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

1. Gain visibility

2. Reach potential customers

3. Find suitable users

4. Grow following

5. Rank up my website

6. Build up relationships with press and influential people

7. Getting mentioned in the press and winning awards

Social Media Report

Blog/RSS (Opens in a new window) 3 Posts +1
Mastodon (Opens in a new window) 99 Posts +12 | 81 Followers +9
Instagram (Opens in a new window) 13 Posts +1 | 62 Followers +5
Newsletter (Opens in a new window)4 Posts +3 | 8 Followers +5 | 0 Business Insider+0
Producthunt (Opens in a new window) 4 Followers +1 | 3 Upvotes Auricula +1
Linkedin (Opens in a new window) 1 Posts +0 | 10 Followers +2

Publications, Appearances and Testimonials

2021 January | Filmlog
“Track your watched and unwatched movies with Filmlog for iPhone“
→iMore (Opens in a new window)

2020 December | Auricula
„Intervalle hören & üben mit der App AURICULA // Gehörbildung Erklärung mit Merkhilfen“ (German)
→Youtube (Opens in a new window)

Did I miss something? Please let me know: feedback@simonbraun.eu (Opens in a new window)

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 (Opens in a new window)* 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 (Opens in a new window)

Simon Braun – Website (Opens in a new window) / Mastodon (Opens in a new window)

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