My Sudoku app passed 20,000 installs 🎉 AMA!
I'll keep it quick:
Got tired of all the spammy and clunky sudoku apps that dominate the top charts of the app store and built my own.
I'd built an (ugly, poorly designed) journaling app called Introspekt, and I'd wanted to completely revamp it and build it for iOS so I'd started learning iOS dev. While learning I was having a lot of trouble staying motivated and so I decided to just learn while building and thought this would be a nice simple app to get started (Narrator: It was not simple).
It's clean, minimalistic, and available for iOS 15+.
Most of the installs are organic (18k at least) and I didn't do much ASO research either - just put in some keywords that I thought were relevant. So far, the only search term that NES ranks for is sudoku and is #138 as of today.
The only "marketing" was a post on r/Apple that did quite well. I have a Twitter account but it had only ~100 followers when I launched and only has ~200 now: @selvarajashish
Website: https://www.notevil.app/
Launch: April 14th, 2022
congrats on this!
Actually passed 20k a few days ago (about 21k as of writing) but didn't have time to post this. A pic of the App Store Connect dashboard: https://twitter.com/selvarajashish/status/1573432444182843393
I think discover-ability might be easier on the app store than it is on Google Search
(which sucks). Sorry but what does NES mean ?
How many months did it take to get 20,000 installs?
how many installs are you getting a week now?
NES = Not Evil Sudoku
Long name so I'm just using an acronym.
Released April 14, 20k installs a few days, now about 21k. You do the math 😛
I think it was ~1k per week but it varies a lot. Some days I get 100, some days 600.
Congratulations.. Awesome..!
Congrats! How long did it take to from idea to implementation?
Started Feb 24, 2022, released Apr 14, 2022. This was all while having a full time job so I'm pretty happy with that timeline - 49 days from idea to release.
That is pretty fast. Impressive.
Cool! Any plan to release for Android?
Not right now, the app is heavily dependent on Apple's framework. Maybe if I learn Kotlin!
Awesome! How much have you made from it so far?
After costs about ~$1.2k but its going to go further down because I have to hire an accountant and a bunch of other things like that.
Congratz! I love the simplicity! Now... You may think you could earn some money from it, right? Or is it already monetised?
Edit: Sorry, I see your replies in other comments.
It hasn't earned much and I don't think it will create much income but it was fun to build and we'll see where it goes!
Did you use already existing sudoku generator algorithm?
Nope, built my own (that's half the fun!). I actually built 2. The first didn't produce puzzles that were guaranteed to be unique, the second did.
I can imagine the fun in that 😁 I guess discovering the rules of that and building it on your own rewards you with satisfaction 😊
You seem to have an interesting pricing model.
How does that work? does that mean for free you can only play a few games, then need to pay to play more?
Is it doing well? Whats your conversion rate to the paid tiers?
Congrats btw. It looks slick!
You get 1 game/day for free so if you're one of those people that has like a daily sudoku habit, you basically get the app for free.
If you want to play unlimited games, you can unlock that for 0.99 and get charts, some extras for 3.99.
I've gotten complaints saying that 1game/day is too little but for a fee of 0.99 I think its pretty fair.
Conversion is not super high, I think ~1k/21k have bought a purchase but I think that's par for the course with app stores.
Have you tried doing any ASO research?
There are many things that help with keyword ranking, one of them is ratings. Lots of good ratings in a short period of time helps with rankings. Are you using SKStoreReviewController (or the SwiftUI equivalent)?
From preliminary research, I found that in the beginning, the thing that helps the most with ASO is just ratings as you said.
Not including SKStoreReviewController earlier was a big misstep I made and it was affecting ratings a lot. It's been 2 months since I put in an auto-review dialog and I'm almost at 100 5-star reviews!
What marketing techniques you used for installs?
Monthly revenue?
No monthly revenue, only one-time purchases.