Piratizer Sales

So it's still a little early to conclusively call it a trend, but the release of the Lite version seems to have boosted sales of Piratizer by about 4-5x. Sales are now around 20-25 per day.

The one thing I know the sales won't do is stay constant, but imagining that they did, 25 sales per day would be about 9000 per year. Add in say 5 more apps pulling similar numbers and you could have yourself a nice little source of passive income, which is a good thing to have during these days of recessions and layoffs.

It's looking more and more like Piratizer won't achieve the great success of CubeCheater, which is what I had feared and intended to test by making the app. Certainly with 50,000 apps now in the App Store, only a select few are going to be making any real amounts of money, given the way the system is set up.

After an initial burst of purchases by friends and family (thanks everyone!), daily sales have slowed and and leveled off in the single digits:

Piratizer Sales - First Three Weeks

The problem is the same one that most other iPhone apps face: nobody knows that the app exists. With 40,000 other apps on the App Store, it's impossible to find any apps that aren't in the Top 100 lists, unless you hear about the app through some other means, and then search for it. The trick is to somehow get enough people to buy the app in one 24-hour period that it shows up on the top lists, where lots of other people will see it and then buy it (hopefully).

So far the response from existing customers has been positive, so I'm hoping that the app will be popular if it can just get onto the charts.

CubeCheater was able to really take off once it got mentioned by Wired, Gizmodo, and other high-profile sites. Unfortunately I'm not sure that Piratizer has quite the same "cool factor" required to get mentioned on one of those sites (of course I have submitted it for review to all of those sites, but no luck so far - they probably get hundreds of apps submitted every day, so it's difficult to stand out of the crowd).

Not all hope is lost, though: there are still a lot of other opportunities to increase sales. Since "app visibility" is such a large problem, enterprising developers have come up with lots of ways to tackle it. The first big one I'm going to try is the "Lite" strategy: make a Lite version of the application which has limited features and advertises the full paid version. Huge numbers of people download all the free apps they can get, so any free app is almost guaranteed to be downloaded many times, at least if it's any good. The popularity of the free app will drive some fraction of users to "convert" up to the paid app.

This "demo" strategy has existed forever, but its power on the App Store was only really quantified with the success of the iShoot app, as chronicled in this Wired article. Ethan Nicholas's iShoot tank game was selling slowly until he released iShoot Lite. The Lite version was downloaded 2.4 million times, and that caused the paid version to be downloaded 320,000 times (all numbers are from February - they are certainly higher now). He was smart, though: his app cost $3, so he pulled in a cool million dollars from those sales.

So if Piratizer Lite has even a fraction of that kind of success, then I'll be happy. It's waiting in the Apple approval queue now and will hopefully be approved soon. Once it's been out for a while, I'll make another post about the results!

Anyway, it will be quite interesting to see the total sales for the first full day it's available for sale (today). Before beginning the full marketing blitz, we need to build up a good stable of reviews and fix any critical bugs that the early users find (hopefully there won't be any). If you'd like a free promo code to download and review the app, let me know!

We finished and uploaded the website just in time. There are still a few things to tweak, but it's pretty much complete. Check it out over at piratizer.com!

I'm still trying to figure out how to fix the thumbnail of the YouTube video to display properly, but at least the video itself works OK. Speaking of the YouTube video, here it is:

If you're reading through an RSS reader or otherwise can't see the embed, here's a link to it on youtube.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMlJmdyy-zM.

Here are some sneak preview pictures:

Piratizer uses face-recognition technology to find the faces of all of the people in your photographs and automatically turn them into pirates. There are all kinds of pirates - Buccaneers, Corsairs, Wokou, Vikings, and maybe a super-secret fifth pirate type if we have time.

There's a large collection of all kinds of professionally illustrated pirate gear - hats, eye patches, jewelry, beards, hooks, peg legs, parrots, monkeys, swords, scars - you name it!

Once you're done editing your photo, you can save it and then email it, assign it to a contact, upload it to Facebook, etc.  Here's me as a Buccaneer.

First, the obligatory chart of App Store sales:

As you’d expect, sales saw a big boost after getting publicity, and then dropped back off afterwards.

Many sites include “via” links as a way to give credit to the people they got some content from. It’s interesting to plot these links in and see how content spreads through the blogosphere. Here’s a link graph, with solid lines indicating confirmed “via” links, and dashed lines representing my best guesses as to how the content spread:

The next interesting bit of data is to look at YouTube’s new “Video Insight” feature, which tracks a lot of data about how your videos are viewed. The view count graph is about what you’d expect: a huge spike and then near-total falloff:

The YouTube viewer demographics are more interesting:

I was surprised at the age range: well more than half of the YouTube viewers were over 35 (I would have expected the majority to be under 30).  The gender breakdown is 90% male, 10% female - I am actually a little surprised it was skewed this much. Both of these statistics probably have more to say about Wired & Gizmodo readers than they do about YouTube viewers or iPhone owners (since the vast majority of YouTube views came from embeds on those two sites).

The last bit of interesting data I have is from the hits directly on my CubeCheater web site. Here’s the graph of daily pageviews, which shows a spike similar to the others, though its shape is slightly different:

The HTTP referrers also reveal some interesting tidbits:

Surprisingly, Yahoo is by far the #1 referrer, most likely due to the fact that the Yahoo Games article did not include an embedded YouTube video: it was the only one which prominently linked to the CubeCheater website directly.

The vast majority of search keywords during this period were either cubecheater or cube cheater.  For these terms at least, Google Search apparently has about 20 times the traffic of either Yahoo Search or Live Search.

While I was making the app I was expecting to get only one or two sales until the app was reviewed by a prominent iPhone site or blog, at which point there would be a spike of sales, followed by a drop-off back down to almost zero sales after a few days. So my strategy was to make a gimmicky sort of app that bloggers might find interesting, and then try to get someone to write about it. It’s now looking like that might be the wrong strategy to use in the App Store.

The first surprise was that the app has sold more than 50 copies each day that it’s been available, and as far as I can tell there has been absolutely no English press about the app at all yet which would be driving these sales. At first I thought that it might have been due to the app showing up in the “new apps” section in iTunes on the day it was released, but it hasn’t been new for a week now, and the sales are still keeping up. Without any press or publicity, my only guess is that people are finding the app by browsing the Utilities section in iTunes, where it currently is ranked around #70.

The next semi-surprise was that I started to receive a whole bunch of emails from customers who had purchased the app. Many of them were of the “Hey, great app!” variety, but a lot of them were from people who liked the app but couldn’t use it because it didn’t work with the cube that they had. Among other problems, it turns out that all cubes sold in Japan and many in Europe use a different color scheme than cubes currently sold in the U.S. The app would tell the user to input the “Blue face with the White face on top”, which would be impossible because the Blue and White faces are on opposite sides of those cubes. I rushed out a 1.1 update to support that style of cube (and custom user-specified styles), but the update has been languishing “In Review” for almost a week now - Apple’s system was closed for much of the Christmas week, so I’m hoping that the update will go live sometime this week.

So far only 68% of the sales have come from the U.S., meaning that a full 32% are coming from overseas, which is more than I had originally expected. The app isn’t localized at all - it’s only available in English. Localizing it would require paying quite a few translators to translate all the text strings in the app, which could get expensive depending on how many languages I wanted to support. At this point I’m not really sure how to tell whether or not it would be worth doing that, financially-speaking. I designed the app’s UI under the assumption that nobody reads any explanatory text anyway, so it’s pretty graphical and should be usable without knowing much English. It seems to be selling OK in non-English countries, and I haven’t received any emails requesting that the app be translated into a specific language, so maybe it is OK as it is. On the other hand, that’s sort of an argument from fallacy because if people aren’t buying the app since it’s not available in their language, then they wouldn’t be sending me emails in the first place. Also, a large majority of sales have been from the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany, where most everyone understands English (or at least the people who are buying iPhone apps). At this point I think that if I did localize the app, the first languages to tackle would be Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese, in order to cover the largest number of potential customers.

Anyway, enough with all the blathering, let’s get to the meat of the post: the actual sales stats. Here’s a graph of CubeCheater’s daily sales, overlaid with its rank in the Utilities category in iTunes:

This graph shows a few interesting things:

1. The sales were pretty consistent leading up to Christmas, at which point there was a huge jump. Right now there are only two data points after Christmas, so it’s hard to say if this is a permanent shift or if it’s a one-time fluke. I assume that it happened because a whole bunch of people got new iPhones and iPod Touches for Christmas, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the new stable sales point is somewhere in between.
2. The iTunes rank stayed constant even through the Christmas spike. The rank is determined by number of downloads, so the fact that it remained the same indicates that all iPhone apps probably experienced a similar huge jump in sales (See: A Christmas iFart Explosion: 40,000 downloads - Man do I wish I had thought of that app).

And here are the sales broken out by country for the 12/18-12/27 period:

It’s interesting to see that there’s sort of a “long tail” of countries where the app was purchased one or two times, but not in the Chris Anderson/power-law sense, since the bottom 80% of the countries only account for 10% of the sales. With this distribution I could completely ignore all but the top 3 countries if by doing so I could increase sales in those countries by 20%.

Other random thoughts after one week of sales:

• The YouTube demo video has been viewed only 573 times. Given that many of the YouTube viewers probably did not end up buying the app, this means that far less than half of the people who did buy the app watched the demo video or visited the web site for the app before buying it.  I had originally thought that most people would buy the app after watching the video, but it looks like this is not the case.
• It’ll be interesting to see how long these sales numbers remain consistent. On one hand, you’d expect the sales to drop off after all of the people with both cubes and iPhones buy the app. On the other hand, the installed base of iPhones is still increasing exponentially now, which might counteract that drop-off.
• I’m curious to see how the sales are impacted if the app does get any mentions on any high-profile sites. Other developers have noted large yet temporary sales spikes.

Loyal readers have probably noticed that I haven't been posting very often in the last couple of months. During the spare seconds between my job and two classes at UW, I've been working on a new iPhone app.

I'm pleased to (finally) announce that the application is complete and should be available on the iTunes App Store soon. I just uploaded it and am now waiting for Apple's approval before it goes live.

The app is called CubeCheater and is an iPhone/iPod Touch app for solving everybody's favorite 80's puzzle cube. You input the state of your cube, and it will compute an optimal (or near-optimal) solution to solve it.

It uses the Group Theory algorithm discovered by Herbert Kociemba to do the solving. I haven't tried all 519 quintillion cube configurations, but I have run through quite a few random ones during my testing and I've never seen the program give a solution worse than 22 moves (the current upper bound [2] on optimal cube solutions as of August 2008). On average it takes about 7 seconds to find a good solution.

The other particularly cool part of the app is that it takes advantage of the iPhone's camera and can recognize your cube from pictures you take of it, using computer vision. I was pleased with how well this turned out - if you orient the cube properly with good lighting, it recognizes the cube perfectly every time.

That feature and most of the cool animations and 3D effects are best experienced by watching the app in action, so if you're interested, head on over to the website and check out the embedded YouTube video (or view it directly on YouTube, and don't forget to click "watch in high quality").

Here are some screenshots:

Previously, I had decided not to jailbreak since I was afraid that Apple would refuse to replace my phone if the touchscreen or other features broke (as happened to about 50% of the people I know with iPhones). Now that the warranty has expired, that's not much of a concern any more. I also figured that if my phone got screwed up, I could always upgrade to a 3G model next week anyway.

Now that I have jailbroken it, I must say that I can't believe I didn't do this a long time ago. It doesn't seem to mess up the phone at all, at least if you aren't running any custom apps. But the custom apps are completely awesome. These are what a phone with these hardware capabilities was meant to run. It's too bad that Apple's official SDK is so limited and constrained - most of the cool apps will never be allowed by Apple.

I've just gotten started trying out all the apps, but I've already found several cool ones:

Rockin' the Terminal. I booted up vi but quickly realized that that was a stupid idea when you don't have a real keyboard or Ctrl and Esc keys.

Remote Desktop is probably the killer app so far. Now I can log into my home computer and use it no matter where I am in the world (with cellular or WiFi access, of course). You'd think it would be impossible to use on the small phone screen, but with multitouch zooming and panning it actually isn't too bad.

I haven't even gotten to the 'Games' section yet, but I have definitely heard good things about the NES emulator. This should be sweet..

You could drag the cursor over a target window and adjust its transparency or make it 'always-on-top':

It's extremely simple but it was pretty cool back in the day. I just tried it out and it still seems to work for the most part, but not as well on newer versions of Windows like Vista, due to the increased security that prevents processes from messing with each other.

An interesting unintended use of the program was that it could be used to discover saved passwords in '******' textboxes, since it displayed the result of WM_GETTEXT as you dragged the cursor over various HWNDs. Fortunately they seem to have fixed that vulnerability in XP+.

Anyway, here's a link to download it:

TransparentMaker.zip

For the final project in a class I am taking we had to build a web-based disk storage system with a REST XML API, basically like Amazon S3 but at much smaller scale. The assignment was pretty cool because it was very open-ended: our servers just had to register their URLs with the professor's server and allow him to store data blocks. How we actually did it (OS, language, etc) was completely up to us.

I decided to just run my server on a computer at home, which is what most people did. I figured it would work out fine. My biggest worry was that Comcast would block a port or go down and screw me over. Fortunately that didn't happen, but there were other problems.

For about two weeks my server ran perfectly with 100% uptime, but the professor only started monitoring uptime and availability this Tuesday. Of course, on Tuesday afternoon there was a power outage at home, and my computer didn't turn back on until I got home from work and found it. I have my main computer hooked up to a UPS so it didn't go down, but the other computer was running in a closet with no UPS. Lesson learned: always have a battery backup when homework points are at stake. Also, set all computers to reboot themselves automatically after a power loss.

After I booted it back up I figured it was OK and went to bed. Of course, this happened to be the second Tuesday of the month, so Windows Update downloaded a bunch of patches overnight and rebooted, taking out the server. My process failed to start on reboot, so I had another outage all night. Normally I always set updates to "notify only" and never "automatic", but in this one case I left it on automatic, figuring that it wouldn't matter too much since it was a closet-computer that I wouldn't even log into regularly. Lesson learned: never ever ever leave the updates on automatic, they'll always find a way to screw you at the wrong time. Also, test to make sure the service comes back up properly after a reboot.

Larger-scale, I guess I learned about the importance of having geographically distributed datacenters and automatic failover, but that wasn't really a practical option in this case.

Fortunately most of the other students in the class also suffered outages as well (see graph above), so I don't think my grade will be impacted too much.