GetIpsum

I checked on the sales overview earlier today and it's currently at $506 in sales since the launch.
Which clocks in at about $4 per day, so this app is definitely not something that can sustain anything but it's own right to exist really 😅

I should also mention that this number is before Apple has taken their 15% commission and if I would want to withdraw the money from my company I also have to pay income tax on the money at around 30%. So if I were to withdraw the money to use privately it would amount to a grand total of around 300 bucks.

This app is not in the app store for the money it makes though, it is more about the learning experience of maintaining a useful piece of software for paying customers.

Things I've learned since starting this project:

✅ A new programming language
✅ Dealing with a marketplace that sets the rules
✅ Providing customer support
✅ Making time for maintaining a piece of software that I've built
✅ Dealing with everything that comes with receiving payments from Apple, international payments and accounting
✅ Packaging and marketing a piece of software

The latest release featured a visual theme selection and also a new theme bringing the count up to 10 available color themes. Everyone should be able to find something they like.

With this release I also took the opportunity to update the screenshot images for the product page in the app store. This is one of the things I don't like about the app store, you have to make a new release if you want to update the screenshots. Feels a bit clunky to me.

The sales is chugging along slowly and steadily at around 2-3 sales per day. Occasionally there is a day with zero sales which usually happens on saturdays for some reason 🤔

I've tried increasing the price a couple of times with just a dollar to $3, usually this seem to coincide with one of those zero-sale days and I end up lowering it again 😅
Competitors is priced at $2 but I'm thinking about committing to a permanent price increase to see what happens with the stats.

I got feedback from some of the users, most through the app stores built in review system. I quickly replied to all reviews that came in, thanking for both positive and less positive reviews.

Most reviews also came with suggestions for improvements, all of the suggestions were actually good ideas and I ended up implementing all of the suggestions.

The best suggestion in my opinion came in via my websites support-email and the user suggested that I should add a feature where you could register a keyboard shortcut for any of the content amount. Which I implemented shortly thereafter.

After a couple of rejections in the App Store review process the app was approved for sale on the 24th of August.

The first week brought about 50 sales at $2 each.

Before the launch I focused a lot on creating nice looking screenshot images for the app store product page.

Stats for the first week on the app store:

1M Impressions
3.6K Product page view

The second and third week brought 2M impressions each and about 10K page views combined, getting featured under "Great New Apps and Updates" helped a lot with initial sales.

It took about 2 weeks to build, I worked mostly evenings and weekends learning more and more about SwiftUI as I went.

The first version included the main app UI, some behaviour preferences and a keyboard shortcut to bring up the main window.

The whole time I replaced my old workflow of getting placeholder text with using my own app.

This app is a product of two things, a dissatisfaction with existing solutions and me wanting to learn more about building native apps.

As a web developer using placeholder text is part of my workflow and I always want to use the best and most beautiful tools for the job.

Of course I've used similar tools before, both web-based solutions and apps. The web-based ones falls short on productivity since you need to either google or type in a website address before getting what you want. Often meaning you have to switch apps.
Apps falls short on productivity as well with multiple unnecessary steps, no keyboard shortcuts and no sign of being actively maintained.

This app is a a typical case of scratching your own itch.