As I wrote almost two years ago, back then I decided to try developing a mobile app. In that post I already mentioned that I wanted to see if people would buy the app without me advertising it, and how it seemed from the start it's not happening. I'll now briefly look back at what happened after writing that post.

My huge marketing efforts

A couple of weeks after I released the app I decided to write a public LinkedIn post about it. I posted a direct link to the app in the post comments, but also mentioned that it's a paid app and I don't expect any one of my friends to buy it. (Call it humility or just stupidity.) That was the only time I marketed the app in any way outside of mentioning it in some face-to-face conversations.

Show me the money!

After the app had been up for almost a year, my Apple Developer membership expired as I chose to not renew it — for reasons that'll become obvious very soon. This meant the app got hidden in App Store, and could not be purchased anymore. It also meant people who had actually bought it could no longer download it, e.g. when getting a new phone, which I find very unfortunate and am sorry about.

I had emptied an old bank account that I don't really use anymore, and directed everything Apple paid me to that account so I could keep track of my new fortunes easily. It was quite handy, so I didn't have to check the Apple Developer site for statistics about my sales. I got monthly financial report emails from Apple whenever they had paid me something so this wasn't a big deal, though.

Before I pulled the plug, Apple had paid me... 5.52 € in total.

So, with a unit price of 0.99 €/$0.99 etc. (the price being country-specific) of which Apple takes their cut that means 7 – or possibly 6 – purchases. And as the Apple Developer membership costs 99 € annually, I was not even remotely close to breaking even.

My attitude towards marketing

Why didn't I market the app more, then? Well, I have this naive idea that great products sell themselves. But of course in practice it's the product's reputation that sells it — and there cannot be a reputation if no one even knows about the product. So, to get raving reviews or positive word of mouth, there must be some kind of an initial push to get the ball rolling. And I guess it's fair to say that my LinkedIn post wasn't really one.

The much harder obstacle to marketing I have is that to sell something I'd have to believe it's worth its price, and also believe everyone agrees with that. I of course did my best to create a quality app and to set a price that I didn't think was too expensive. And to be honest I do believe I got that right.

And yet it's hard to tell my friends (and my other LinkedIn connections) they should buy it.

I'm not even sure why that is. It might be that I've seen so much advertising online, often of products that I couldn't care less about, that I don't want to add to the noise. Or it might be that it's just really hard to "grade" one's own work in general, and that's why it'd be easier if someone else somehow validated its quality and sang its praises.

In a way, the same goes for these blog posts as well. Even though there's a reason why I don't have comments enabled or collect any reading statistics, I've had trouble finding motivation to write anything recently. Although partly it's because I can't really write about the things I encounter in my customer projects daily, partly it's also because I'm not sure if there's any value in these for anyone.

For now I think I'll just write something whenever I feel like it, and make no promises about the cadence nor the quality. And I definitely won't be starting a product company any time soon.