Finally, after my promise, I have gotten around to tabulating some data. I won’t delve too deep into the analysis of Compounds‘ sales figures. I will be dipping into greater detail in another post. For now, I just want to get our sales figures out, hopefully, to assist other developers in estimation of their own sales.
I’ve used Numbers to graph our sales for the import range of data. These figures are AFTER Apple’s 30% rake. I’ve also placed some significant markers that properly scope the data.
April 11th and 12th were a Saturday and Sunday, which are traditionally poor performing days for our work-oriented Chemistry app. We did have a few sales, but they were, in fact, our worst 2 sales days since we launched Compounds. For reference, are sales were normally a modest 5-15 units a day. (Edited)
Tuesday, April 14th was an awesome and welcome surprise. I honestly was a little down about out app until this happened.
You can see another significant jump on the day we decided to reduce the price of Compounds to $0.99. The effect of dropping the price just $1.00 was astounding. In retrospect, I probably should have reduced the price earlier to make it into the top 100. Ahh, hindsight…
Lastly, is next Tuesday, when we moved to the second page. What a difference a single click makes. You can see we approaching a asymptote near $100 a day, which I would be extremely satisfied with. For our first released app, I am extremely pleased.
In another post, I’ll also compare this data to our popularity within the Productivity category.
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10 Comments
damn….. nice stats there, i wish i made money like that :/
Excellent post – your blog is moving up higher and higher on my book mark list these days. Your graph roughly follows what I saw on my app when it was featured. Notably, the drop when you move off the first page is significant. Other posts like this seem to show a similar pattern.
@Dslrocks: I’d like to say it is because we are great, but honestly, Apple really gave us a hand. I think going after the chemistry niche really helped us get noticed in Cupertino.
@MattjDrake: Thanks, I’m really trying to get out there and tell a few stories and hopefully help others make decisions that were hard for us.
thank you. I’m going to release my first app soon so it’s really nice of you to post your experiences. In your opinion, if you had to do it over again, would you have started the price at $.99? More and more I’ve been hearing stuff like, “sales volume creates more sales volume” obviously that has to do with rankings as well, but their basic idea is you want to do everything you can to reach as high a ranking as you can.
So, do you recommend starting at $.99 out of the gate?
@jesterfuj:
Actually, I don’t think I would have lowered the price. I released a niche app, so I have a much more finite audience than say a farting app. I had to build a quality application and charge a slightly higher price to make it worthwhile. The dynamics have of course changed, and I have now focused (maybe too late), but I don’t think I would rework my initial strategy save for releasing a “lite” version.
Thank you very much for posting your statistics. We will be releasing our first app, a game, very soon, and although we will be in a different category, your graph and data is very helpful.
Doug Hogg
http://www.toykite.com
Congrats Corey…
I bet the 14th was a fun day
@sean
Thanks, the whole week was hectic!
Are these numbers for just the US of total sales in every country. Great job by the way!!!
@vince Thanks! Those are total sales. Of note, we have recently come back to earth. Probably at least worth a blog post…
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