Lawrence Ingraham’s Blog

Probably the most popular podcast for Mac and Apple news is MacBreak Weekly. Hosted by Leo Laporte and routinely featuring Alex Lindsay, Scott Bourne and Andy Ihnatko, MBW does a weekly segment called “Pick of the Week.” This is where each person chooses an app, website or hardware they’re excited about. My iPhone app Zoo Sounds was one of the lucky ones that got picked.

Zoo Sounds is my first attempt at iPhone development. It’s a very simple game designed for parents to play with their kids. A picture of a zoo animal is displayed which makes the sounds of the animal when tapped. There’s 12 animals in total as well as a mode showing four animals per screen. It’s a very niche app, designed for kids ages 1 to 3, selling for $.99 in the App Store.

Finding a Needle in a Haystack

Life is tough for a new app developer trying to name for himself. The App Store is overflowing with content, of all levels of quality. Trying to get noticed is more difficult that the actual development of the app. I had a website up promoting the app and had an open beta during development. Soon as it was released, I sent out a few dozen promo codes to people I follow on Twitter I know have kids and could appreciate it. Posted it to Digg and Stumbleupon and started running AdWords ads. Anything to drum up some buzz.

Zoo Sounds hit the App Store the evening of Saturday May 2nd. The first full day of sales I sold 17 copies, which was more than I expected. The second day, Monday, I sold 11 copies and figured sales would slowly drop down to 5 or so over the next week. My sales unexpectedly went up on Tuesday, selling another 17 copies. It wasn’t until I listened to MBW the next day that I realized Zoo Sounds was Alex’s pick.

Pick of the Week = Explosive Growth

The episode of MBW was recorded live Tuesday evening and hit the web Wednesday morning. Sales ramped up the rest of the week capping at 102 copies sold on Friday. Zoo Sounds made it as high as the 18th Top Paid Kids Game in the US App Store. I sold over 400 copies in the first week of release. This is all thanks to Alex and the rest of the guys at MBW.

Of course that growth wasn’t sustainable. Sales dropped 15% or so every day. It’s currently one of the top paid kids games, but who knows for how long. By comparison, my second app Farm Sounds, which I actually think is better, started with the same launch numbers but has stuck around 5 copies a day.

While I was selling 100 apps a day, I was sitting stable at 18th Top Paid Kids Game. As of this writing I’m selling 25 apps a day and floating around 50th. Those guys higher than 10th must be selling at least 150 a day, and I’m sure this is a slow category. Someone’s getting rich.

Website Statistics

Since I’m a web developer, naturally I’m extremely interested in how the site has performed. The launch day website traffic was busy because of my promotional efforts, but I expected a bigger bump from MBW. Course they didn’t mention the website, but I always Google something before I buy it.

It’s really difficult to determine how many sales I received from the website, but I know through LinkShare I sent 112 customers to iTunes but sold only 20 copies. That works out to only 5% of sales coming directly from the website. I can only assume people are buying apps directly from their iPhones so they don’t have to sync to install.

What’s strange to me is I haven’t seen any relation between web traffic and sales. My web traffic hit its high the day of launch, when I promoted the hell out of it. It again reached that high after MBW hit iTunes, but has stayed pretty consistent the last few weeks while sales have dropped.

As a reminder to all you SEO guys out there, exact match domain names are super important. They never said the url tantrumapps.com during the podcast, but 57% of my traffic comes from visitors typing in the url.

I got 13% of my website traffic in the first week from wiki.twit.tv, one of the nice perks of getting picked. It’s a nofollow link, and the traffic has definitely died down since the podcast hit, but it’s good quality traffic.

Closing Thoughts

I hope you enjoyed this read. Not a lot of people have the unique perspective I do, so naturally I wanted to share with the rest of the community. Please let me know what you think in the comments, or you can find me on twitter if you want to talk directly.

Update May 26th, 2009

Yesterday we sold our 1000th app; 928 Zoo Sounds and 88 Farm Sounds. Works out to 24 days of sales to reach the 1000 mark, average of 42 apps a day. Course I can’t see reaching 2000 within the same amount of time, but it sure was a fun ride.

Check out all my apps on iTunes

Digg This Post | Stumble This Post

3 Comments »