On Promotion and Marketing - A Response to Critics of Yesterday’s Article about Unread

Since posting yesterday’s article about the numbers behind Unread’s first year on the App Store, several people have asked me why I didn’t do any promotion for Unread. The answer is that, in fact, I scrounged up as much promotion as I could afford. I did not just naively dump my app on the App Store and expect the bucks to start spilling through the mail slot.

Here’s a list of the promotional activities supporting Unread (both iPhone and iPad), either directly by me or through good fortune:

Did Unread already have a significant amount of competition on the App Store? Yes. But I defy you to name a category on the store that doesn’t already have lots of competition. Could I have done a better job of marketing my app, use different screen shots, etc? Perhaps.

Arguments that I naively built and marketed an RSS reader in 2014 aren’t relevant to the heart of my article. Any polished app — in any category, with any amount of marketing or promotion — is a lottery. Increasing the marketing budget is just as likely to increase the potential losses as it is to increase potential sales. Each niche is an apple or an orange. It’s all a gamble.

The lesson to be learned from Unread is that even if you keep your costs low and your quality high, the immense scale of the App Store — 100 million credit cards — is deceptive. From the outside one might assume that an indie dev with a quality product could “fail” her way to a sustainable paid-up-front app business. The reality is that App Store sales patterns rarely support such a developer. True fans will buy her quality app within the first few days, then never give her any money again. The rest of her time will be spent trying to convince a few more users to become true fans, repeating the same short-lived, one-time purchase until she goes out of business.

|  29 Jul 2014