on creating apps

On March 8 we received email from Apple that DrinkControl is approved and is in processing for the App Store. After all those late nights and weekends for last half a year it was a great feeling seeing that our app is available across the world.

The idea of DrinkControl is very simple - it is an app for a moderate drinker. If you are interested in what is considered moderate alcohol consumption, or if you want to understand how much you are spending on alcohol, or you’d like to understand your drinking habits, then DrinkControl will be interesting to you. [iTunes link] ($1.99 until the end of April, $2.99 afterwards)

Now, after a full month in App Store the question is - how did it go?

First. We decided to give away DrinkControl for free to our friends and those people who has left their email on app’s landing page (that was online from February 22) and therefore for 13 and 14 of March made it free for everyone. We sent email to our friends, colleagues, our Facebook contacts and Twitter followers.

Second. We decided to set DrinkControl price $0.99 for March and $1.99 for April and only from May 1 app will get it’s regular price - $2.99.

Third. Unfortunately on March 13 we found critical bug in app related with daylight-saving time. That totally crushed our promotion plans for first month- instead of sending app press releases and materials we had to focus on fixing this bug and hoping that App Store review process for bugfix will be fast enough to make fix available before March 27 when most of our existing customers in Europe should adjust their clocks. Bugfix was available in App Store in March 24. Huh. 

Fourth. As app has to be rated 17+ (because it contains references to alcohol), Apple does not provide promo codes (that allows to get app for free for person who has a code). Which means that a lot of review sites- big and small are not interested even look on DrinkControl.

Fifth. On April 4 thief broke inside Arts (who is making all XCode work) apartment and stole his MacBook and iPhone among other things. Thank’s God there is Dropbox for his personal data (still some photos was lost) and SubVersion repository in the network for all code of DrinkControl and other projects we are working on. Still a big loss both materially and mentally.

Numbers

• 1237 downloads (95,4% of these when DrinkControl was free)
• 605 updates (these are real users, still keeping app on their iPhones)
• $59 in revenues

So it was a very hard, demanding month full of bad surprises and not very encouraging results. On the bright side- we launched (remember, version 1 is the loneliest number). We got real feedback. We learned what we have to improve in DrinkControl. We got good rating and some great reviews from users in AppStores across the world. We have ideas how to make DrinkControl more valuable for the user. We know what should we done next. Version 1.3 is on the way (it just will be more harder and slower than we expected).