Look What the Stork Dropped: A Year in the App Store

The first year being a developer in the App store has been a fun and educational experience. First off, it was probably only fun because I am not relying on income from my app to support my family. I have a day job that I like and don't plan on leaving to become a full-time developer. It is a hobby, the result of late nights and lunch hours, but I take great pride in my app Stork Drop. Also, I have never had any unrealistic expectations about becoming an overnight millionaire. I do, however, strongly believe that I created a software product of value that could be sold.

The App Store Is The Revolution, Not the iPhone
If I might digress, I believe the App Store is a revolution unto itself. I have studied business and entrepreneurship and never has the barrier of entry to a market been so low where the stakes were so high. Is there any doubt that competition in the App Store is so fierce? Apple has created a platform, environment and level playing field for designers, programmers and marketers to compete against each other solely on the merit and implementation of their ideas.

The App Store may be the first instance of an actual Global Marketplace. Where else could a developer in the Midwest United States wake up and find out that, while he rocking a crying baby to sleep at 3:30 in the morning, he sold his product in 11 countries (two of which he has never heard of and six of which he doesn't even know what their currency is). As far as I'm concerned, the App Store has rewritten all the rules of entrepreneurship.

A Brief History of Stork Drop
The idea for Stork Drop was conceived when I tried to find a baby naming app in the App Store when my wife was pregnant. There were plenty of apps, but they were all boring lists. None of then took advantage of the capabilities of the iPhone...or were any fun. After a brainstorming session with my 3-year old, Stork Drop was conceived. Yes, that's a pregnancy joke.

When I first starting out to work on a baby naming app for the iPhone, my wife was in her second trimester. By the time it was approved in the App Store, Oscar was two months old. During the first six moths, Stork Drop was a Paid app, with the price ranging from $.99 to $2.99 to coincide with random promotions. After fighting a saturated market with many free, albeit inferior, offerings, I moved to two versions: Stork Drop Free with advertising and Stork Drop Premium, ad-free at $2.99. Here is more detailed post about going Free.

Going Ga-Ga for Google
After a month shuffling AdMob, Greystripe and Mobclix, I was ecstatic when I was contacted by Google (yes, someone actually called me) and invited to participate in the AdSense for Mobile Content Beta. My traffic was significantly lower than they required, but I had an offering with a very lucrative demographic that they were anxious to get some ads in front of.

The great thing about Google ads is that they are served from keywords you set. This way the ads are targeted and you don't end up with random ad spam (e.g. Get Ripped Quick, Loose Weight Today, Meet Local Singles) which had been defacing my app with the other networks. Now the ads being served were all relevant to parents and babies...that meant clicks.

Blah, Blah, Blah Get to the Income
Bottom line, I made twice as much the first week from AdSense than I did in two months from the other ad networks. The page eCPM fluctuates dramatically from day to day, but on a weekly basis the income is pretty consistent. There are a couple of nice spikes that seem to coincide with holidays.

Through some rudimentary analytics I implemented with Google App Engine, it was very clear sales of Stork Drop Premium did not correlate to price changes or Stork Drop Free downloads. The conversion rate of Free to Premium was 0.2%. My best guess is that some people probably just can not stand in app advertising or they saw the Premium version in the App Store first.

Regardless of our pricing strategy or offering, we are proud to say that we have been a fixture in the top 10 ranked baby naming app in the store. This translates to between 100-200 downloads of the free version a day. Overall, we have cracked the 100,000 download mark. And just so all you game developers don't feel like your the only ones getting screwed, there is cracked version of the Stork Drop Premium circulating the Internet. Either software piracy can not just be attributed to teenage hackers or those teenage hackers don't know when to pull out. Of course, that assumes that they're getting laid.

Enough Already, How Much Did You Make?
Here is plot of the income generated from Stork Drop Free (red) and Stork Drop Premium (blue) since the implementation of AdSense. The Y-axis has been purposefully removed but it should be apparent that I am not one of the overnight millionaires you have begrudgingly read about. The Google AdSense Beta program explicitly forbids disclosing the financial details, and the last thing I want to do is get on their bad side. Its not the AdSense income I'm worried about losing; its that Google knows so much about me by now and the last thing I want is my kids finding out that I made an "independent" film back in college.




In Midwest, suburban father terms, I made enough income to make half a year of car payments on a Toyota Sienna minivan and take my family on a nice Disney World Vacation without sweating profusely over paying $20.00 for a 8x10" of my daughter and Cinderella (despite the fact I took the same picture with my digital camera).

The Future
I am optimistic about the future of App development, especially for those of us "second shift" developers. For the most part, all it costs me is time, and that's time that I probably would have just been sleeping anyway. As a rule, I have never taken time away that could be spend with my family to work on any app. I have however, extensively involved them in brainstorming and beta testing. BabyBinks has just recently released a new app, Elephonics, that I developed alongside my 4-year old daughter to help develop early reading skills. Her input was invaluable as I remember she said in response to the prototype, "It's not very fun".

As far as Stork Drop is concerned, I have a major upgrade in the works that will transform it from a just a baby naming app to a complete pregnancy tracking app. It's the most requested feature from customers and it will give me a chance to try out the In-App-Purchasing model.

Of course, just like a few other successful apps out there, I have also been busy shopping around a script for "Stork Drop: The Movie". The bad news is that my old director friend from college has picked up the option on it. The good news is that the nudity is very tasteful.

Stork Drop is Now Free

Today, we are announcing that Stork Drop is now a free download for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  We appreciate the thousands of users who downloaded the paid version, but we hope this new ad-supported version will ensure the long term development and support of Stork Drop.

A Brief History of Stork Drop
The idea for Stork Drop was conceived when I tried to find a baby naming app in the App Store when my wife was pregnant.  There were plenty of apps, but they were all boring lists.  None of then took advantage of the capabilities of the iPhone...or were any fun.

After a brainstorming session with my 3-year old, Stork Drop was conceived, designed and developed.  Originally priced at $2.99 with various sales and free days, we were proud to say that we have been a fixture as the 12th ranked baby naming app in the store.

Why Ads?  Why now?
The best part of creating Stork Drop has been all the positive reviews and feedback we've received from our uses.  Ok, the revenue has been nice too, but so far it has all gone into creating and containing shit (via baby formula and diapers).

Since the initial version of Stork Drop, our aspirations have grown.  We want to build upon and expand the community that has embraced BabyBinks and continue to develop great apps for families.  The first important step is to get Stork Drop on as many iPhones as possible.

Putting the multi-core processors on our MacPro to work, we deduced this formula:

(Stork Drop Paid * a few sales per day) = 
(Stork Drop Free * .0000001/per ad)

This is based on analytics from a couple of "free" days that we had in which our number of downloads increased over 1000x.  You can run the numbers yourself, but the math works.  The bottom line financially is that we can give away Stork Drop for free and make sure that our shit production and collection expenses are covered.


What to Expect When You're Expecting (Ads)
We put a lot of time and consideration into placing and designing the ad experience in Stork Drop.  First and foremost, we did not want the ads to detract from any of the functionality, usability, or look-and-feel of the app.  After all, if the ads prevent the app from being fun, no one will download it.

We've partnered with 2 advertising providers, Greystripe and Mobclix to try and create a relevant and minimally obtrusive advertising experience for our users. Here are the two types of ads you'll see: the speech bubble banner ad and a full page interstitial ad.

Speech Bubble Banner Ads

Normally, the bird does all the talking in our app, but now our Stork has something to say.  He wants to let you know about products you might want to purchase.  A screen shot of Stork Drop Premium (the ad free version) is also shown.  As you can see, it doesn't really detract from the screen.

     

Full-Page Interstitial
The full page interstitial ads are programmed to show every 3 minutes in-between screens.  So if you switch from Favorites to Snoop, and its been 3 minutes, you will be presented with an ad.  These ads are provided by Greystripe, who, so-far, seem to have ads for things you might actually be interested in (as opposed to Free Ringtones and Meet Sexy Singles that are often seen in other apps).  Here is an ad for the Tim Burton's new Alice in Wonderland Movie.

     

As in any ad, if you click on it, you will be presented with more information and the option to be redirected to a web site or the App Store.

Current Users
If you purchased Stork Drop before this update, you WILL NEVER SEE ANY ADS.  It has been programmed directly into the app.  If for some reason you still see ads, email us and we will instruct you how to disable them.

We hope that making Stork Drop a free download proves to be beneficial for both our users and for BabyBinks. Remember that the App Store is still very young. In fact, it is just entering its "Terrible Two's" stage. And, as any parent will tell you, this is the time when you start to figure out what works and doesn't work.

Unlike my kids, positioning ourselves in the App Store might take more than bribes with M&M's.

In the App Store: 6 Months with Stork Drop

Our baby naming application, Stork Drop, has found a nice little niche in the baby names reference category of the App Store. Unfortunately, "niche" could easily be replaced with "stagnant".

Believe Me I Tried

I am not one the developers who is idly waiting for my retirement check from Apple, I have been actively marketing Stork Drop. I continually email app review sites, parenting blogs, parenting networks to request an app review.  I've tried to be active in forums, blogging, twitter'ing, Facebook'ing. Everything short of sexting. I even print business cards with my app logo and a promo code and hand them out to expecting mothers at the Apple store in my town (really).

In the app itself, I implemented two social network options, Facebook and Twitter, allowing people to automatically update their status with their favorite baby names.  Of course, the tag line "...from Stork Drop for the iPhone" was on the bottom of each update.  I thought this would help to generate the valuable word-of-mouth exposure that it seemed to be lacking.

Yes, I have done everything...except spend any money. Stork Drop has not brought in enough profits to justify any real marketing expenditures. I have gone back and forth about reinvesting everything in an ad campaign, but I have a very targeted market that should easy to reach.

It Should Be Easy, Right?

Unlike a lot of apps in the App Store, we have an established market: expecting parents. Many other developers have the burden of convincing a potential customer why they should spend their time popping bubbles, growing flowers, or running from spiders. We have it easy, our customers come to us (so to speak). If you have an iPhone and are expecting a baby, there is a pretty good chance that some day you will type "baby names" into the App Store search bar.

Herein lies the problem...Stork Drop is #12 on the returned app list.  In iTunes, you are presented with 6 apps from the query: 2 free, 4 paid.  The apps range from a poorly rated free app (at position #1) or highly rated $3.99 app.  Of course, there is a pet naming app there which doesn't make any sense, but, if you want to live in the App Store, you need to come to terms with the oddities and insanity that exist.

A Drive to the Top 6
I ran the numbers and figured out if I could get in the Top 6 than I could retire in 2 months.  Of course that's a joke, but who really knows.  My goal is simply to be on the front page when you query "baby names".  My strategy was to release a Lite version that would reach the front page, driving sales of the paid version once people realized how awesome it was.

Originally, I was hesitant to release a Lite version, thinking it would cannibalize sales.  After all, even though most people think they want to be creative and unique when naming their baby, the same names have been in the top 100 list for the past 50 years.  People stick to the most popular ones and those are the ones that would have to be released in the Lite version.

Instead of a Lite version per-se, I tried to "web 2.0" it up and called it Stork Drop Social Edition.  It contained a smaller name database, but you could unlock more names by using the social networking features.  All of these Lite users who used the Twitter and Facebook integration to unlock more names would be running a small ad campaign to all of their followers.

Except I Forgot About One Very Important Thing

The Lite version launched without much fanfare, just a blog post, but was instantly downloaded about 8:1 over the paid version.  The graph shows the month after the launch date (cyan:Social Edition; navy: Paid).  The Lite version gradually pulled the paid version up, but it was not significant.  What was most disappointing was very few people, literally 11, used the social networking features.  I came to two conclusions: they were content with the name lists provided or they don't want to share their favorite names.

I'm a parent of three so I don't know how I forgot that protecting your favorite baby names is something to be taken very seriously.  In particular, I know a family where two sisters who haven't talked in 5 years after one named her baby Max, even though the other sister had "called" it.  She wasn't even pregnant when she "called" it.

That was clearly a mistake on my part, but either way it proved that the Lite version was adequate for most peoples needs and they weren't interested in the paid version.  This was evident by the 0.9% upgrade conversion rate.  This was not what I had wanted from a Lite version and was not going to get us in the top 6.

When All Else Fails, Brute Force

I decided that I needed to get it that top 6 any way I could, to see if that exposure would drive a sales boon. I thought a free day after the New Year would keep the uptick in sales that we saw over Christmas rolling along. So on Jan. 4, I changed the price to free.  The results were pretty incredible, as seen in the plot.  The time period outlined in red corresponds the plot previously shown.

During the free day, at some times we were averaging 2 downloads a minute. On some days, we see only 2 downloads a day.  This blew my mind and our server, which had been comfortably calculating real-time name popularity statistics.  I guess you can view it as a good thing when your Google App Engine account rolls over from a free service to a paid service because of the traffic hit.

It Worked For About 4 Hours

During the free day, we hit as high as #2 but never lower than #4 for a "baby names" query. Thanks to the iTunes connect latency, our price updated faster than the popularity ranking switch from free to paid, so we enjoyed a #3 ranking the following day and a dramatic uptick in sales.

This had confirmed what we had thought, being in the top 6 results in iTunes connect for a targeted audience would be essential to any continued success. Unfortunately, when Apple's server switched us from free to paid, we dropped right back to #12, like nothing had ever happened.  That's not exactly true...our rating, which had been 4-1/2 stars, dropped to 3 stars from all the unsatisfied, free customers that had downloaded it that day.  We saw this before on our last price drop.

What Next?
After 6 months, maybe it is just quite possible that our app is where its supposed to be in the App Store.  Despite our efforts, we can't seem to get penetration in the App Store popularity algorithm that holds back any sales breakthroughs.

We can simply enjoy that our app is near the top of the popularity list for "baby names" and that we have great reviews and feedback from our users. There are several new apps in our pipeline that need more attention at this point, although I can't stop imagining how the name drop will look across a 10" tablet screen. In addition, many of lessons we learned from marketing Stork Drop are probably more valuable than any lost sales during our pricing experiments (A Week at $.99, A Day at Free).

Overall, our sales numbers are pretty consistent day-to-day and that helps pay for the essentials in life: diapers, formula and beer.

Stork Drop Social Edition: A New Class of Apps

In the Beginning
On the first day, Steve created the iPhone...and everyone thought that was good.  He looked around and saw the iPhone had no companions, so he allowed native Apps. On the second day there was Paid apps, but the people said that was no good. On the third day there was Free apps, but but the developers said that was no good.  On the fourth day there was Lite apps, but everyone felt a little screwed.  On the fifth day there was Freemium apps, but no one is quite sure how that's going to work out.

Today, on the sixth day, there is Social, a new class of iPhone apps. On the seventh day, everyone has to shovel, because the Midwest just got a ton of snow dumped on it.

Stork Drop Social Edition
Today, BabyBinks is proud to announce their latest iPhone application, Stork Drop Social Edition.  This is a free version of their not-very popular, but highly rated baby naming application Stork Drop.  Stork Drop SE has all the features of the full Stork Drop app, with a limited database of names.  You might be thinking, that sounds just like a Lite version.  Yeah, it pretty much is...but with a social twist.

Being Social Has Its Benefits
We are also introducing a new class of apps: social.  Social apps allow you to unlock additional functionality by sharing via your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts.  When you download Stork Drop SE to your iPhone, you will have access to the name, meaning, and origin of the top 100 baby names of all time.  If you choose to sign-in to your Facebook or Twitter accounts, you will unlock 900 more names.  While signed in to either social networking service, your status will be automatically updated with your top 5 favorite baby names.

Of course, if you want access to almost 10,000 baby names you can always purchase the full version of Stork Drop.

It's Not a Marketing Secret; We Want You to Share
The biggest obstacle to success in the App Store is visibility.  Getting featured on the front page of the iTunes Store, either as a Favorite, Noteworthy, or in a Top 10 list increases your visibility.  Having websites or blogs review your app increases visibility.  Of course, getting this kind (or any) of visibility is difficult, especially for small, unknown developers.

So, with over 115,000 apps (and growing), how do you let people know about your product?  We decided to turn to social networking (my local news told me its all the rage).  By rewarding Stork Drop SE users to link their social networking, we enter in a mutually beneficial arrangement: users get more functionality; BabyBinks gets more visibility.

The Bottom Line
A Lite app allows customers to try before they buy.  A Social app allows customers to try before they buy...and tells the whole world about it.

Stork Drop 2.0 - Ready for Sale

The latest version of Stork Drop is now available for sale in the App Store.  This version features a helpful little bird who knows a lot about baby names.  He will also help you share your favorites lists to Facebook and Twitter.

Despite all the bad publicity of late, a special thanks goes out to the reviewers at Apple.  No doubt overcome with the spirit of season, they approved this version despite a small technicality that would have held it up for two more weeks.

In the App Store: A Day at Free

Last month we conducted a one week marketing experiment to measure the effect of dropping the price of Stork Drop, our baby naming application, from $2.99 to $0.99. While the price drop did increase the volume of sales approximately 200%, the price differential resulted in 33% loss in revenue (based on the weekly average). The most detrimental outcome of this experiment was not the revenue loss but a downgrade of our rating. In our case, the experiment seemed to suggest that price was not a major barrier to purchase for a customer who was willing to make a purchase.

A Highly Inaccurate Breakdown of App Purchasing Behavior
An informal survey of the 30 or so people I know who own an iPhone, suggested to me that only about 1/3 of them have purchased apps.  I am aware of the reports that, on average, an iPhone user has spend $80+ in the App Store, but those numbers are averaged out across the whole population and could be misleading.  Of the 20 I know who have not purchased an app, 15 actively search for free apps to meet their needs.  The other 5 (including my mom and dad), had little intereste in using the iPhone as anything other than a phone (blashphemy).  As a developer, this tells me that no matter how good my app, no matter what features I work feverishly to implement, no matter how slick my artwork is, that there is a large population of iPhone users who will never look past the "$" in the App Store.

Stork Drop 1.2 - Update Available

Stork Drop version 1.2 was just approved in the App Store. Here’s what’s new:

• Twitter integration; automatically tweet your favorites list to your twitter account
• United Kingdom and Canadian popularity statistics
• Real-time name popularity statistics listed in Stork Snoop (see image)
• More name lists (Athletes, Scholars, Celebrity Baby)
• Over 1,000 new names, meanings and origins
• User interface enhancements in Stork Drop game

Labor Day Sale on Stork Drop

Don’t work too hard trying to name your baby. Stork Drop is on sale for $0.99 to celebrate Labor Day…whether that means not working or going into labor.

In the App Store: A Week at $0.99

"Naming your baby should be as much fun as making it. Well, at least as much fun as you can have with your iPhone." This is the tag line to the BabyBinks' iPhone application Stork Drop. After 2 months in the App Store priced at $2.99, we decided to conduct an experiment to see if we were leaving 'money on the table' with our pricing strategy.

The "Baby Names" Category
Currently, there are currently 53 applications returned when using "Baby Names" as the search query in the iTunes App Store. There is about a 50/50 split for free/paid applications, with only a few Lite versions of paid apps. In these cases, the Lite versions consistently rank significantly above the Paid versions.
The overall quality of the apps vary significantly. While I am biased, since my app is in this category, I would say only about 5 apps are well-designed and thought out attempts at creating a quality product. The others are simply table views of data with some sort of baby image on the front page. Given that all these apps (including mine) use the same data source (publicly available U.S. Social Security data), the presentation of the data is the only thing that allows the apps to differentiate themselves.

Interestingly, there are many apps that appear from the query "Baby Names" that don't have any baby naming functionality. These include: Baby Tracker: Nursing, Pet Names Plus, Toddler Flashcards, etc. This problem speaks more to some highly-discussed problems with the App Store indexing and the new keywords in iTunes Connect. I'll leave that for another day.

Our Place in the App Store

Stork Drop has enjoyed moderate success in the App Store. It has been consistently in the top 5 paid apps in the "Baby Names" category and typically floats around position 15 for all baby naming apps. Stork Drop is circled in the App Store search below. Monetarily, the word 'moderate' is extremely generous. I would put it in the beer money (or more appropriately baby formula) range.

From a feature set position, Stork Drop stands out as one of the only applications that provides any real interactivity or utilizes the iPhone as more than just for statics data display. For example, Stork Drop provides real-time statistics of name popularity by monitoring all users "Favorite Baby Names" lists through an external server (screenshot of this "Snoop" feature is shown). I would concede that some of the other apps have better graphics, but then again, every app (including Stork Drop) is based off a series of UITableViews.

Free Fridays

Here at BabyBinks we are always excited when someone emails to tell us that they used Stork Drop to pick their baby’s name.  To celebrate the birth of Lola Anne from Missouri, Stork Drop is free today! Please download, enjoy and rate it!>

Dollar Day Sale

“Stork Drop - Baby Names” is on sale today for $0.99 in the App Store.

Dollar Days

Stork Drop is on sale today for $0.99.

What Happened to Valerie and Rodger?

After receiving some feedback regarding the name popularity in the Snoop feature, we realized that the default names Valerie and Rodger were undeservedly in the top spots.  We have filtered out the default names from our popularity calculations to account for this.

Happy Birthday Sale

To celebrate the first documented baby named using Stork Drop, the app is on sale today for $0.99. Congratulations to baby Lorraine and her family!

Staff Lunch Hour

 

It’s not all late night coding and trying to decipher the nuances of the App Store.  Here’s how the BabyBinks team spends time on the weekends!

Sidewalk Sale

 

It wouldn’t be summer without sidewalk sales.  Today, Stork Drop is on sale for $0.99.

Update Update

I just received an email from Apple saying they are experiencing longer-than-expected review times on application updates.  I imagine this has to do with many applications switching over to work with the new iPhone 3.0 OS.

Slept Through the Night Sale

To celebrate 8 hours of continuous sleep, we are having a “slept through the night” sale. Stork Drop is on sale for the next 8 hours.

Happy Father's Day!

To celebrate this day for Dads and Dads-To-Be, Stork Drop is on sale for $0.99 all day long.

Stork Drop v1.0.1 Submitted to the App Store

Fixes:

• Non-standard characters (e.g. umlauts) in some names that were not being properly displayed were corrected

New Features:

• The ‘Snoop’ stork can now be seen spying on your Favorites list…or can he?