If you still need convincing, read this review from Tap! Magazine.

The sale will last over the Christmas period and then it will return to its original, although still reasonable $1.99 (£1.49) price point.

I hope you can take advantage of the offer. If not, perhaps you’ll consider buying a copy for a friend or loved one.

Launch day

Coffee Cellar has been available on the App store for 3 weeks now. This means I don’t have a huge amount of data to share, but still enough to give you a taste of the results I’m seeing.

My original plan was to go live with Coffee Cellar on Wednesday 17th August. As I approached that date, and with some promised coverage on launch day, I felt it was too risky to leave the launch until the morning. What I instead ended up doing was to soft launch Coffee Cellar on the Tuesday evening (16th August).

A soft launch is essentially putting the App live without announcing it. This meant that I could be sure that the App would be available first thing on Wednesday ready for its official launch day. If you have launch day coverage lined up then you should certainly consider doing the same – I can’t immediately think of any downsides.

Launch day coverage

Leading up to launch I had approached a multitude of different publications (both online and offline, covering diverse subjects). Despite some promising communication, I only in fact managed to garner two mentions on launch day.

The Guardian (A prominent UK newspaper) were nice enough to include me in their App Rush feature (online) – a roundup of notable App launches that day. Check it out here (Coffee Cellar is about half way down the page). This was as a direct result of my pre-launch marketing and I was really pleased that it paid off.

I also had a mention in a second App round-up post on AppleTell.

In addition to this, I had also opted for some blanket coverage through a press release. I chose prMac who offer a few tiers of services at varying prices (I went for the extended release). You can read the press release here. According to prMac, they syndicated my press release to 634 media outlets, my release had nearly 11,000 views and the purchase link (through the press release) was clicked just over 300 times.

It fairly easy to see where the press release ended up by searching google. However, it’s difficult to gauge the real benefits of this kind of press. Regardless, its good to know that there are at least some additional links to Coffee Cellar out there.

Post-launch coverage

Since launch, I’ve continued to try and get reviews/features for Coffee Cellar. One of the first things I did was to email my original contacts again to let them know that the App was now out and to give them the link. This resulted in some communication and promises of features but these have yet to materialise.

I think this is a fairly crucial point to raise. You can’t bank on a feature/review until its physically been published. I’m sure everyone has the best intentions when they promise coverage but all sorts of things can pop up (busy periods, a change of heart, a disapproving editor, etc). The trick is to remain polite and keep the communication going – its usually obvious when you’ve reached a dead end.

Coffee Cellar has had some more coverage though, through its own traction. It was featured on Notcot’s Tasteologie site. In addition I had some tweets from foodies and coffee related peeps/websites – from @theurbangrocer, and @jonathanbonchak (of Joe Van Gogh) who totally understood the App concept and was also kind enough to link to it on his blog. And of course, all of my twitter followers who have been great in helping to spread the word.

Sales Revenue

So what about sales? This is really why you’re here right? Its difficult to determine success from a revenue point of view at this early stage. I feel I should put my expectations into context a little (so that you don’t think I have starving kids or anything). My target for Coffee Cellar is to make enough money to purchase a new Espresso machine (approximately £300). It’s not a lofty ambition nor a particularly noble one. The point is, this isn’t how I make my living – its a hobby, although one that I’d love to do full time, and as such this isn’t a disaster.

So how did Coffee Cellar fair? Well, I’m not even close to that new espresso machine and, at the current rate, may not even make it to that figure within the financial year. Despite this, and although sales have been fairly low, Coffee Cellar has still sold better than any of my previous Apps (All 3 of which were games). Its difficult to know what to read into that. Its great that I’m improving but the margins are so small that at the rate I’m going we’ll be on the iPhone 3000, iOS 2999.1 and will be producing 500 different sizes of assets to support the various screen resolutions, before I’m what you’d call “successful”.

With all that out of the way, and off my chest ;), here are my sales figures for Coffee Cellar.

Total revenue from Coffee Cellar sales to date: £19 (thats after Apple’s 30% cut).

Here’s how that translates to download numbers.

Total number of Coffee Cellar downloads to date: 15.

…and finally the country distribution of sales.

Reviews

Due to the low number of sales, I’m struggling with getting reviews – both App store and through websites. I could certainly do with a few more reviews/ratings so if you own the App, a review would really help.

What I’ve learned

My efforts in promoting Coffee Cellar have taught me a few things.

1. Build your press contacts early.
2. Don’t be afraid to contact mainstream press.
3. Focus on the launch day and post-release coverage. Pre-release coverage is only really viable for games.

What’s next

Coffee Cellar is an interesting project because its an App that I’m passionate about and one that I have a desire to use on a daily basis. As a result I’ll be improving it steadily with new features. I have a lot of interesting features planned (not all of which will come to fruition) so I’ll be picking away at them and releasing updates over the coming months.

I’m not doing it purely for myself though and I would like to attempt to hit my Espresso machine target. I’ll be continuing to look for opportunities for features and reviews. To get things started I decided to produce a trailer (to help with promotion). Here it is in all of its glory…

Conclusion

It may look like a lost cause, and even sound like a sob story, but the marketing I’ve done for Coffee Cellar has honestly been my best effort to date. Each time you launch a product, you learn something new and crucially I’m not ready to give up creating!

The real effort needs to come from spending time trying to promote the App. Its easy to spend nights working on updates but I think what’s really needed is to set aside some of this time for pure promotional efforts. Thats what I plan to do. Time spent promoting is equally, if not more, valuable than time spent adding new features.

The final post in my App development series will be a postmortem – it will be part of a wrap-up post containing all of the links so far and a review of the whole process (a two-for one kind of deal) – so look out for that.

If you’d like to support me, you can purchase a copy of Coffee Cellar here. Alternatively, I now have a Facebook page for Coffee Cellar which you could “like” and/or post to your wall. Helping me spread the word by telling your coffee loving friends is also welcome.

(Money tunnel image courtesy of RambergMediaImages)

Astro Noughts is my latest iPad game. It’s an arcade number crunching game with, what I consider to be, a fairly unique concept. You can read a postmortem here (it was also featured on Gamasutra). I released Astro Noughts on 14th December 2010 – incredibly bad timing since there were a large number of high profile, kick-ass games released at exactly the same time (and EA decided to play hard ball). Despite the bad timing Astro Noughts sold 16 copies on its first day – you might consider this terribly low but I consider it a success. Sales bounced around for a while but by the end of January this year they had petered out to precisely 0 sales every day. That’s where it has remained, receiving 0 sales for the past 2 months.

Also in that time I have released a number of updates to improve the game and add value. I’ve also attempted to keep a thread alive on Touch Arcade. I had some coverage here and there but ultimately my attempts to court the media have failed miserably.

It was clear that I needed to do something, but what? I went FREE that’s what. Here’s how it went down…

Why Free

I’ve dabbled with Free before on my other games without much success. The general idea is that you make your game free for a period of time. During that time you are trying to get as much exposure as possible so that, when you make the game paid again, it takes off through word of mouth. Alternatively Apple may notice it rise up the charts and opt to feature it. Either way, you’ll increase your user base which increases future exposure from updates (e.g. you update the game and someone tells their friend who doesn’t yet own the game).

I made the decision to go free on Sunday 20th March. A quick tweet (and a follow up reminder) in addition to a post on my touch arcade thread – the stage was set.

Rankings

Making your game Free for a period is a bit like reliving launch day in that you get to obsessively check your chart ranking in the various categories and countries. It’s great fun and, to be perfectly honest, it alone is enough reason to go free.

There are a couple of tools used pretty much universally for checking rank. The first is MajicRank which tracks rank dynamically and the second is App Annie which aggregates daily rankings.

Astro Noughts started off pretty gently, breaking into a few of the the game sub category charts…

By the end of the first day it was the #1 educational game in a number of countries and had also broken into the top overall games in the US & UK as well as the top overall Apps in a number of countries…

Things came to a head on the second day when Astro Noughts hit #14 in the top free Apps in France. It was also in the top free games in US, UK, and Canada as well as the #1 educational game in 5 countries and within the top 10 educational game in 17 countries…

Due to its high ranking in France, Astro Noughts also ranked higher than Angry Birds HD Free in the top free Apps in France for a while. Pretty cool!

I’ve tried to collate this data as best I can to show the most interesting chart rises…

Top Free Apps

Top Free Games

Top Educational Games

Downloads

Rankings are all very nice but the big question is, how many downloads does this equate to? The iPad App store requires far fewer downloads than the iPhone store in order to begin seeing changes in rank. Presumably this is due to the reach of the iPad (when compared with the iPhone) and also perhaps the way that iPad users are interacting with their devices (perhaps spending more time in the prebuilt Apps such as Safari and Mail).

During its free period (20th – 23rd March) Astro Noughts was downloaded a total of 2,299 times. I’m pretty pleased with that number. Its great knowing that such a large number of people have played my game.

I think it’s always interesting to look at country distribution, if only to highlight how important the US charts are.

Press

I didn’t contact the press during the free period and most of the positive press happened virally on twitter. However, I did get some press through App Advice (check out the humorous comment) and Appmodo.

iTunes reviews and ratings

In the past when I’ve gone free this has had a negative impact on my iTunes ratings. With Astro Noughts this hasn’t been the case and my rating is still pretty good. I suspect some of this is due to Apple’s removal of the rating popup when you delete an App.

Aftershock & Conclusion

The Astro Noughts Free experiment lasted from 20th – 23rd March. I decided to put the App back to paid on 23rd March when I could see the rankings & downloads begin to decline. Putting Astro Noughts back to paid had an immediate affect on rankings since these are not shared between free and paid apps (i.e. I went back to my previous paid rankings). However, Astro Noughts did begin to rise up the paid charts in a few places…

Since putting the App back to paid, I’ve seen a total of 4 sales (across 2 days). If we say on average that during the free promotion I had 766 downloads per day and I’m now seeing 2 downloads per day (on average), that puts my conversion rate at about 0.26%.

Here’s the resulting revenue chart for the entire life of Astro Noughts…

and the related download chart…

From that you can extrapolate fun facts such as, for Astro Noughts, each download is currently worth 0.5p.

You may look at the above as a bit of a failure. I, however, see this as a partial success. Here’s why…

• An additional 2,299 people, from around the world, have played Astro Noughts
• For a brief period, Astro Noughts was higher than Angry Birds HD Free in the Top Free Apps in France.
• I have 4 additional paid sales that I may not have otherwise had
• I got to enjoy a few days of chart craziness

As an aside, Astro Noughts v1.3 has been submitted to Apple with Game Center support and a few minor fixes. If you feel compelled, you can buy Astro Noughts for $0.99 (59p) here.

Does this match your findings? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. As for me, I’m taking my £12 and moving to France.

Rocket Santa has been in the App store for nearly 1 month now so I thought it would be nice to share the sales figures with you. Rocket Santa is listed in the UK and US stores only and i’ve converted all values to dollars to make it easier to digest.

Rocket Santa units sold

Rocket Santa dollars made

Lets take a look at some promotional efforts and their impact on the graphs.

The Great App Bake Off 2009

Gavin Bowman of Retro Dreamer runs an annual App baking contest. I decided to enter this year and submitted my developer entry on 19th December (I also acted as a sponsor for the competition, offering promotional codes for Star Fusion and Rocket Santa as prizes). Gavin’s App Bake Off has been picked up by many of the larger iPhone sites so this may have had a positive impact on my sales figures – its hard to tell. Either way its a great idea and you still have time to enter with an App cake of your own.

Notcot

On 16th December Rocket Santa appeared on the front page of notcot.org. This resulted in a spike of 8 sales that day which accounts for the surge in the week commencing 14th December. More importantly though, it was great to see Rocket Santa on the site since I religiously visit Notcot every day for inspiration.

Mundue Holiday promotion

Matt Martel of Mundue.net very generously offered a golden opportunity to around 25 iPhone developers. He ran rotating advertisements in his excellent game reMovem at zero cost to the developers. Adverts for Rocket Santa began running on 23rd December and resulted in 1,238 clicks over the holiday period. Unfortunately I have seen no uplift in purchases through this. Perhaps my app store page is not compelling enough, perhaps people don’t want a Christmas themed app, perhaps Rocket Santa does not look like that great a game :-) who knows. Even so, i’m very appreciative of Matts efforts and hope that we can work on similar promotional efforts in the future.

So 1 month after launch Rocket Santa sold 27 units and, after Apple’s 30% cut, made a total of $18.90. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions from that.

I feel like my first two games have been great learning experiences but also very simple in terms of gameplay. I’ve already started working on my third game which promises to be more complex and i’m hoping to draw on my experiences from Star Fusion and Rocket Santa to make it as good as it can be.

I decided to conduct an experiment, or promotion if you will, dropping the price of Star Fusion from 59p to Free for just one week. Here’s what happened (the pretty graphs are further down the page)…

Sunday 11th October – Star Fusion goes Free

At around 9pm on Sunday I began the promotion, making Star Fusion Free in the two countries it was listed in (UK and US). I also updated the description in the App store to say “*** Star Fusion is Free for 1 week only ***” in the hope of enticing people with the mention of a sale. The only other promotion I did was a quick tweet to promote the price drop.

Monday 12th October – Downloads

Checking the sales data in iTunes, Star Fusion had received 411 downloads in the space of 12 hours. Fantastic, this was better than I had hoped and I think it demonstrates the distribution power of the iPhone platform.

Another surprise was an update from Google alerts notifying me that people had begun discussing the game in forums. Whilst the game was not initially seen in the best light, seemingly related to the “cartoony” graphics more than anything, I did get some great feedback.

At the request of one Italian user on a forum, I launched Star Fusion in all countries. I had previously avoided this when the app was 59p due to the various complicated tax laws. All in all, the first day was positive and provided some really useful feedback for future patches.

Tuesday 13th October – Top 100 lists

On Tuesday things began to get really interesting. Another 586 downloads and Star Fusion began appearing in Top 100 lists. Not for the major categories, but for the sub-categories such as Arcade Games and Family Games. It was really exciting watching Star Fusion rise up the lists as each hour passed.

(Red = US Family Games, Green = UK Family Games, Blue = Portugal Family Games, Black = Portugal Arcade Games)

Graph showing Star Fusion in Top 100 rankings (courtesy of MajicRank)

Wednesday 14th October – Downloads begin to slow

On wednesday, sales data for the previous day showed the downloads slowing to 183. By this point Star Fusion had stopped rising up the majority of the Top 100 lists as well. One nice surprise was portugal where Star Fusion was up to 33 in family games and 82 in arcade games. In addition to this, a few nice reviews were posted in the US App store with one user commenting that Star Fusion is an “Interesting game, fun and replayable” and that “The game defies classification…”.

Thursday 15th October – Decline in downloads

On Thursday the number of downloads had declined to just 22. However, the volume of downloads over the previous few days had also brought with them a number of ratings in the App store. Ratings in the US App store showed mixed reaction with a large portion of 1 and 2 star reviews but also a reasonable amount of 3 star and even some 5 star reviews. My average rating had dropped from 4 1/2 stars to 2 stars in a matter of days.

US ratings for Star Fusion

Friday 16th October -> Sunday 18th October – Nice while it lasted

Between Friday and Sunday the number of downloads dipped to around 5 per day and Star Fusion had pretty much dropped out of all top 100 listings.

Monday 19th October – Star Fusion back to 59p

On Monday 19th October the promotion ended and I put Star Fusion back to its original price of 59p.

Tuesday 20th October – 0 sales

No real surprises here. Star Fusion is no longer free and people are unwilling/unable to pay 59p to try it. Here’s a graph showing the sum of the number of downloads (in all countries) across the promotion period.

Star Fusion Downloads during October Free promotion

A note on countries

Throughout the promotional period, the majority of downloads came from the US and UK (as expected). In fact the US represented 70% of the total sales. Here’s a graph showing the distribution of sales across the countries with the highest volume.

Distribution of sales across all countries

Conclusion

So what has this proved? Well for a start it’s been a really interesting experience. It’s given me the opportunity to get Star Fusion into the hands of more gamers than I was able to previously. Across the entire promotional period, Star Fusion was downloaded 1,291 times.

The comments I’ve received in forums and through App store reviews provides invaluable feedback from real users that will form a great basis for future updates. It was also fun playing around with some real data with a decent volume to it.

Unfortunately with the good also comes the bad. When the promotional period ended and the price returned to 59p I received no new sales. In addition to this my overall rating in the US has dropped from 4 1/2 stars to 2 stars.

So here’s my take. People love Sales, getting something for a reduced price can make all the difference in the buyers mind. Making your app free obviously means more people will play it but it also opens your App to abuse via ratings. I think it’s convinced me to increase the price of my next game to allow me room to have a sale without making my App free. Overall it was really great experience though and I hope it provides other developers with some useful data.

So, a total of seven people have bought Star Fusion and ten people have used a promo code to download the game for free. Clearly I have some work to do in order to increase the number of sales. I have to say that even though these sales are fairly dire, the thought of 17 people playing Star Fusion is an incredible feeling.

Promotion

I’ve only really scratched the surface when it comes to promotion but I have put in some effort. Here’s a list of the activities so far…

1. 26th July: Two promotional codes published on twitter to celebrate the launch of Star Fusion
2. 27th July: Review request sent to 148Apps along with a promotional code
3. 27th July: Promotional Post created on iPhone Dev SDK forums along with 4 promotional codes
4. 27th July: Review request sent to Touch Arcade along with a  promotional code
5. 27th July: Two more promotional codes published on twitter
6. 27th July: Review request sent to TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) but didn’t include a promotional code this time
7. 30th July: Added Star Fusion to game list on cocos2d for iphone website along with 4 promotional codes
8. 30th July: Review request sent to AppVee along with a promotional code
9. 30th July: Review request sent to Touch Reviews along with a promotional code

So what worked? Well, I published 16 promotional codes and from the download statistics above only 10 have been used. I’ve published 8 codes to forums, 4 to twitter, and 4 to individuals (review sites). The only constructive comment i’ve had back has been via the iPhone Dev SDK forum. It’s a little early to tell but I think at this stage it’s fair to say that posting to forums gives the best response. None of the review sites have got back to me yet.

Reception & Feedback

I’ve had a few positive user reviews on the iPhone App Store . One of the comments was particularly useful since it offered some constructive criticism. Obviously i’ve shown the game to as many people as possible so i’ve had feedback there too. General consensus seems to be that the game is enjoyable but lacks replay value. I’ve also had some negative comments regarding the graphics and science behind the story.

Next Steps

I’ve listened to what people are saying and i’m currently working on a Free update for the game (I’ll write a separate post about this soon). My aim is to add some more depth as well as refining some of the existing gameplay elements. I’ll also be adding some more polish to the graphics. It’s certainly been an enjoyable experience so far and i’m feeling positive about the steps I can take to increase sales. Money is only one aspect of creating games though and I think the biggest draw for me is the idea that one day i’d see someone I don’t know playing one of my games. How great would that be!

Thanks for reading this post. Here are some promotional codes to download Star Fusion for free from iTunes. Enjoy!

49KMPWAHJ64X

7646MLNRE3EJ

A6RKH7YEEL73

KXJAAFKKNE4P

Star Fusion App Store Submission

Some great news today. Star Fusion has been submitted to the iPhone App Store for approval. Providing Apple do not find any glaring errors, it should be available to buy within the next week or so.

I’ll get a trailer up as soon as I can and i’ll also put some promotional material on the official Star Fusion page which can be found here.

It’s certainly been a journey to get this far. I started learning iPhone development a little under 4 months ago with no knowledge of the platform, armed with just a book! (Beginning iPhone Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche). I came up with the idea for Star Fusion 1 month ago so development on this game has been pretty fast. Obviously the journey doesn’t end here and i’m looking forward to the next stages (Promotion, Game updates, and new ideas).