David Beck's Blog

It has been about a month now since Bubble Burster was released to the App Store and early sales are not promising. Before I launched Bubble Burster, I did a lot of research into marketing and sales of iPhone Apps and I found very little information. Most of what is available in terms of sales numbers is from big companies with apps in the top 100, and almost no data from your average app developer.

The hard truth is that in it’s first month, Bubble Burster sold only 6 copies. 2 were to my friends. At $.99 that means I earned $4.20 after Apple’s cut. Pretty bad for something that took me months to develop. Especially when you consider I spent $99 on the developer program to publish it in the first place. In other words, I am not quitting my day job.

I can’t say I am too surprised by the low turn out. My low end estimate was a little higher though, at $20 in the first month. I knew going in that there were 75,000 apps (well 80,000 by the time it actually released) on the store already, and that because the only ones visible to most people were the ones in the top 20 and you couldn’t get there unless you sold a lot of copies and you couldn’t sell very many unless you were in the top 20.

To combat the problem of visibility I used some advertising promotions I had been saving. Google gave me $100 ad credit to sign up for AdWords and my hosting company, LunarPages, gave me a $25 credit for FaceBook. Unfortunately, those have not been very successful and I think I will pull them when the promotions run out.

One thing that is often suggested is to make a “lite” version of your app for free. I am working on this right now. It is difficult for me as a programmer to create a lite version because it means taking functions out that I have spent a lot of time putting in. When it is finished, the lite version will have all the functionality of the full version but will cut the player off when they score more than 50 points. A score that takes a while to accomplish.

The other suggestion is to get blogs like Touch Arcade to review your app. I plan to do this once I have released the lite version. Even still, most people don’t read these specialized blogs.

The original plan was to introduce what I had for $.99 and then, once I had updated the game with more features like saving score and games, I would raise the price to $1.99. I advertised that it was $.99 for “a limited time”. Well a few days ago I upped the price as planed when Apple approved version 1.2. So far no one has made a purchase at the new price, but that is not necessarily any different from when it was at $.99. We will se if I can make 3 sales next month to match the income (if you can call it that) of the app at $.99.

Filed under: Programming Tags: App Store, Bubble Burster, iPhone, Marketing