Featured AppSeptember 30, 2011
I was treated to a surprise this morning when I peeked at my app sales: It was only 8 AM and my Baby Names app had already generated $20 of revenue, whereas typically it would be between $0 and and $4 for that time of day. Nothing like that has happened before, so I wondered to myself what could be going on... a couple hours later, it was up to $30, then $40. Obviously something was up. I discovered that my app was was a featured application on
BlackBerry's app world page. Of the 40 or so apps, it was the 40th one. To my amusement however, the last app shows up to the left of the first app, slightly dimmed, whereas apps 2-39 aren't visible at all unless you wait on the page for the carousel to slowly rotate through.
By the end of the day I've earned $50, and the extra revenue has caused my app to show up on the PlayBook "Top Purchased" section of App World, which is cool too. Interesting to know that the 20th highest grossing app on PlayBook brings in around $50 of revenue every day. (I'd bet the equivalent spot on the iPhone's charts brings in > $2500/day)
BB/PlayBookSeptember 17, 2011
The statistic that 200,000 PlayBook units were shipped this quarter is an interesting one, as compared to the 500,000 that were shipped last quarter. Even though it's unclear how "units shipped" corresponds to actual sales, the trend is pretty discouraging. And that gets me thinking... given this glum news, what does that mean for the future of the PlayBook?
If the PlayBook were doing well, then it might be a justified "distraction" for RIM from it's core phone business. But if it's doing poorly, then how can it be justified? And if it can't be justified, then... what?
It has been mentioned that there is an expectation that sales will improve when native email and Android app support hits, but I'm wary of that argument. As I've mentioned before, having native email is a nice-to-have, but for me it's far from critical. And Android app support... well, it would be extremely valuable if it Android apps were first class citizens, but my understanding is that you have to boot up this "Android player" first, and then access Andriod apps. Even if it only takes 10-15 seconds to boot up the Android player, that's a pretty convoluted process. I shouldn't judge the solution until I've seen it in completed, but I'm not exactly hopeful that it will be a great solution.
If I'm right that v2.0 of the PlayBook software won't cause a big shift in consumer appetite, that leaves the PlayBook in a bad spot. And with any platform, there's the chicken and egg problem that low unit sales mean that big development shops aren't motivated to develop for the platform, and without major apps, a platform is going to have a hard time.
So boo. We shall see...
Mobile AppsJuly 25, 2011
This winter, I submitted my first mobile app:
Baby Names for the PlayBook. My motivation was getting a free PlayBook, but it was also nice to learn something new. I set the price of my app at 99 cents. When the PlayBook launched, I was surprised to hear from a user within a couple days. He was from British Columbia, and he had purchased a PlayBook around the same time his second child was born. I hadn't even had the opportunity to run the app on a real device yet, and he was emailing to let me know that on the actual device, scrolling didn't work properly. A week or so later when I had finally received my free PlayBook, I fixed the error. For the next couple of months, my revenue rate worked out to around 15 cents per day. Paltry, and not unexpected. But I didn't care, because I had my pretty new PlayBook!
My uncle Tim expressed some interest in the business potential of mobile apps. I shared my honest opinion with him, which was that mobile apps seemed like a very sketchy opportunity. My sense was that a few apps reaped most of the revenue, while most of the hundreds of thousands of others got little to nothing. Even if you were able to make an app in 10 hours at 40 dollars per hour, you'd have to get about 600 purchases before you broke even on your development costs. And that's about as cheap as an app gets.
Regarding the PlayBook offer, I had offered to write people apps if they had an idea that they were interested in submitting to App World. One such application was Graham's app, Solicit. Fast forward a couple of months, and he mentioned that he had accrued a rather impressive 700 downloads, albeit without charging for it. He decided to spend a few hours and re-skin the application to look nice, and add a couple of simple features that users had requested. He submitted his app in early June and I was rather surprised to hear that money was coming in each day as people bought the app. Fast forward a month, and the app has a revenue rate of about $70/month. While that's a pretty tiny sum of money, some simple math shows that it could work out to be a very lucrative compensation: If the revenue continues for two years, the total revenue would be $1700. Given 12 hours of labor to produce the app, the hourly rate would be $140/hr. Yikes! If the revenue only continues for 1 year, we're still talking $70/hr, which is still great.
Also in June, I implemented my Baby Names app for BlackBerry phones. Again, I did this without any money making intentions, I was just interested in learning some new skills and having some fun. I released the app around June 21. Like with Solicit, I was surprised to see money coming in each day. I had some fun experimenting with the price, raising it by a dollar every 10 days or so, to see how that affected the revenue rate. I settled on $3.99 after a few weeks. In the first month, the revenue rate has been around $150/month, which completely blows me away. Again, not because it's a great sum of money, but because an app with 0 marketing and 13 hours of implementation effort (which would be more like 8 hours if it weren't my first BlackBerry app) has the potential to compensate at a rate of $275/hr if sales continue for 2 years, or $400/hr if sales continue for 3 years. And that's if sales stay steady. What if the app catches on via word of mouth and the sales rate goes up by a factor of 5?
Needless to say, in the space of a month, my attitude towards mobile app development has been turned on its head. It's not that I think it's a fool-proof way to make money, far from it... it's that I see the potential, the possibility.
I'm not one for get-rich-quick schemes, but after doing some math I may have stumbled across one which seems more likely to me than anything else I've heard. It builds on the idea of building apps similar in complexity to what I have created so far, about 6-8 hours per app for programming effort, and 3-4 hours per app for visual design.
The idea is to crank out one app per day, each day, for one business year. One person would do the programming, and another person would be responsible for adding as much pretty visual design as possible in the allotted time. The average time input per app would ideally be about 10 hours. The target revenue rate would be >= $1/day on average, but hopefully >= $2/day, with revenues continuing for 2-3 years. Compare these revenue rates to the first two apps we've done, which are bringing in $2.30/day and $5/day, respectively.
So how much money would this amount to if everything went swimmingly, and apps averaged $2/day on average for 3 years?
230 apps * $2/day * 365 days/year * 3 years = ...
... wait for it ...
$503,700At 10 hours per app, that works out to $219/hr.
And with 230 apps in play, there is a chance that one or two of them could really grab the imagination of the public and go viral. Not likely, but quite possible if your ideas are good enough and your execution is good. Who knows what that would mean in terms of revenue, but it's a fun thought.
Anyway, kind of crazy. You might say "but 230 ideas, that's not realistic". You're quite possibly right, but remember that people like me looove to dream up ideas. I already have a list of 100 ideas. But yes, let's not kid ourselves: This is very far away from a for-sure idea... quite possibly most of the apps would fall flat on their face. But interesting to consider, very interesting to consider...
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