. There are already so many great apps. Take Pomodoro technique, for example. There are hundreds of apps for Pomodoro technique. So obviously, I decided to build another one.
Product
FocusList is an app based around two good techniques — the Pomodoro technique, and planning your day. It’s not something anybody will understand and use. Most people have don’t have time to even bother with a productivity app.
Planning your day is something you can do with a piece of paper. Pomodoro technique can be practiced with a stopwatch. People laughed at me for trying to sell a “stopwatch”. But they were right. It’s really tough to sell it to somebody who just doesn’t think about things like that.
Pricing
I tend to try these apps, but I always forget about them in a few days. I thought most of the people are the same, and so there would be poor retention numbers. I was quite right, so it was a good idea to put a price tag on the app and avoid freemium. Price was (and still is) $4.99.
I don’t know what freemium would do. I want to try it this year with another app.
Execution
My original goal was to get featured in the App Store, so I built good looking iOS, Mac and Apple Watch apps. My friend Philip designed a beautiful icon and the UI. Then I made some crude modifications to his UI design. At this point he wouldn’t sign his name on it. But it’s thanks to him the app looks so good. (He doesn’t think it does after my meddling.)
Despite all this effort, it was never featured in the App Store. Quite a shame. Lesson learned: Don’t rely on getting featured, I guess.
February: Launch
I launched it in the week of Feb 14th, 2016. It was featured on Product Hunt and with 500 upvotes, I think most of the initial downloads came from ProductHunt.
Notice also how on the launch day, mobile version was doing a little better. Don’t skip making your landing pages responsive. But I think desktop version compensated for it later though.
March: Engineering as marketing
At the time of launch I was reading Deep Work, a great book about staying focused, and I came up with an idea. Count how many times I get distracted for Facebook, Twitter and such. (Many.) I built it in a week and launched as Escape. It had everything that a good free app needs: Simple value proposition, pretty design and there was certain virality to sharing your daily distractions number.
It did great. Received over 1000 upvotes on ProductHunt and scored tens of thousands downloads. This was great advertising for FocusList. As you can imagine, that did drive a lot of traffic to FocusList thanks to the big ad in it. The ad showed I think on 7th launch, effectively disabling entire UI, but once you opened it, then it wouldn’t bother you again. So it would get me traffic and people didn’t complain about it.
I think this is a great example of “engineering as marketing”. I tried something similar just now with app Cleanbox, but that isn’t doing very good. (At 100 upvotes now.)
May: Paid promotion
In May I paid for my spot in TwoDollarTuesday. I have previously worked with these guys, and it’s an okay way to get your Mac app promoted. Here we can see it affected number of downloads greatly, and the proceeds went up at an okay rate.
It’s just okay, because it’s not what it used to be. When I ran this promotion few years ago for Zonebox it did much better. People are less willing to pay for apps now, even if it’s just $2, or maybe it’s just less useful.
Summer: Staying alive
In the summer I was doing short contract work and exploring some other ideas (fitness app — gave up), so I didn’t push indie too hard. But the sales kept going (and they still do) thanks to Tomato One. It’s my free Pomodoro app, it has an ad in it and it helps me to some extra sales.
Even today, when I look at the charts, I can sense a light correlation between free Pomodoro and total proceeds.
November: Making iOS app free
I tried making iOS app free for a few days. I thought it would be all over the internet. And it was. Just going free generated over 50k downloads. There were a lot of headlines on websites like “apps gone free” and such.
But all these downloads were absolutely worthless. It simply did not change world’s unwillingness to pay five bucks for my stopwatch app. If anything, it made things worse.
Thanks for reading!
I love reading articles where indie developers share their experience, so I thought I’d write one too. I’m sorry if I sounded miserable at times, but beginnings are hard.
So am I going back to full time job after this year? No way. I think it’s doing wonderfully given how full the market is. Thanks to all the feedback from customers I already have a pretty clear picture of “Pro” version of this, so if nothing else I’ll get to that.
But my main focus for 2017 is the tool I used to make these charts! It’s called Median and you can use it to get any of these charts in like four clicks. Sign up on the website if you’d like to try the beta.
