corvidapps, juanla Thank!
These are great ideas. I will try and let you know.
I am doing a lot of things to improve the situation, for example creating a short movie, and a set of movies to explain how to use the app.
I am probably doing not bad- thanks to your help-
The goog news - day 5 - HandWallet is now located in place 12 (!!!) if I look for “expense manager” in the English Play store. 5 more places to climb (I want to be in the first page on most of the devices).
Bad news - “track expense” - located 44
“expese tracker” 58
“money manager” 53
I can totally relate, I developed apps for Windows Mobile back in the day. Working on an app for months at a time, getting your hopes up high, and then only getting a couple of 100 downloads.
I don’t mean to sound all negative, but it is generally not a good thing to work 7 months on an app without proper research about whether there is actually a large enough market for it. you should focus on developing smaller apps.
Try developing a small game/useful tool that only takes a couple of weeks to develop and release it. I don’t mean to say that you should release fart/prank apps. Just a minimal viable app that looks good and doesn’t contain any bugs (I know from experience that bug reports actually influence your ranking, so keep that in mind). See if it gets any traction and then work on it some more, listening to your customers. If you don’t get any feedback or the app just isn’t getting any attention. You might want to consider moving on and come up with something new. That way you have only spent a couple of weeks at most and aren’t frustrated that nobody is downloading/buying your app that you have worked on for so long.
Probably not what you wanted to hear but it’s just my honest opinion. Hope it helps!
True words - do not forget, that Angry Birds was the right app in the right time and that times are not longer - competition has raised extremely.
Today it’s not enough to just stand out … it is more to stand out and launch a rocket, so people can see you standing out
I have not done much marketing with my latest game and it does not go well currently … (almost no marketing so far, making ready gold release in the first place)
BigWhoop- hi.
“it is generally not a good thing to work 7 months on an app without proper research about whether there is actually a large enough market for it. you should focus on developing smaller apps”
Well, before I started I did a detailed research on all the apps in this category (financial expense manager) and didn’t find anything like HandWallet.
I consider myself a very good programmer (20 years of experience including managing some big software projects), so 7 month is not a lot of time for such an app. Actually it is an advantage because it will make it difficult to clone.
A financial app will never be popular as a game, but I do get ~300 downloads a day, so the need exists. But most of my users are still not from US or UK. I still didn’t find the way to break to these markets.
I just released version 1.1 with translation to 17 languages to gain control on markets outside US and UK, but I still feel that I miss the main market.
reiti.net - hi!
“it is more to stand out and launch a rocket, so people can see you standing out”
This is the problem. It’s like moving a train up the hill!
I still think that reviews are the key issue here. If you have reviews you will climb to a realistic place in Google Play store. Thus, when people are looking for your product they will find you. These users (that were looking for an “expense manager” or “tracking expense”) are the best customers. I give them exactly what they were looking for, so they really use the products and not just playing with it a little like people you catch in a forum.
[hr]
By the way- if someone here speeks any of these languages it would be great to know if the translation is clear or there are things to improve:
Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Korian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese.
It may help also to investigate the overall search behaviour of people - just like your own behaviour.
If I as looking for an app, I do a keyword search. I do generally not consider the first search result for some reason, I look for best rating first (which is not always the first search result).
After than I look at the screenshots and the description of the app if it fits my own expectations.
For apps, I prefer small ones, that do exactly what I need and nothing else. I do not like blown-up “i can do anything” apps.
So, if you want to reach ME with your app, you have to give a good feature overview in the description and screenshots which does reflect the interface. If some of that is wrong I would not download the app.
Also I am reading the reviews … normally I do read the BAD reviews, to see what other users are complaining about. I do merely ignore 1-stars with no reason and would wish to be able to delete them, because they are of no use for anyone. But sometimes there are bad reviews with a reason which may concern me as well.
Just as an insight how “I” do search up an app … but again, I am developer myself, so I may act different than the ordinary user xD
I know 7 months isn’t all that much for a software project in general. Especially since you are doing this alone. But for an app (unlike big (desktop) software projects), where most of the time it is a hit or miss, pouring your heart and soul into the development of an app and then not seeing the results you expected is demotivating.
Have you tried advertising your app? Or perhaps even buy ads/reviews on popular app blogs/review sites?
300 new users a day is not that bad. I had much slower start with my apps. Do you track your retention rate? To be able to make some money from it you need people to keep coming back to it again and again. App like this has high stickiness potential - once you convince user to invest time into putting his data into it he’ll stick with it.
Looking at your app one suggestion instantly comes to mind - invest in a professional icon. Come on - you spent 7 months of a experienced developer time probably few hours a day, that’s how much? $20-30k? It should be a no-brainer to invest another 200-300 bucks on 99designs to get a great looking icon done. I guarantee you’ll be getting 500 instead of 300 downloads. Current icon is putting people off for sure so they don’t even bother reading description of your app.
Btw - I can proofread your Polish translation, just send me the PM with the text.
“Advertising your app” - currently publishers experience very low CPC at admob so it is cheap to do some advertisement and get some popular ad spaces. just an idea. As a dev you have the additional information about current CPC levels, why not use that information
You can also target your ad to countries were the CPC is currently low. Normal Advertisers do not have that opportunity.
I currently have a contest running at 99designs to get good images. Unfortunately they rejected my affiliate request so I will delete my CJ account again because that way I do not want to be their referal …
