The fact that his visually stunning and interesting app Percolator was a staff pick in the App Store (at one point, I bought nearly all staff picks near automatically) is relevant. I wish he had talked more about the week he spent working on the app (how long did he work, how does he balance visual and technical tasks, his mentors, his weaknesses, the creative process, reuse of clever graphics routines, any backtracking). Perhaps a future blog post?
I remain convinced that Apple has a watchlist of great app makers and apps (e.g. a reviewer that finds an Apple worthy app can flag it to the editors as worthy of consideration).
And, Percolator and Tinrocket were rightly on that list.
Yes, that will be a future post. Quite honestly it took a lot out of me and only now can I go back and revisit some of it. You will hear all about how my friends and family had to get food for me because I couldn't leave the computer. :)
Thanks for writing up your experiences! I am completely fascinated that you are not only a professional visualizer but someone who enables people to create their own.
I can't find any of the "before" images, though I clicked through and around his site, watched his videos, and googled for images (of course, people want to show off their "after" images, not the "before"). I guess they are just ordinary photos, but it would be nice to see what the app actually does - that would be much more compelling than seeing how you can change colours etc.
lesson: optimizing every little thing won't make you fail if the important things are basically right.
This looks amazing and was 99 cents (now $1.99).
I love this comment reply from the OP's post. Reminds me of the advice (not mine) I pass along to clients that if you write original, compelling content, you don't have to ever worry about SEO.
> I don’t know anything about App Store SEO. I put all my effort into the app and how people will approach it: icon, name, screenshots, etc.
Fantastic job -- your app is stylish and clever. What are your thoughts about your price point? I would think you're leaving a lot of money on the table selling at $1.99.
Thanks, $.99 was right for 1.0, but I feel that changing the price to $1.99 for version 2.0 was correct:
-A lot of work went into the update and I will continue to offer free updates for as long as I can afford to. The price went up for new users to reflect the effort put into the new version, and also to reward people who bought 1.0 on the faith that there would be future updates.
-Although there is a novelty aspect to the processing, I do my own computer graphics research and take it seriously. Doing my own R&D is more time consuming than adapting other people's research. As a bonus, using original research is the best way to stay unique—and valuable. :)
-Raising the price to $1.99 is an intentional strategy to curb impulse buys and by consequence, bad customer reviews because of misunderstandings. With my previous app, I raised the price and the quality of reviews went up. I believe that the price increase makes people do a double-check before hitting Buy. I would much rather have a few happy customers than a lot of disgruntled ones. :)
-I rarely put my apps on sale, but when I do, I can go down to $.99 from $1.99, which I can't do if the app was $.99 all the time. I want to make sure that I'm always in the charts—my apps have been holding their own for months around position 100 in the photo category. I would only consider a sale if they dropped below the top 200.
Oh, I see. :) A year ago I tried an experiment with one of my other apps at $2.99 and there was some review backlash. Perhaps it's worth testing the waters every once in a while. My general strategy has been to price to keep the rankings up (for discoverability) and keep the price where it won't be a factor in user reviews.
Sometimes lower price points draw negative reviews and higher price points draw positive reviews simply because the price itself sends a signal about quality. Higher price points may also result in more profit -- by reducing the costs associated with support (and the entitlement that a $0.99 app comes with). Have you thought about $4.99?
$4.99 would be to high. That price range is right for apps like Snapseed (pre Google aquisition) that are billed as serious photo editors (tools in genreral can command a higher price.)
When you are at that price range, it also helps to have a lot of big published reviews behind it so customers can evaluate the purchase more easily. Popsicolor doesn't have any of those, and probably won't receive any, because it doesn't solve a particular problems other than being fun unto itself.
Great work! 7 days is inspirational. I also did a small side project to clear my mind and it did wonders! Yours however, is simply jaw dropping for 7 days.
I think this says more about the market that buys featured apps than the developer. Specifically, it has become much smaller, but getting featured is still a guaranteed payday.
I remain convinced that Apple has a watchlist of great app makers and apps (e.g. a reviewer that finds an Apple worthy app can flag it to the editors as worthy of consideration).
And, Percolator and Tinrocket were rightly on that list.