Financial Reports - August

UPDATE: I posted the data a little early. I have updated the chart to include sales from Great Britain, Australia, Europe, and the rest of the world. Previously, I only had the data from Canada and the U.S.

August numbers are in, and there is an upward trend in units sold for FlashCardz and QuoteKeeper.

If you notice the number of units sold more than doubled compared to July. But it is important to note that July numbers only reflect the last week in July when these apps were released. I was pleasantly surprised to see the numbers for QuoteKeeper. My original thought was that FlashCardz would be much more popular, so it's nice to see QuoteKeeper holding it's own.

As for FlashCardz FREE, the data from Apple for the month of August shows 99 downloads from 12 different countries, the majority of which (81 units) is from the United States. The total number of users is somewhere around 350 which includes September, according to the analytics data I get from mobclix. The great thing about putting your apps on the App Store, is that iPhone users all around the world can download them, and Apple will handle all the currency conversions.

QuoteKeeper FREE was released in September so these results are not available.

By the end of next month, I will be able to compare the revenue from the paid and free versions of FlashCardz. As a reminder, the free version generates revenue from advertisements. The reason for the free version, was to offer people the opportunity to try before they buy. I suspect that the paid version will generate more money in sales than the free version from ads, but that remains to be seen.

Egg! has about 1500 users now, and seems to generate a little less than $1/day. After an initial spike, the number of new users is steadily increasing. My goal is to get to over 100,000 downloads for Egg!

August is the first full month of results up to this point, so comparisons will be more meaningful when I get numbers for September.

New Features Update

Over the weekend, new versions of QuoteKeeper & FlashCardz were approved. These include much requested features that I will highlight here.

1. Shake to get a random card. While viewing cards in FlashCardz or quotes in QuoteKeeper, you can shake the iPhone to get a random card or quote. This does not change the order, but jumps you to a new one in the list.

2. Shuffle the list. While in the edit mode pictured here, you can click "Shuffle" in the upper right hand corner and shuffle the list of cards or quotes. This changes the order and cannot be undone. And as always, you can rearrange the list manually, by grabbing the right side of an item in the list.





3. Shorter default text. When you create a new card or quote, the default text that appears has been shortened, so that you can more quickly enter your own text. I could have made it so that no default text appears, but it is important to maintain some sort of visual cue for users. I may explore a different solution to this in future versions.

Also, FlashCardz FREE includes these new features. QuoteKeeper FREE is still awaiting approval.

WebMD Review

Hypochondriac's rejoice! WebMD has released an iPhone app. I don't normally browse the Medical section in the App Store, but when I did, I found this. This is not an app that I look at every day, in fact the only reason I keep it on my iPhone is that one day it might save someone's life.

WebMD mobile does three major things: 1. Check your symptoms 2. Check your prescriptions 3. Gives First Aid Information.

If you go to the Symptom Checker for the first time it will ask you for your age, gender and zip code. I have no idea what your zip code has to do with anything, but I'm not a doctor either.

Depending on the gender you specify you will get a person pictured like this. You can touch different parts of the body and select from a list of different symptoms. Once you build up a whole list, you can touch the "View Possible Causes" button. From there you can read up on the different possible causes for your list of symptoms.

Next is the Treatments tab, that lets you search for different drugs by name, or by shape and color. Once you find the drug you're looking for, you can read about all kinds of relevant information such as uses, side effects, precautions, interactions, and overdoses.

And finally, there's the First Aid section. Just click on the relevant situation and it will pull up the relevant article. It's probably worthwhile to read through them before you encounter these situations, but it's still handy even if you don't.

It's a well done app and as I mentioned before it could save someone's life. I also like the symptom checker and the way it was implemented.

Overall Rating:

Fun at the BMV

As many of you know, yesterday was my birthday. To celebrate I thought I would head to the BMV (Bureau of Motor Vehicles) to renew my driver's license. When I get there, it turns out that I need my SS card, or some form of picture ID with my SSN. When given the option to put my SSN on my ID, I always opt not to, because if someone steals my wallet then they have my SSN too.

So, I wasted a trip to the BMV. No big deal, I'll just go back today. When I went in today, they inform me that since my out of state license expired yesterday, I now have to get a temporary permit and take a driving test, in addition to the written test that is normally required!

I take the written test. Passed on the first attempt. There are 2 other people taking that test at the same time. I finish before both of them (I'm good at tests).

I go to the next room, wait 15 minutes, and purchase my Temp Driving Permit that allows me to drive w/a 21 yr old licensed driver in the passenger seat next to me. $22 down the drain.

Back to the testing room, the man behind the desk processes my forms. (I see the same guy in the back still taking the written test.) The desk guy points to a sign on the wall and tells me to read it. It looks like this...

Keep in mind that it's been close to 20 years since I last did this, and on this particular day I drove a Toyota 4Runner SUV to the BMV. If I knew I was going to have to do this before I came, I would have borrowed my sister's MINI. Instead I roll up to the obstacle course and have maybe 4 inches on each side of the car from cone to cone. Personal embarrassment aside, if I fail this test, I have to reschedule 2 weeks later, and won't legally be able to drive by myself.

By some miracle, I navigate my behemoth of a car through the cones w/out knocking any of them over. I proceed with the rest of the road test and find myself back in the testing room. (The same dude is still taking the written test).

They send me next door, where they take my freshly minted Temp Driving Permit and $23, and give me a new driver's license.

The good news is that I found a new White Castle on the way home. I normally like to celebrate special moments with some Chick-Fil-A, but White Castle works too.

There are probably a lot of lessons you can draw from this experience:

• Don't let your driver's license expire.
• Study hard in school. (That same dude is probably still taking the written test).
• If you have to wait a little bit at White Castle, it means fresh fries!

Setting Expectations

One of the mistakes I made when I first posted my apps to the App Store, was failing to set expectations. This is important because when people come across apps, they have all kinds of wild expectations as to what it is and what it should do. If what they expect doesn't match up with what they experience in the app, they will come away with a negative impression of the app, which leads to negative comments a lot of the time. So it is up to the developer to do what they can to set the proper expectations for their apps.

Let me illustrate with a couple of my own apps. When I first posted Egg!, I didn't want to spoil the surprise and tell everyone what was inside. So I posted it with this description:

Just tap tap tap to reveal what’s hidden inside the Egg!

I have since added the following:

Egg! is for those times when you’re waiting for the movie to start, stuck in a boring meeting, or for when you have to entertain a small child and don’t know any magic tricks.

Adding this line, gives Egg! more context and helps people understand some of the rationale for it.

For FlashCardz, I added this to the description:

When I was creating FlashCardz, I took a look at similar programs on the App Store, but none of them was what I was looking for. There were some apps out there that did more than FlashCardz, but that didn't really concern me. I didn't set out to make the Swiss Army knife of flash card apps with all the bells and whistles. I just wanted something clean and easy to use, that let me make flash cards on my iPhone. This is my niche. People that want more will choose the other stuff that's out there, but there will be many people that find FlashCardz meets their particular need.

People naturally compare similar things to one another, so here I try to differentiate FlashCardz from the other stuff that's out there and give my perspective on where FlashCardz fits in. If people come in expecting FlashCardz to do everything they will be disappointed, but if they understand that it's not trying to do everything, then they can focus on what it does do.

So whether you're making the next great iPhone app or not, setting expectations will help people understand you and your apps better and reduce the negative comments from mismatched expectations.

Piratizer Review

Happy Monday! I found a funny app that should brighten up the start of a new week. Piratizer lets you turn people into pirates. Take a look.

You can add different hats, facial hair, and other pirate accessories. Each one can be rotated, resized, and repositioned.

The lite version doesn't let you save the new image, but I suspect the paid version does.


Overall Rating:

It made me laugh, so it gets 3 stars.

Y! Finance Review

I want to review at least one app a week, and I wasn't sure what I was going to review this week. But last night when I was running Egg!, I started to see some different advertisements and one of them was for Y! Finance. I clicked the ad and before I knew it I was downloading this on my iPhone. Now normally, I want to review something that I think a lot of people would find useful and enjoy, so a finance app doesn't quite fit the bill. In fact, if I had not stumbled across it, this app would not be on my iPhone (blasphemy for an MBA grad). I have to say, I was very impressed with the design of the app and that is why I am reviewing it here.

This is the summary screen of the app. It gives you a quick look at some of the important things finance people like to look at (DJ, S&P, Nasdaq), and just below some of the top stories. This is the least exciting part of the app, so stay with me. If you tap the small black bar at the bottom, there are a number of options to customize what you see on this summary screen.

Under the quotes section, this is what we see. You can have a bunch of different companies that you want to follow. If you hold down on one, you have the 3 options pictured (Remove, Move, Resize). To move a company, you'll see these blue dots appear, and you tap the dot that represents the position you want to move to. This wasn't obvious to me at first. Initially, I thought the blue dots were anchors and tried to drag them to a new position. As for Resizing, there are 3 options (Compact, Graph, Details). The Apple Inc. box shows the detailed view with the graph and news article headlines below it. The others companies shown are in the compact option, and the graph option is just like the detailed one without the news headlines.

I found this screen by accident, while I was putting my iPhone down. If you turn your iPhone sideways while you're in the quotes tab, you get this sexy graph that lets you compare up to 3 different stocks or indices. You can scroll through all stocks/indices that you are following.

If you tap on a company from the normal quotes tab, it takes you to a detailed view where you can rotate your iPhone for a detailed graph of that company's stock performance. Here you can choose different time scales for the chart, similar to what you see on Yahoo Finance and Google Finance websites. Swiping along the bottom half of the screen lets you swap between news, performance indicators, and industry/competitors. I've shown the performance indicators here.

The last two bits are the Research and Tech Ticker tabs. As you can see the Research tab offers up a wealth of information and allows you to import your own My Yahoo! Portfolios. This is nice, if you have a lot of stocks that you're following and have them setup in Yahoo. It's even smart enough to know if you've already imported a company's ticker and tells you how many new companies were imported and how many you tried to import that were already there. The Tech Ticker tab features videos from the Yahoo Finance portal on current events in business.

I don't follow BlackBerry or Android too much, so I don't know what Yahoo offers on those platforms. But this is the first iPhone app that blew me away. If you have even a passing interest in finance or stocks, or if you want to see how the funds in your 401K are doing, get this app. (It's free).

From a developer's perspective, this app does a great job organizing the enormous amount of financial information in the marketplace and making it easy for users to navigate that information. Yahoo does a great job of customizing their app in a way that builds their own brand image. When you use it, you know it's a iPhone app, but it doesn't look like every other iPhone app out there. This is THE killer app on in the iPhone for finance. It's amazing how far we've come. It used to be that you would have to sit at your computer to get this kind of financial information. Now, it is available at your fingertips wherever you are.

Overal Rating:

I don't expect to give out 5 stars too often, but the information and the way this app presents that information is amazing!

Fierce Competition

A recent Business Week story talks about how some companies are hiring marketing companies to promote their iPhone apps. They also mention another company that "appears to have solicited positive reviews through an ad on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an online tool that farms out small tasks." The article goes on to talk about some of the limitations of the App Store in handling reviews, compared to other review sites.

The thing that caught my attention, was this line, "Some developers ask family and friends to post positive reviews. Others post negative reviews of competitors' applications." I've seen this negativity in a number of different places, with people slamming products without having used them. On the App Store, you have to purchase/download an app to review it, which is supposed to prevent this kind of thing. But, anyone can download a free app and post a negative review. My thought is, why spend the time or money to bash someone else, why not just make your stuff better? (OK, I recognize the the financial reward for bashing a competitor might be substantial, but show some character please.)

Before I started using mobclix, I can across this article. I read through it and went on to read the comments, where some people were bashing mobclix. The author of the article goes back and forth with some people posting negative comments. At one point the author says, "It is not vaporware. Do you work for one of mobclix's competitors? See update." It starts to get really bad when they question the author's journalistic integrity and professionalism. It's pretty clear that the competition is waging a major flame war.

The bottom line is, "who says it" and "why they say it" is just as important as "what they say." Unfortunately, most of the time we only get "what they say." (Don't necessarily take reviews and comments at face value.)

On a more positive note: Egg! seems to be getting a lot of new users, since it's release on Sept 3rd.

Making $ (Mobclix & AdWhirl)

There are a few ways to make money with iPhone apps. The traditional way is to release an app and charge for it. Another way that is gaining in popularity is to release a free app and generate ad revenue. I'll admit that the first time I downloaded a free app with advertisements that I was a little taken aback. Like most people I don't like commercials on the radio, on TV, on YouTube, on Hulu, or anywhere else on the Internet. (OK, Hulu commercials aren't so bad, compared to broadcast TV). So, when I saw ads on these iPhone apps, I didn't like it. That is of course, until the shoe was on the other foot.

When I was browsing on the internet one day, I found an article about generating revenue through advertisements. I thought it would be a nice experiment to create free (ad-supported) versions of my apps and see if they would generate more revenue than the paid versions. It's still too early to tell, but I will keep you posted as time goes on.

To do this experiment, I found a couple solutions, AdWhirl and MobClix.

AdWhirl was started by iPhone developers and had come up with a way to serve ads from different ad networks. This allowed for better fill rates so that there would always be an new ad served. Higher fill rates = higher ad revenues. There was even an option to post custom ads for people to promote their own apps. This appealed to me because I wanted to cross-promote my other apps. I incorporated the AdWhirl libraries in a development build to test it out and it worked as expected. AdWhirl was recently bought out by AdMob, one of the largest Mobile Ad companies.

I also looked at MobClix. I liked MobClix because in addition to the different ad networks, they managed your account with the individual ad networks, so you didn't have to have 10 different accounts with 10 different ad networks. They consolidate all your ad revenue in one place for you. MobClix also has superior analytics, so that you can track how well your app is doing in the app store and how much ad revenue it's generating. They recently added the ability to serve custom ads. If you have one of my free apps, you'll see my ads for chilidawgsoftware. One of the key benefits for developers is that the ad agencies bid on your advertising space, which means that you will get more revenue than if you were locked into one ad network. I've been very happy with MobClix and I use it in all my free apps.

As a developer, it's not easy to get people to look at your apps, and even when you do 1/2 the people don't like it, 3/8 are indifferent, and if you're lucky 1/8 might consider keeping it on their iPhone. The bottom line is advertising allows developers to provide free versions of their apps, that they might not otherwise make available. So don't hate the ads, just be happy that someone is paying developers for the work they do.

QuoteKeeper & FlashCardz Updated

I just submitted updates to QuoteKeeper & FlashCardz for approval. So expect to see an update in the AppStore in a couple of weeks. I added the ability to shake for a new quote or flash card, and also the ability to shuffle the list in the edit list mode. I will give a more detailed post w/pics when they are officially up.

If you happen to use either of these apps and would like to see some feature implemented, please leave a comment and let me know. These new features were implemented for one of my old roommates, Albert Lee.

AppStore Rejection

So it's been about 18 days since I submitted QuoteKeeper FREE for approval and today, I finally got a response. REJECTED!

The actual wording in the e-mail is more tactful, but says the same thing.

First I should mention that QuoteKeeper FREE was submitted the same day as FlashCardz FREE (Aug 17th). FlashCardz FREE was approved Aug 29th (12 days later). The only difference between the original versions and the FREE versions is the advertising at the top. Here's a snippet from the e-mail.

We've reviewed QuoteKeeper FREE and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because of an Apple trademark image.

And this is the image they sent for reference...

At first I couldn't figure out what the problem was. But I think it has to do with the Ad at the top that mentions iPhone. Here is the statement concerning the use of the Apple Logo that was sent with the rejection e-mail, etc...

Apple Logo and Apple-owned Graphic Symbols: You may not use the Apple Logo or any other Apple-owned graphic symbol, logo, or icon on or in connection with web sites, products, packaging, manuals, promotional/advertising materials, or for any other purpose except pursuant to an express written trademark license from Apple, such as a reseller agreement.

It's not too big of a deal. I fixed it so that the only advertising that shows up is my own for Chili Dawg Software, which doesn't mention Apple or iPhone.

Now if you read the fine print, it talks about logos, graphic symbols,  and icons; none of which are present in this image. Strange. I'm beginning to understand why a lot of developers are complaining about the app review process. However, I do appreciate that they are at least telling me why it was rejected.

Anyway, I resubmitted my application for review and I hope it doesn't take another 2.5 weeks to get it approved.

I love the Mac and the iPhone, and I think Apple is one of the best companies out there. I know they're working hard to make improvements to the overall process for developers, which I appreciate. This is just one of those things that leaves me scratching me head.

The YouTube Effect

One of the thing's I've noticed about myself since getting an iPhone is a dramatic increase in watching videos on YouTube. I call this the YouTube Effect. Before the iPhone, I would visit YouTube occasionally  to watch things like Lion vs. (insert name of soon-to-be-dead animal) and funny things that friends would send along.

As you may know, the iPhone comes with the YouTube app built in. (It is one of the apps that you can move around but never remove from your iPhone. Notice the X on the upper left corner of the Facebook App) I started out watching the most popular videos for the week, and after that I would check the most popular videos of the day on a regular basis. I soon found myself subscribing to different channels and following certain channels fairly regularly.

This iPhone-YouTube connection turned a casual YouTuber into a regular viewer. The YouTube Effect.

It's one thing to watch videos on YouTube everyday, but it's another thing to actually make a video every day. So I started to wonder why people would do this, and I learned that the top video bloggers make six-figure incomes. These are people with hundreds of thousand views every day. Here's a link to a NY Times article on the subject. I have a lot of respect for the work that the guy in the article puts in to his show (but I can't watch more than of few seconds of him).

This is getting long, so I'll just leave with some interesting people on YouTube:

Erin and Roxanne, they sing covers of popular songs. They got to the point where they recorded their own single and get to hear themselves on the radio. When they're not singing they work at a Chinese restaurant.

Christine Gambito, from HappySlip, she plays six different characters in her videos.

Peter Chao, (warning offensive language & content sometimes, does this make you want to see it more?)

Ryah Higa, this Hawaiian guy has some funny stuff.

Peter Schiff, boring unless you're into financial markets, insightful if you are. He predicted the housing bubble collapse.

Who do you watch on YouTube? Leave a comment and let me know, I need to feed my YouTube addiction.

Marketing Failure

One of the sites I follow regularly is The Unofficial Apple Weblog (www.tuaw.com). It has been a great source of all things Apple. After my apps first came out, I thought that if I could just get mentioned on this site that my sales would go through the roof.

So, I e-mailed one of the guys that reviews iPhone apps on the site and suggested that they do a "Back to School" themed review for iPhone apps. I also mentioned my app FlashCardz.

Well, I never got a response; not even a "Hey that's a great idea." If you go to their site now, you'll see that they do have a new "Back to School" section where they review iPhone apps for students. And to put salt on the wound, they review someone else's flash card application. 

Now, I don't know if they were planning to do this all along or not. But I can imagine that guy I e-mailed sitting in a meeting and saying, "Hey, why don't we do a Back to School thing with iPhone Apps!"

Anyways, as far as marketing goes, that was a big failure.

UPDATE:
Tuaw has announced their iPhone app review guidelines. I'll test it out one of these days.

Financial Reports - July

So how much money can you make on iPhone apps? It depends.

I recently received my monthly financial report from Apple for the month of July and thought I'd share it with you. To give you some context, my first two paid apps are QuoteKeeper and FlashCardz. They are simple and functional, and most important, they do what I want them to.

FlashCardz went up on the AppStore on July 23rd, 2009 for $1.99 (USD).
QuoteKeeper went up on July 29th, 2009 for $0.99 (USD).

I wanted to put FlashCardz up for $1.49, but the AppStore doesn't give me that option.

In July, I sold 3 copies of FlashCardz in the U.S. at $1.99 of which I get $1.40, for a grand total of $4.20. I also sold 2 copies of QuoteKeeper in Australia, for a grand total of $1.52.

Some quick math give me $5.72 for the month of July.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. I guess, FlashCardz was only up for 7 days, and QuoteKeeper only 1 day, so I will have to wait for the August numbers before I draw any conclusions. The thing I didn't expect was to sell things through the Australia AppStore. This is surprising because my only advertising thus far has been through Facebook.

I'll continue to share my financial reports as they become available, and in future posts I will talk about monetizing through advertising.

TapWord Review

OK, to launch this blog, I'm going to review an app that's been keeping me up late at night. This app is called TapWord and I downloaded it for free from the AppStore. I don't remember if it was a promotional thing or if it was always free, but I didn't pay for it.

In TapWord, you are given a set of letters arranged in a 4x4 square and you have to use your finger to connect adjacent letters to make three-letter words or longer.

As you make valid words, they are added to your word list, and you are awarded points. If you attempt to make a word that isn't a word then you will hear a drum sound to let you know.

Eventually time will run down, and with 10 seconds left, your iPhone vibrates to let you know its almost over.

After time expires, it gives you your total score and tells you the % of total words you found. It also shows you the list of all possible words. I hover around 14-20%. It's actually easier to get a higher percentage on tough boards with few vowels. If you get to play this, you'll know what I mean.

There are options to expand the board size to 5x5 and increase the minimum word length to four-letter words. I have yet to play the 5x5 board, just looking at it is mind-numbing, but this may be my next challenge.

This game is very addictive and super fun! I have spent hours putting words together. I would put this in my current top 10 iPhone apps.

There is a downside, but I'm still trying to figure out who to blame for this. You see, when the game is over and I get the list of possible words; I think to myself, "Is that really a word?" I was always better at math anyway.

TapWord does a great job of exercising your mind, but it does make your brain hurt after a while. After long sessions, I have to do something mindless like Farmville or Mafia Wars.

Overall Score: