PodTrapper developer spills the beans on making his hobby pay.
Marcus Watkins isn't a multi-millionaire. He's not buying speedboats or snorting caviar off the bellies of supermodels. Or if he is, he kept quiet about it during his session at the BlackBerry Developer Conference today.
However, Watkins is still a successful BlackBerry developer, since the app he developed in his basement in his spare time – podcast aggregation app PodTrapper – is averaging 18-19 sales a day at a $9.99 price point.
He outlined some of the key lessons he's learned since launching the app, which can be summarised as follows:
Don't get hung up on the latest handsets
Watkins' figures show that there are still plenty of old BlackBerry handsets still in use, such as the Curve 8300 and Pearl. What's more, nearly 30% of PodTrapper users are on BlackBerry OS 4.5 or lower, leading him to design his app for 4.2. “It was a trade-off that I wanted to make to keep the user base high.”
Substance over style? Nope.
Watkins happily admitted that PodTrapper 1.0 looked pretty rubbish. “I am not a graphics designer – I can't even pick out clothes that match!” The first version of the app was plain, using built-in widgets and a dodgy text font.
“It just wasn't a professional-looking application,” he said. “It looked amateurish. There is no amount of technical knowledge behind the scenes that overcomes that 'it slides when it comes on the screen' thing.”
How did he rectify this for version 2.0? By copying the BlackBerry App World client to get a more professional and BlackBerry-esque look and feel. “It set me apart, and made it a professional app. Even though it was still me working in my basement, it didn't look like that.”
Think hard about pricing
PodTrapper costs a one-off fee of $9.99, although a free trial is available before users are asked to sign up. Initial reviews suggested this might actualy be lower than Watkins could have charged, although his candid response when asked about why he didn't whack the price up was this: “I had a good thing going and didn't want to screw it up”.
However, PodTrapper was launched when a one-off fee was the most realistic way to charge for an app. Watkins said he's excited about Research In Motion's announcement today of an easier way to put advertising in BlackBerry apps, and plans to investigate it.
Don't put all your retail eggs in one basket
Watkins started out selling PodTrapper through Handango. “It was the only store I'd heard of, and I stupidly assumed they'd be the best,” he said. “They turnd out not to be.” The store's 50% royalty for small developers, minus promotions, meant he was taking home an average of 45% per sale, yet Watkins said he wasn't getting the exposure he'd hoped for.
“I was off posting in forums and linking back to my site for people to find out about the app, and then I'd have to redirect the over to Handango to pay for it, and lose 50% of the money,” he said. Tiring of this, he turned to direct sales on his own site, using PayPal to take payments and keeping 95% of the proceeds.
However, he continued to investigate stores, selling through MobiHand and MobiReach, which Watkins said brought the first big spike in sales after popular BlackBerry blog CrackBerry noticed the app and wrote about it.
BlackBerry App World is important
And then in April this year came the official BlackBerry App World “Getting into the App World has been x3 browsing and finding my app,” said Watkins. “That would now be my primary goal, but the other stores would drum up more traffic and get mentioned on sites like CrackBerry.”
More than half of PodTrapper's sales are still direct though, with around a quarter coming from the App World, and a quarter from MobiHand. Interestingly, he said he gets two to three emalis a week from people wanting another way to pay for PodTrapper than the PayPal option in the App World.
Marketing is everything
It's easy for small developers to focus on development rather than marketing, but Watkins advises against this. “You have to get the word out,” he said. “It's a lot of work – I spend countless hours emailing random bloggers and tech writers. But it is critical.”
He also said press releases have been important, although for reasons that should make many journalists blush. “I always wondered why companies wrote press releases saying how wonderful they are, but it turns out that those are used by a lot of people writing about your app,” said Watkins.
“A lot of people do due diligence, download it and write up their impressions of it, but a lot more will just look at data you have and copy and paste it into their story. So press releases are great for that.”
Watkins also pointed out that even seemingly non-newsworthy events can generate sales. When he released version 2.1 of PodTrapper, he told a couple of bloggers, who wrote about it, and sales jumped 7x for the next two weeks.
Talk to your users
Every app that Watkins makes has an 'Email the developer' option in the menu, and he spends 30-45 minutes a night answering the resulting emails.
“If I could stress one thing, it's keeping my users in the loop and explaining to them why I can't do things, or why bugs are in there, or fixing those bugs in a reasonable timeframe,” he said.
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