Launched an iPhone app, now what?
A few months ago I had a silly idea of making a mobile app that used the accelerometer to track the slide motion for playing a virtual trombone.
Just wanted to share the story of bringing it to fruition and see if anyone had any advice on where to go from here.
After I had the idea, I started out spending a couple days trying to get something cross-platform going in Flutter, but it soon became clear that wasn't the best fit, seeing as I'd need native hooks for most of what the app needed to do, and it wasn't yet clear it'd be possible at all. So I switched to making it an iOS app in Swift. The accelerometer data turned out to be not nearly accurate enough to do the job, so I switched to using the camera/AR using ARKit... and it worked instantly. Like the very first time I hooked up a slider UI element to the distance function. It felt a bit like magic. And also just ridiculous.
Here's a video I recorded to send to some friends at the time:
https://youtu.be/6BIogfGH3IQ
Here's a video of it in action in it's current state:
https://youtube.com/shorts/8kS2TRzV4I4?feature=share
Apologies for the non-responsive website (using nextjs on cloudflare btw which is awesome). It doesn't look great on mobile, which is kind of inexcusable, I'm working on it:
https://www.tromphoneapp.com
Anyway, I'm not sure where I'll take it from here. I have some ideas for more AR content like hats, heart eyes, etc. Possibly a song editor so users can add songs that might have issues with copyright if I included them in the app? Any ideas you guys have would be fun to hear.
Also, this is just a silly side project I don't expect to get rich from, but it would be nice if I could recoup the couple hundred bucks I put into it for joining the apple dev program and buying the domain etc. And honestly I think it's really a fun and unique app so I want to get the word out just to share it with people. I'm a tech guy so marketing isn't my strong suit. Any advice is appreciated.
Hi Ray,
I think this looks really really fun.
If you would like to recoup some money, I would make it a paid only app. You are operating in a very specific niche and you will be able to find some high intent users. Plus your app does not seem to mandate a free trial experience
Then you can keep doing small organic distribution efforts or do some paid efforts targeting this specific niche group.
I believe you ll be surprised at how well you ll do. Best of luck
PS: I have not tried the app, just looked at the website
You think a paid app would do better than the In-app Purchase for unlocking recording? I'd love to hear more.
My thinking is that by making it a free download you can try out the app, have some fun playing it, and if you want to send a video to a friend or post on Tik Tok or whatever, the $1.99 to unlock that is a low barrier. The name of the app is baked into the recording, so people seeing it can search and find it. Hopefully that fuels some viral growth.
One problem currently is that when you search for "tromphone" google returns results for "trombone" which I don't rank well for. Not sure if there's anything I can do about that. I doubt I'd ever hit the first results page for "trombone".
I need to work on making the website responsive so it looks good on mobile, and probably put a video on there. Then I'll use the $100 in Apple ad credits, but I'm a bit skeptical putting real money into that channel will pay off.
Other common growth advice like starting a newsletter or posting to ProductHunt doesn't seem right for a silly little app like this, so I'm not sure how to find users. As a strictly paid app that would be even more challenging, no?
If anyone's curious, it's been on the App Store for almost a week now and has gotten 250 downloads and made $6.
Hi,
I made some assumptions about the kind of effort you want to keep putting on the app.
I am playing the freemium game and I can tell you it is a LOT of work. If this is truly a side hustle with limited time to devote, then it is best to capture the payment flow when the user has the 'highest intent' - and in your case it would be your app product page and install action.
ASO should work well for you.
However, if you think the conversion funnel from using your app to share is good enough, then stick to it. You know your users best :)
I agree on your other points like newsletter etc - these face the same distribution problem when you don't have an audience already
Regarding sharing on TikTok, I am still working on it. It takes a lot of work following/messaging the right users.
Cool that makes sense, thanks. I guess the bigger fear for me is that it'd sit and languish as a paid app. In my case even with 99% of downloads not converting at least some people tried it and maybe had some fun with it, and for something like this I chalk that up as a win.
I hear you on growth being hard work. I have a SaaS business as well and we do the whole newsletter, ProductHunt, etc thing and it's just really tough to find and convert users.
Interesting app! Even if it's just a side project, I think it adds good experience.