MicroCars for iPhone, sales and downloads
Just a follow up about those two iPhone game developers that generously provides their sales info.
MicroCars for iPhone downloads and sales are going down very fast. I would like to understand exactly how it happens. What factors (blogs, IM, news, anything) made the App reach high rankings in the store and what made it go down after?
iLightning is hardly getting a sale a day. I bet Jabavu just forgot about it.
Martin C. published the sales of his MicroCars iPhone game on the BOS forum.
As you will remember for my previous post, MicroCars nice, well written and complex game was close to the sales of iLightning small gadget 2 weeks after launch.
Well, one month and 10 days after its launch, MicroCars has sold 1035 units, more than iLightning performance in 6 months.
What happened?. Simple. Martin launched a “Lite” version of the game, and that free version got damned popular in the store… As I’m writing MicroCars lite is in the 16th place in the category Games->Racing (top free).
Let’s see a simple graph of Martin’s sales. Can you guess when the Lite version was launched?
As you might have guessed, the Lite version was launched near August 5th. The effect is impressive. Before that sales were averaging 12 a day and looking at the graph we can see a downward trend. After the launch of the Lite version, daily sales average jump to 43 a day and, at least to the naked eye, the trend is going upwards.
We are talking of an exceptionally well written game here. The App Store holds near 65.000 apps, most of which must be games. For a game to make the first places on one category, it has to be good.
Anyway, we have a clear morale here. For an iPhone app, the Lite version is a must.
I’m just starting in the shrink wrap software world, so I read a lot of forums and blogs, specially BOS forum. I learn a lot of things, and have a great time 
One thing that amazes me is the rigid position of the guys there regarding the price. They all stick to the “price signals quality” way of thinking and seldom consider other points of view.
Many of them are also afraid of special sales, they think that after you make a sale it’s difficult to return your price to the previous tag.
On a recent article on Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood presented the case of Valve, a game producer. They tested the reaction to their holiday sales, with impressive results:
The massive Steam holiday sale was also a big win for Valve and its partners. The following holiday sales data was released, showing the sales breakdown organized by price reduction:
75% sale = 1470% increase in sales
10% sale = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
25% sale = 245% increase in sales
50% sale = 320% increase in sales
Not all the markets are the same, not all the products are the same. Sales must be carefully designed, planned and communicated to avoid affecting product image. But we must remember that, with all that taken into account, price is a powerful lever to play with!
As this July 15th article says, App Store has served 1,5 billion downloads… and there are 65,000 applications.
“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality” said Jobs. Well, at least the scale part is already clear. Something is going on here, a lot of people in obscure corners of the world (greetings from Chile here) are wetting their hands on Objective C and Cocoa to produce enormous quantities of applications.
Lots of the 65.000 apps are no doubt very small gadgets, mostly for a moment of fun. One of those is iLightning by Javabu Adams:
http://www.shinyfish.com/ilightning
It’s a small app that when you tap or shake the iPhone shows a lighting and shouts “lightning bolt”…
Java is very generous and he publishes the daily sales of his app.
http://www.shinyfish.com/ilightning/sales/
I have summed the sales by month:
|
Month |
Sales |
|
Feb |
262 |
|
Mar |
201 |
|
Apr |
145 |
|
May |
117 |
|
Jun |
109 |
I suppose that Java isn’t doing any efforts to promote his app. He just identified an idea, created the product and sent it to the App Store.
On the other side, I suppose some of the 65.000 apps are complete and well written applications or games. In the BOS forums I’ve found an example: MicroCars:
http://www.microcarsiphone.com/
The game is very good. Labour of Love. Even the sound is nice. Hundreds of hours must have gone into it.
Well, the sales on first two weeks were 228. On the first two weeks iLightning sold 216 units.
iLightning started in Feb 09 while MicroCarsIPhone started in July. In the meanwhile the number of apps in the store grew by 3x. One must think that, as the app number grows, it will be more difficult to get noticed.
Humm, I need good stats here, like what was the change in the universe of iPhones + iPod touch…
Anyway, I would like to know how the sales of MicroCars… move. My gut feeling is that simple, one moment gadget apps like iLighting will have a decrease in sales while more stably appealing apps will get reviews, word of mouth and will get growing sales.
Since January I’ve thinking of my first iPhone application… It took a lot of time to sign in the iPhone developer program. As I am in Chile, and te Apple store doesn’t operate here I had to send a fax and the fax at Apple was busy for three or four months… (sad as it sounds).
Now I’m signed, I have my new iMac and my iPod Touch will get here on Saturday. I’m learning objective-C, Cocoa and getting to know the iPhone development environment. So far so good…
But I need an idea to start. Here’s the history of my ideas…
First one: a medication reminder. Sounds good don’t you think?. Sorry. Two problems;
Ok, it seemed a good idea, then I thought about a little stupid but well, maybe that’s the way to go… My new idea, an iPhone insult generator. Orginal, isn’t it. Well, it’s not, at least 10 apps. There even exists a “Shakesperean Insult Generator” Greetings thou botlesss…
Third idea, a wheel that makes decisions for you !! Cool, don’t you think. You write as many options as you want, spin the wheel and the chance decides.
Why program it? it’s easier to buy it on the app store…
http://kirktech.com/336/wheel-of-chance/
A lot of products ideas come to my mind. That’s a blessing/curse I share with a lot of people in the uISV community. A good thing is to get your ideas tested again the reality as soon as possible, in any case, before you invest any considerable amount of time and work in them.
Though obviously it’s an old idea, I like the term Andy Brice coined “Lazy Instantiation Marketing“. The idea is to create a minimal website with some registration features and see how it goes with the people…
This weekend I was haunted by the idea of making a website where people can register, pay and get SMS messages reminding them to take their medications. Following the “Lazy …” idea, I registered a domain and created a simple website. My idea was to use adwords to get some people to the site and test reactions, % of registration, etc.
The “Lazy…” concept worked even before I started. When I got to adwords and tried to register my ad I learnt that you must have an “Online Pharmacy ID” to create any campaign with “Pills” or “Medication” on it. So the “Lazy..” concept saved me a lot of work. Now I know that the idea has an important drawback and that I will have to think about different way to promote it if I finally decide to go on. And I hadn’t yet programmed a single line of code!
Today I got the email accepting tekBlues for MS BizSpark program. I cannot say how useful it’s and how dumb I was not getting into it before.
You don’t pay nothing, and get all the MS Software you need to develop and test your applications. It’s the equivalent to the upper-end subscription to MSDN. You also get support and the chance to list your startup in BizSpark’s directory.
Getting into BizSpark is a no brainer.
In the BOS forum is frequent that some uISVers publish some partial data of their sales, visitors, etc.
Some interesting facts:
Cristian Pascu, FlairBuilder, Mockup & Prototyping tool:
Over the past 2 weeks, the best 2 weeks so far, I had:
~7150 visits
~5800 unique visitors
~12300 page views
~780 downloads (~10% * visits)
~30 sales (~4% * downloads = ~0.4% * visits)
Impressive numbers for a new product, we must take note of the following factors:
Let’s compare it with text2go.com, Mark Gladding posted in BOS after his Bit Du Jour last experience and gave this numbers for reference:
…. To put the numbers into some perspective, I normally average 4-6 sales per week with about 60-70 visitors to my site each day….
text2Go was launched in August 2007, has almost three years in the streets and his daily visits are around 1/10 of the newborn FlairBuilder’s. IMHO, here’s a marketing problem. I like text2Go website, the product seems interesting and I think it has a great potential, in fact it has a 1,4% sales / visitors far over the industry media (according to A.Brice).
Another data point.Mo Flanagan developed a very cool gadget, it lets you view all the windows you like in the Chrome’s tabbed style. WindowTabs (very clever name and good a domain he got) is attractive and visually impressing.
@shanselman tweeted a link to WindowTabs about five hours ago and I have already gotten 50 downloads and several purchases. With AdWords, I struggle to get five downloads a day. Word of mouth marketing rules.
5 downloads a day? using adwords?.
Well, Mo is lucky, his product has the strength to become viral, after the tweet he got featured in lifehacker.com and got a peak of 3280 visits, 1332 downloads and 13 sales.
As the uISVs are cash-strapped it’s important to be careful when investing in external services. Here are some excellent testimonials from people from BOS forum:
Today i’ve applied for BizSpark, I plan to code emailToDatabase.com using VS 2008. I’ve hear good things of MS BizSpark on BOS forum.
