My side-project product got covered by LifeHacker and Mashable and it still bombed.
I wrote a retrospective on a past side project of mine (a Mac App) that ended up failing even though it sold hundreds of units, ranked high in the app store, and was covered by LifeHacker and Mashable. You'd think that it would have been a decent success but it was a huge waste of effort and barely made any money.
Here's the numbers at my blog:
https://blog.wunderbucket.io/mac-audiozue.html
Hope this data is helpful for someone considering similar ideas.
TLDR: Recurring revenue is essential, even if it's small. It's really hard to make money with one-time purchases.
Trending on Indie Hackers
Good recap, and a reminder that launch isn't everything. Even if you get lots of traffic on launch day, most apps don't grow virally through word-of-mouth. You've got to figure out a consistent way to grow.
I don't know about recurring revenue being essential. It's good for sure if you can get it working. But it's quite possible to make a considerable amount of money from one-time purchases if you charge enough. Perhaps it's harder to get away with charging a lot in the App Store, though.
Good point, @csallen. A more nuanced take would be that volume is the key to making a one-time purchase strategy work.
If you're building recurring revenue, even a small launch isn't a disaster. I got about 200 customers in the first 30 days of launch, which, even if I charged something low like $3/mo. That's still something that could fund continued development, even for part time. But at the end I was making like $5/mo off of one time sales and that's just not enough to continue investing effort.
Of course, people would have to be willing to pay $3/mo for my service instead of making a one-time purchase and that's the big unknown.
Thanks for sharing. I much rather read your story than the usual crazy success story -- which probably only accounts for 1% or less of all endeavours made.
Mine from 2007 was also a huge bomb, even when we were featured in many important publications and many developers and our publisher were all hyped up with the launch. Anything can happen!
Yep. Apps are tricky things to make work from a financial perspective. I assume very few every pay off.
Thanks for sharing. Interesting read!
Thanks for posting this Levi. Brings perspective to a couple of things. Few questions:
Thanks a lot for the response.
That last part really resonated with me. As I'm working on my side project, I've used a quick/easy FE framework called RapidRailsTheme (now it's called Kiso). It was a 1-time payment that had hundreds of thousands of purchases, but recently they changed their model to a monthly subscription and required everyone to switch. Initially, this made me mad and thought they were money-hungry, but sounds like although they sold xxx in order to continue providing service they made this tough choice.
Thanks for sharing!
Oh man, I've been on both ends of that situation. I think the one-time purchase model for software is dying hard. Adobe, Sketch, etc. they're all switching to subscription models. It's just hard to fund continued development when you only get paid once. And apps and services need continuous development just to function.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.