carpeaqua

Ever since my return to the iOS App Store with Elements last August I have held strong on three beliefs:

1. I will never read the reviews of my apps.
2. I will never put a $5 app on sale.
3. I will never blindly throw promo codes out via social media services.

Let’s look at each more in-depth:

No Reviews

I have no idea what Elements’s App Store star rating is right now. I also have no idea how many reviews are available for prospective buyers. I believe Marco is where I got the inspiration for this policy, but it really is great.

People generally leave reviews to vent their frustrations if an app doesn’t work for them or because they failed to read the description and it’s missing a feature they had hoped would be there. There are those good hearted souls who do take the time to leave positive reviews on products they love, but they seem to be outnumbered by those who would rather leave 1 star and emoji poop in the subject line.

I make it ridiculously easy to get ahold of me if you have feature requests or support questions. There’s a dedicated help button in the application. The Second Gear site even has a dedicated support section with frequently asked questions and a direct email address that goes right to me so we can figure out what is going on.

Anyone that genuinely wants to improve the product or figure out why the app doesn’t work for them will use those support channels. If they take the effort to write in, I do my best to ensure they get a satisfactory response. Anyone who just stops in the reviews to complain doesn’t really want to resolve the problem. They just want to let steam off.

Until Apple offers a way for me to interact with reviewers directly, I don’t see the point to subjecting myself to the negativity. The amount of feedback I get via my official support channels coupled with sales being strong give me more than enough feedback to go on in shaping the future of the app. Some anonymous poster dangling an extra star on his review if I add his pet feature does not phase me.

Never On Sale

Elements is a $5 piece of software. When you take out Apple’s 30% cut that’s $3.50 per copy respectively. Unless you are planning to play the charting lottery and get in the Top 25, it’s hard to be in business selling a few copies of a day for a dollar or two at most.

I frequently explain to people that I don’t build consumer applications and instead target the nerds. The nerds are more than willing to spend money on quality software. Nerds have bought tens of thousands of copies of OmniFocus’s $40 iPad app, so I find it hard to believe they would struggle to part with a $5 bill to use my application.

Moreover, I don’t want someone who is interested in the app to hesitate buying it because they fear it may go on sale soon. By never putting it on sale, I ensure that everyone who hops on board the Elements train got paid the same toll and doesn’t feel cheated out of a few bucks.

Does that make me a bad Capitalist? Am I leaving money on the table? Maybe, but at least I don’t have second thoughts or hesitations about it and I don’t have to waste any of my time dealing playing the pricing game. I don’t need or even want everyone with an iPhone or iPad to be my customer. I’d rather have a small percentage of the user base that I can more easily manage as a small independent development shop.

Promo Codes Are For Friends & Journalists

More puzzling to me than sales is the practice of blindly throwing promo codes out on a company Twitter or Facebook account. You have definitely seen the posts where a company just throws the codes out in a tweet and the first person to copy it to the clipboard and paste it into iTunes gets a free copy of the application. You never know who claimed the code and you have no assurances that they are going to leave a positive review for the application. Like sales, I also don’t want a prospective customer to hold off from purchasing because they think I may be unloading a set of promo codes on the @secondgear Twitter in the near future.

In Indiana we have this chain of shoe stores called Shoe Carnival. For the longest time they had a plastic box in the middle of the store where lucky customers would get the opportunity to step inside and try and grab as many coupons and Shoe Carnival Dollars as possible while air out the bottom so they could save money on that new pair of Nikes they have their eye on. Throwing promo codes out on Twitter is a lot like that, except it’s not just one person in the booth. It’s everyone who follows you.

Worse is the practice of giving promo codes to sites that do nothing but give away free copies of your apps with the belief that it is good promotion for your product. If anything it cheapens the value of your product. In most cases, people claim codes because they like the idea of getting something for free, even if they have 0 intention of ever using it.

That’s why the only people I give promo codes to is legit journalists¹, friends and fellow developers. In that case I know who is claiming the codes and it’s building good will with people I know and respect. When I go to conferences or local developer events, I make little cards that have a promo code for Elements or Today on it to distribute to people I chat with because I want to encourage them to try my product. Though it is on a much smaller scale, that is the kind of marketing that I can track and follow up on. All I get out of a blind code giveaway on a social media site is a lost sale.