I think it's safe to assume that they'll ride the top charts for a while and this product will definitely give them a really solid return. However, I wish they'd paint a more realistic picture for AppStore publishers... but I doubt I'm their audience in this blog post. :)
- 4 team members (based on props in blog)
- $5,999 promotional MacBook contest
- high quality promo video, mkting material, etc. ($$)
- tap into large MacHeist audience
- TapTapTap was one of the first on the store, Classics and WhereTo? got them a nice following of fans.
I'm not trying to sound negative here, I think TapTapTap deserves everything they have coming for their amazing products. But this post is the tip of the ice berg, so try not to get disillusioned that the AppStore is lush with $$$ for indie developers... a majority of the time it's the exact opposite.
What's worth noting about TapTapTap is how they approached the launch of Covert and the level of polish in the 1.0 release. I really believe you need to come out with a BANG if you want an honest shot at the Top 100. Trying to get there with iterations is definitely an uphill battle.
They're painting a realistic picture of how high the bar is for AppStore success. Step 1: Take an idea that would be useful to lots of people. Step 2: Do it better than anyone has ever done it before. Step 3: Do it 3x better than Step 2. Step 4. Make it smoother and prettier than anything you've ever used before.
That, my friends, is what it takes to succeed at the App Store.
I really believe you need to come out with a BANG if you want an honest shot at the Top 100. Trying to get their with iterations is definitely an uphill battle.
You can thank the App Store review process for that. If each iteration takes 2-6 weeks, you'd better put a LOT more into each try.
I'm very much aware of the quality of their products and I agree with your 4-step process, but that's not the end game for success in the AppStore and that's all I was saying. There are plenty of gems amongst the 65k apps that have not had a chance to see significant sales because they failed at marketing, and/or hurt by AppStore economics.
ps. Games aside, there are more craptastic apps in the Top 100 than quality.
I was more impressed by that before I bought the app and saw they had spelled Celsius as Celcius... I mean if you are going to piss around with fonts and colours for so long, you would think someone would get the names of the units right (well you know, being a unit conversion app and all).
Honestly I'm impressed that the app is so popular as a pay-for app. Definitely useful, has beautiful UI but I fail to see why people don't just do a Google query when you want to convert something.
Ugly and difficult to read in Win 7 in both Opera, Firefox, Chrome and IE8. It's especially unreadable in Opera and Firefox, especially in the shaded Note bits where half the font pixels appear to be missing.
Looks like a combination of suboptimal AA and an incredibly poor font colour choice which massively reduces the contrast, which is made even worse when the background is shaded in the Note bits.
Unbelievable the difference between the 6500 downloads a day that guarantee the second place on the rank and the 30 downloads a day that a guy in a blog post shared on HN a couple of months ago said was making is app stay the top30: http://www.stromcode.com/2009/05/24/the-incredible-app-store...
Convert is listed as #2 in the overall chart; that link is talking about an app in the top 30 in the social networking chart. Two different charts (with the overall chart being quite a bit more competitive) explains the differences.
I'm not very familiar with the app store and what it takes to be a top seller, but selling 40,000 units in two weeks sounds like a pretty good success to me.
It depends tho. We've seen from other folks that unit sales drop off a cliff from those top spots on down. Which means that they're making $20,000 a week or so for the time they are at #2.
That's only a $1M a year or so (before Apple gets their cut). Which is obviously good money, but it's not a huge win by any means (It's less than your average hedge fund manager makes). That's before you divvy it up among your team.
It's also unlikely they'll see that full amount, as some other app is going to come along and displace them eventually. So your dealing with movie economics here: You have to make all of your money in a month or so. Something along those lines anyways. Given the way the app-store functions, building a sustainable income stream seems rather unlikely. Certainly not at those numbers.
I guess I'm actually a bit shocked by how low those numbers are. I guess it's really an indication of how difficult it is when your forced to price apps at a sub $1 price point.
- 4 team members (based on props in blog)
- $5,999 promotional MacBook contest
- high quality promo video, mkting material, etc. ($$)
- tap into large MacHeist audience
- TapTapTap was one of the first on the store, Classics and WhereTo? got them a nice following of fans.
I'm not trying to sound negative here, I think TapTapTap deserves everything they have coming for their amazing products. But this post is the tip of the ice berg, so try not to get disillusioned that the AppStore is lush with $$$ for indie developers... a majority of the time it's the exact opposite.
What's worth noting about TapTapTap is how they approached the launch of Covert and the level of polish in the 1.0 release. I really believe you need to come out with a BANG if you want an honest shot at the Top 100. Trying to get there with iterations is definitely an uphill battle.