My 2nd Year in the App Store
Talking to publishers, growing revenue
If my first year was solid, my 2nd year was great.
My 2nd year net revenue increased to $100,134.
Here's an idea of what our numbers looked like for the year:
Best Month – Sales
January – $11,358.85
Worst Month – Sales
May – $5,743.03
Best Day – Sales
January 19 – $1,008.27
Worst Day – Sales
February 22 – $112.68
Best Day – Downloads
January 26 – 3,014
Worst Day – Downloads
July 4 – 652
Average Daily Revenue
$274.34
Median Daily Revenue
$237
Best Sales Day, every single week
Sunday
Worst Sales Day, every single week
Friday
Returns
122
Updates Downloaded
879,402
Peak Gross Ranking in the Books Category
8
“Current Version" Average Rating of our most popular app
“All Versions" Average Rating of our most popular app
Monthly Sales Chart
Number of days where I worried this would collapse at any moment
365 (being an entrepreneur is stressful!)
Some of the highlights from the year:
Publishing Conferences
I attended as many publishing conferences as I could find. One in particular was tailored to the Spanish, Christian publishing industry. It's called Expolit.
I showed up in Miami, not knowing anything about the conference, who was going to be there, anything. My goal was to talk to the publishers and get them to license their books to me.
Why?
Well, at this time in Apple's App Store, the world was transitioning from "pay to download" apps (like my original Bible app), and "free to download with in-app purchases".
So I had to figure out a way to make that transition, too.
The best thing I could come up with was to make the app free (which would 10x the number of downloads) and sell content inside the app.
But I couldn't afford to make a bunch of my own content of course. So I did the next best thing, and licensed content (books!) from a bunch of publishers.
Behold Apple Giveth and Apple Taketh Away; Blessed be the name of Apple
My #1 cause for worry was always that Apple controls everything. They could change their search algorithm, or worse, decide to turn us off altogether.
This isn't a diss though. There are pros and cons to playing on others' platforms, and I accepted that when I launched our first app.
In the case of Apple, the deal is this:
They give me access to hundreds of millions of above-average income consumers and their credits cards.
I agreed to play by their rules, that they own the relationship with the customer, and that they can decide to turn me away if they so choose.
That deal worked out great for me, but it doesn't mean I don't worry about worst case scenarios.
Android is Awful
I'll spare you the horror story, but I tried a port of our most popular app to Android during year 2. It did not go well.
The developer was awful and required a ton of handholding. (He later sabbottaged our database, too, but that's a story for another time.)
Even when we finally did launch (albeit with fewer features than I originally wanted), downloads were terrible, and revenue was practically nonexistant.
This tends to surprise people given our target demographic of native Spanish speakers. It surprised me, too.
Overall
Generally speaking, year 2 was a great learning year. I met all those publishers, saw the new version of the app grow a ton, and saw our revenue increase.
But it was no match for what was about to happen in year 3.