On April 21, 2009, Jack the Rabbit (my experiment in iPhone App absurdity) was approved and “ready for sale” on the iTunes App Store. To be honest, I had mixed expectations. If you recall my previous post on this subject, the idea of Jack the Rabbit as a gag-style iPhone game was possibly a ridiculously ingenious idea that might just be a bit. So, as Jack the Rabbit was live, I waited with baited breath to see the numbers of downloads accumulate by the thousands.
Sad to say, the downloads at $.99 have been slow. Most of them are likely from my closest friends and people from work. But I did notice some international downloads. The slowness of the progress sparked my curiosity, though. Why did Sound Grenade and Big Mouth take off faster and with more force than Jack the Rabbit? Both of those examples are equally quirky (somewhat useless) apps that seem to be in the same genre as Jack the Rabbit. What is their key to success?
Sound Grenade is free, supported by Ad Mob display ads, but Big Mouth is priced at the tier 1 price mark just like Jack the Rabbit. Both games show up high enough for casual impulse downloads, which is something Jack the Rabbit is not benefiting from. Clearly my app would greatly benefit from better placement on the App Store. It fails to even show up when you sort by release date. So, instead of standing by, complaining, I decided to poke around and what I found was a fairly obvious set of solutions for the web marketing savvy.
According to Appleiphoneapps.com, SEO is a huge part of getting traction on your app. Some insider tricks include carefully place mentions of other apps by other developers. Those mentions generate keywords that make it more likely that your app will show up in search results. Other tricks include editing the application details also brings up new activity on the app, creating new flashier icons and of course the version release seems to attract attention. But the fancy mega pages on the App Store are invitation only from Apple.
Admittedly, just instinct, I think some basic gorilla marketing and having a special site for your app always helps. Don’t expect a “build it and they will come” approach to extract all the potential sales from your hard work on developing your App. So far to day, Jack the Rabbit has generated 50 sales in one week. We are considering other steps to boost sales, but at this point, a jack off game seems to be more amusing to me than the iPhone and iPod Touch crowd. Then again, patience may prove to be my best ally. I need to learn that in general.
In the meantime, download Jack the Rabbit, see what you think and post a review on the App Store. I love hearing feedback, no matter what you have to say.
~DK
[...] App Store. From the trials of approval to actually going through selling Jack the Rabbit and its first week’s performance, Dean outlines the high points of creating something funny to actually having the balls to put it [...]
Couldn’t agree more – it’s almost impossible for developers to get discovered nowadays. That really didn’t take very long, did it? The number of apps hitting the store continues to grow, what’s the long-term prospectus like.
I recently wrote about how Peter Oppenheimer more or less confirmed that they are _not_ going to address this issue. Sure seems like they’re doing very little to help.
So, we’re working on a new, social app store to allow users to shop for apps in a full-fledged e-commerce experience. Hope you’ll come pimp your app page when we’re done!