SmashCast for Podcasts - A developers tale...


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Context: I posted this privately originally but am reposting here at the suggestion of some friends who thought others might find this interesting.

In the spirit of the rant below I figure I should post the store link as well in case you're interested:


 

 

Good news: ?30.26! We broke the ?30 in sales barrier today!

Bad news / Rant: The developer license costs ?35 per year and we've had the app listed for 2 years worth of billing.

We started writing SmashCast as an experiment, to learn and because we though getting in early to the Windows Store would be a good way to gain some visibility and experience an app ecosystem from the ground up.

We never expected to make mountains of cash (its a podcast player for goodness sake), but I had thought we'd at least break even on the development costs.

 

I'll take on some of the 'blame' here; having never created an app before we made some mistakes; some of which I'll put at Microsofts door though.

For one thing we didn't realise the importance of a name (or SEO in general) in the store, I honestly thought the metadata we put in at submission time would weigh more heavily and was really worried about those 6 tags we could use (podcast, podcasts, vodcasts, crikey I've used half of them!).

Our biggest boost (to search results), came about when I added 'for podcasts' to the end of the name shown in the store. The search engine in the store being far more focussed on app names than anything else. Which is why the Whitehouse Podcasts app features above ours in a search for 'podcasts' (assumption on my part, but seems most logical).

 

We (I) also submitted some bad builds; completely my own fault, but there were race conditions in initialisation code that I struggled to debug and I got myself into a state where if it ran without crashing 5 times in a row then maybe the bug was dead??

This resulted in some negative reviews - particularly from Americans - that actually hurt emotionally far more than I'd care to admit (I've put a lot of love into building this app).

I'd have been fine with the negative reviews too if the store had some way of timing them out as new releases are approved. As it stands there are reviews against SmashCast in the American store from release 5 or 6 where we had the aforementioned bad builds; we're on release 27 now, the app doesn't look or function anything like it did back then, but we're still carrying that baggage. That sucks frankly.

I'd like some form of 'right to reply' to reviews as well from a developer perspective, a few comments were just ignorance and whilst I'll happily take on the need for a more obvious UI, I could have helped them out with just an ability to send a private email or something... but I appreciate that could cause all sorts of issues itself.

 

In fact some of my best experiences of building SmashCast have been the customer interactions that have come in to the 'support email'; about 5 people have bothered to ask for assistance or make feature suggestions.

One guy basically said, 'Let me know when this supports feature x as I'm really interested', having then spent time developing and debugging a heck of a feature it was really nice when I sent him a note saying it was available and I could see his purchase the next day (watching the blips on the purchase graph is a hobby).

 

In fact that's something I never expected; I work all day selling big box software to people and obviously helping to make a sale at work is great. But the first tab I open when I sit down at my PC each morning is the store analytics tab; eager to see if there's a new rating or review, or heaven forfend a new purchase! And every few weeks there's something new, and I'll be nicely chuffed that day (unless its a purchase reversal - I wouldn't mind those either but nobody ever says why!).

I guess building something yourself and putting it out there for other people to (hopefully) enjoy just tickles a different bone than my cynical corporate day job.

 

So yes, I'm annoyed we aren't making our ?35 per year back, but it's been an interesting experience and something I'm glad to have done.

I'm applying some of the lessons learned to another app for the store, this time a freebie, so no expectations around it - its work oriented so I won't be ranting about that as much as I have with SmashCast.

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  • 7 months later...

So, I'd like to write quick follow up to this post to give a bit of an update on how we're getting on.

 

First an acknowledgement that the prior post was written in a more emotional state than I perhaps would have liked. Apologies if it felt overly whiny.

 

So where do we stand 8 months on from my previous post?

Well we're currently tracking at : ?47.39 for purchases which is a nice step up on where I thought we would be, but getting here has involved yet more learning that I thought would be good to share,

 

Smashcast as it went on to the Windows Store was a 99p app with a free trial period. I felt that this was in everyone's best interests. However the download rates were dreadful, conversion was poor and you end up with ranty posts like the one above.

Mid way through this year we switched over to a 'free with ads' model. In addition we offered an in-app purchase at 99p to remove the ads if people didn't like them.

Download rates doubled.

 

That's pretty significant, and something that we hadn't really factored originally - the fact that the app wasn't out right 'free' but merely had a free trial was enough to deter people from even trying Smashcast.

With the new approach we get more people actually into the app and trying it out before they make a decision on continued use. Since doing this we've had a lot more people using the in-app purchase to buy the app than had done previously.

On reflection this seems obvious and is likely how I unthinkingly use other app stores, but until you've been on this side of it, the significance didn't register.

And don't get me wrong, I still love our users who download and don't buy with the in-app purchase - because we're still getting a residual income from them now through ad displays.

 

Obviously during this time we've pushed a bunch more features and functions into the app as well so perhaps some of those converts would have come anyway, but I doubt it, they never saw the original features so how would they see new ones?

 

There are still things I would like to see from the Store though, replies to reviews is still something that needs addressing, and timing out displayed reviews after x time or y updates would be helpful too.

I'd also like some way to offer incentives for people to rate/review the app - a promotion of sorts where you either pay the 99p in-app purchase price or leave a rating & review would be interesting (minimum 25 word review, must have more than 30 mins active time in the app to qualify, something like that). Since going with the ads model the ratings and reviews we were getting have dropped to zero despite now getting more downloads and conversions.

 

So overall I'm happy with how things have gone, obviously they could be better, but as I said in the beginning, it's a learning experience.

 

Now, with all of that said, I was spurred to update this by this news item: https://www.neowin.net/news/google-removes-another-privacy-related-app-from-the-play-store

Whilst I appreciate it is a different app type and on a different app store, I don't see how this could ever make sense:

> The developers of the app, Disconnect, a startup based out of San Francisco, spent a year and $300,000 to build the app. During its short life in the Play store, it was downloaded over 5,000 times.

 

The statement 'over 5000' times makes it sound like a lot - it's not. Smashcast has been downloaded close to 1000 times (982 at the time of writing); number of downloads is has little to no bearing on payback in an app-store. I don't see how $300K was ever a good investment.

 

All food for thought I guess.

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