Business Insights No 2. | December 2023 | Indie Developer Projects Insight
Released on Tuesday January 9th in 2024 by Simon Braun
II. Marketing Insights
Looking back at my ten years of experience, I remember being somehow anxious about being visible and outspoken about my apps. Learning programming on my own, always made me wonder, if I can stand up to the expectations of my users and the general public. I wanted to play it safe and didn’t know how to present my products confidently. – So, if you wonder how to make marketing at all? First get yourself in a position to feel confident about yourself and your products. For me it was helpful to reach out to indie developers and share my experience, to become braver and start testing some marketing ideas. The iOS community is very kind and helpful in general, give it a try.
My main goals with marketing
Gain visibilityReach potential customers
Find suitable users
Grow following
Rank up my website
Build up relationships with press and influential people
Getting mentioned in the press and winning awards
Social Media Report
Blog/RSS (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) 3 Posts +1
Mastodon (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) 99 Posts +12 | 81 Followers +9
Instagram (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) 13 Posts +1 | 62 Followers +5
Newsletter (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)4 Posts +3 | 8 Followers +5 | 0 Business Insider+0
Producthunt (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) 4 Followers +1 | 3 Upvotes Auricula +1
Linkedin (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) 1 Posts +0 | 10 Followers +2
Publications, Appearances and Testimonials
2021 January | Filmlog
“Track your watched and unwatched movies with Filmlog for iPhone“
→iMore (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
2020 December | Auricula
„Intervalle hören & üben mit der App AURICULA // Gehörbildung Erklärung mit Merkhilfen“ (German)
→Youtube (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
Did I miss something? Please let me know: feedback@simonbraun.eu (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
Localization
To make your apps accessible to people the apps need to be in their language. Not everybody is speaking or understanding your language in this world and most are likely to prefer to use an app that is in their native language, date and number format.
Of course it is not only the translation of strings but also making all assets and AppStore material available in all languages, so I decided to slowly add languages throughout the years.
Auricula supports 9 languages: German, English, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Spanish, Italian as well as traditional and simplified Chinese
Filmlog supports 15 languages: Arabic, German, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, traditional and simplified Chinese as well as Turkish
Puinte.org supports 2 languages: German, English
Infolge.org supports 1 languages: German
TOTM – Tip of the month
I highly recommend making an email address available in your app, so that users can reach out to you. I personally do have a short note in the mail draft, that all mails are read, but not answered regularly. This helps to set expectations, but now on to the more important part.
Getting in touch
It may feel like work to you, to answer mails from your users, but keep in mind: there is a person that obviously is using your app and is taking the time to reach out to you. This is perfect for you:
Now you can learn about the problems users encounter or what they love about your app (Don’t get fooled, this is no general knowledge about your app or users, but still interesting).
Use the chance to be helpful, make it obvious that there is a real person behind this app – I also write about struggles, try to keep the conversation open and never promise anything.
If the users replies and thanks you for your help, ask them for their support as well and tell them how they can support your app – I normally ask for AppStore reviews, if they want to support me.
You are looking for testers? Offer them a spot in your apps Testflight release.
Personal connections are strong and I try to keep kind users of my apps happy, because I strongly believe in word of mouth effects. Maybe you should try to engage with your users wherever you can as well.
III. Sales Insights
Numbers are in EURO for last month of December 2023 and are provided for released projects.
AURICULA – Monthly summary
It always is confusing, whenever there are bulk downloads of an app. This time someone in Taiwan just downloaded 2,000 copies of Auricula in the Educational Program – no sales yet. Maybe the free version is useful enough!?
FILMLOG – Monthly summary
The ongoing development of Filmlog 3.0.0 for many months is still wearing on the current version in the AppStore, even if I got some very positive user feedback in December. Sales are not going too well, but the discount for Black Friday did still help in December.
Downloads
Filmlog 419 → 521 Installs | +24% | 29% via SearchAds
Auricula 462 → 465 (+2,000 Educational) Installs | +1% | 27% via SearchAds
Some more Filmlog installs in December, very nice. – Steady regular downloads for Auricula, if the 2,000 downloads from the Educational Program are subtracted.
Sales (net revenue)
Filmlog 36.72€ → 57.80€ | +57%
Auricula 68.85€ → 38.57€ | -44%
Overall 105.57€ → 96.39€ |-9%
Somehow Filmlog and Auricula just swapped their net revenue – I do not understand everything or find reasons for such dynamics. Overall sales are 10% down. I find sales numbers to fluctuate quite a bit every month.
Paid user ratio (all time)
Filmlog not available yet
Auricula 80% → 87% Free | 20% → 13% Pro (iOS and iPadOS only)
Insights with TelemetryDeck (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)* keep being very interesting. Nearing 10% for the paid user ratio is what I somehow expected. Happy to keep converting every tenth user into an Auricula Pro customer.
Sessions (AppStore Analytics / opt-in)
Filmlog 4,302 → 4,378 | +2%
Auricula 871 → 744 | -15%
High session numbers for Filmlog are quite important and keep rising continuosly. They should not be compared directly to the in contrast short usage/learning period of Auricula, which is visible in number of sessions.
SearchAds
Filmlog 25€ spend – Average CPI 0.17€ – 149 Installs | +6
Auricula 25€ spend – Average CPI 0.19€ – 125 Installs | +5
I keep the spending capped at 25€ – because I want to add an additional stream of possible new users, but do not want to pay high CPIs nor too much of my monthly sales income.
Monthly costs
I try to keep monthly costs very low, but looking out for growth enablers. I kept investing some time and money into ASO via appfigures. December is always a little slow, many things on the plate at this time of the year.
Hosting 9.41€ – Legacy plan (112€ yearly)Domains ?€ (Will be added as an entry in “Other costs”)
Public work phone 10€ – fraenk
GitTowerLicenseexpires April 18th 2024
RevenueCat Free plan – not in use yet (will be part of Filmlog 3.0.0)
TelemetryDeck Free plan – for now (719/100,000 monthly signals)
appfigures 20.64€ – Monitor (50% blackfriday discount for 12 months)
Mastodon Instance Support 1.19€ (via Patreon)
Other costs
To complete the insight other costs are added here.
2024
–
2023
Company re-definition 30€ – german company paper work
Thank you for reading my newsletter! Until next month and stay safe, Simon
If you want to become a testimonial for the newsletter or if you have questions, suggestions or critique, please write me: feedback@simonbraun.eu (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
Simon Braun – Website (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) / Mastodon (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
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