The Numbers

Paying homage to Noel Llopis’ blog posts on “The Numbers”, I thought I would have a post of my own to show you the impact of different events on the download count that have happened since BarCards was released.

BarCards and BarCards Lite were initially available for download on May 7, 2010.  After releasing the App, I ran some Google/Facebook advertisements since I had some free credit from GoDaddy after registering the app’s domain.  If you are a sign up for these services for the first time, I think you get like $50 of free credit to advertise on both Google and Facebook.  I ran the ads for the free version thinking that this might boost up some downloads and give me a little bit of online presence.  You can see that they definitely worked with BarCards Lite getting a fair amount of downloads for being completely unknown.

Graph on the numbers for BarCards and BarCards Lite.

I learned a couple of things.  One, if I ever spend “real money” on ads, I would definitely go with Google Keywords as I got a whole lot more value (more impressions/clicks) than I did with Facebook.  Two, that $50 credit goes FAST; just be prepared to run through your advertising budget quickly if this is how you are going to get the word out.

You’ll notice that I got a few more downloads after 5/8; this was namely my friends downloading the application.  Never forget that you have the ability to pander to your friends and family to not only download your app, but also to write review and post to their Facebook/Twitter to get their friends to download the app.  While this can garner a few downloads, you will definitely not eat on it.

The downloads then went practically to zero.  At this point in time, I thought I was dead in the water; the app was going nowhere fast.  Then randomly, I got an email from a former Brazilian exchange student who stayed with my family back in high school.  He was working in London and was walking down the street browsing through the Hot New Games on his iPhone and sent me an email on 5/16 telling me that BarCards was listed!

I was pretty excited to say the least, and had noticed that downloads had been picking up since 5/13.  I tried to understand what being listed as a Hot New Game meant and began reaching out to different devs to see if they could offer advice.  Ray Wenderlich (who I had met because his app Math Ninja was featured on Fresh Apps the same time that Barcards was), posted a link to Noel Llopis blog.  From reading the blog I could tell that Noel was an experienced developer, so I reached out to him for advice.

I was surprised to receive a prompt response from him.  He told me to immediately drop the price to $0.99 to encourage traffic and to begin reaching out to the major review sites (MacWorld, MacLife, TUAW, etc).  It was Noel that I learned that the app was picked up as a Hot New Game on Thursday 5/13, as he told me the Apple Store refreshes on that day every week.

I am so thankful that he gave me that advice, because lowering the price started pushing up downloads (you can see the BarCards line steadily ascend from 5/13 to 5/20) and I think that was what I needed to get the next BIG push.  I value his insight and mentorship and will be grateful for what he did to help me out.  Being listed as a Hot New Game roughly averaged out 30 paid downloads per day; not too shabby.

Special design that we made for Apple.

On Wednesday 5/19 I was driving to my hometown because my mom was graduating from college.  In the process of getting there, my email alert went off and I saw it was an email that appeared to be from Apple.  The email stated that they had a potential marketing opportunity for BarCards; I had nearly jumped out of my seat.  Apple requested that I provide them several images and had less than 24 hours to do so.

At first I thought this was a joke.  I called up Carla and told her the news and asked her to research this email to see if it was a hoax.  She called me back and told me it was legit.  We were both incredibly busy, but we knew this opportunity wouldn’t come often, so we stayed up very late putting together some special images that Apple had requested.

Since this was the day prior to the refresh of the Apple store, I thought that there was no way that it would make the Apple store the next day, so I was kind of bummed that we would be taken off the Hot New Games section.  Turns out something better happened.

Carla sent me a text while I was at Giorgio’s eating pizza and catching up with an old friend to let me know that we were on the FRONT PAGE of the iTunes store!  I couldn’t believe it and couldn’t wait to see the download totals.

On 5/20 BarCards was listed on the front page of the Apple store under New and Noteworthy.

It was quite the boom; we ended up averaging just at 300 paid downloads per day, a 10X increase from being on the Hot New Games List.  I have to say that to this day I am not sure what I did to get noticed by Apple, but I am thankful that it happened.  I have Googled to try to figure out how this might have happened, but it seems that no one really knows.

Thursday 5/27 found us taken off of New and Noteworthy, but BarCards was still on the front page of the Apple store under the What’s Hot header.  We even had one of the images we submitted to Apple as a small banner to boot!  I was really pumped about this, and so happy that Carla’s hard work could be appreciated; she is such a talented graphical artist.  Anyway, this new position found us averaging right at 100 paid downloads per day.

The Apple store refresh of Thursday 6/3 found BarCards still on the front page of the iTunes store under What’s Hot, but our banner was taken away and you had to scroll to the right to see the icon for the app.  We finished the week averaging just under 50 paid downloads per day.  All and all pretty good.

Here is a chart that shows the daily downloads depending where we were featured:

I knew that BarCards was probably going to be taken off the front page of the Apple store for good on June 10, so I realized that I was going to have to drum up some more publicity.  This was very important because I knew that I would not be cut a check by Apple for sometime; seeing that I am unemployed, I could not finance development until the money came in so I still needed some buzz.  The amount of time you have to wait for a check is fairly long, so this is one of the reasons that you have not seen an update to BarCards.

Anyway, I had taken Noel’s advice to heart and kept on reaching out to people.  I emailed everyone, multiple times, and had gotten nowhere.  But with the impending doom of being relegated to obscurity, I persisted for a little while longer.

What happened was that I caught a lucky break.  Through chance of emailing the right person to tell about my app, I happened to get referred to apply for Mashable’s Spark of Genius series.  I thought I had a snowball’s chance in the South Texas heat of getting noticed, but I decided, “What the hell? I’ve got nothing to lose.”

I applied for it the morning of Wednesday 6/9.  That night, I was putting up the Piñojo Productions  website and I was Googling BarCards to link to some of the reviews that we had received.  Lo and behold, I saw the Mashable link.  I looked further into it, and the Mashable Twitter account even tweeted out about the app.  That started the whirlwind which lead to this post as I was really pumped up trying to reach out to the people Tweeting about BarCards (again, another reason to have your Twitter account linked to inside your application; a big lesson learned).

This led to the noticeable spike seen on 6/10 (the article/tweet came out rather late at night); in particular you will notice that BarCards Lite had an appreciable spike.  Equally noticeable is how fast it trailed off!  This even includes a Gizmodo article written about BarCards late on 6/11.  If anything, this proves how much we are about the here-and-now on the net.  Also interesting is that the spike was not as large as being on the front page of the Apple Store under New and Noteworthy.  With as much buzz that the Mashable post gave the app (some 1000+ tweets and retweets were made on the app), I would have thought that it would have translated to more downloads.

My final bit of publicity was an article that Jason Buch wrote about BarCards for both the print and online edition of the San Antonio Express.  It was a lot of fun to get to play the game with a reporter and have someone completely new to the idea see how people react.  The article was really good and even game me a little boost as well.

Needless to say, after the article came out in the newspaper, the numbers have really started to trail off.  I think that I could have kept them higher if: (1) the app didn’t have such a small slice of the population who would play it – by having the word “Bar” in the app, I know that I whittled down the potential audience immediately, (2) the app was purely given away free and had In App purchases, and (3) I would have updated often while it was featured.  At any rate, I will be interested to see what the new website and updated version of the app will do to the downloads.

I hope that this information can be helpful to you as you develop your iPhone app!