3 ms·

This is a great post. Though, as someone who has produced a fair number of hits (and flops), I think hits are almost impossible to reverse engineer & duplicate

by pud 16y ago

This is a great post. Though, as someone who has produced a fair number of hits (and flops), I think hits are almost impossible to reverse engineer & duplicate. My first (and crappiest) iPhone app was released a few weeks ago and continues to get almost 5k downloads per day, and has hit #1 in several countries. I have since released "better" apps but they have largely flopped, by comparison. Same deal with websites. I've had some that are huge (millions of monthly visitors) and some that are ghost towns. I have a YouTube video of me playing the drums that has over 5 million views -- then videos that are largely the same or better that have hardly any views. List goes on. I think talent, luck and frequency are the biggest factors.

yoda_sl 16y ago
Agree with you on "talent, luck"... One thing that definitely help small company or individual developer is to get one big site to cover the app. It's definitely boost the initial launch of the app and can keep the momentum going for a few weeks. Obviously getting featured by Apple is the biggest jackpot a company/developer can get. In fact in order to get a good coverage from well known blogger is to release an app that most likely strike the writer because you are filling one of his need. But you better provide a good & solid app to get a good review. So whenever one of my app is getting close to its release date, I start scanning the various well known blog sites and see if I can find one (or many) blogger(s) that may have a greater interest than just a random one.
phillryu 16y ago
To clarify I wouldn't say I'm advising people reverse engineer and clone past hit apps, it's more trying to figure out some recurring traits that tend to pop up again and again in almost every successful hit app, and testing against these traits with your ideas. Once you get in the habit of running through this list, or your own that hits up your idea from a lot of different angles, you can just focus on coming up with lots of random ideas, mostly terrible, some of them pretty good to great, and save the quality ones. It's good to have some consistent system I think for judging the quality of app ideas, always really nice understanding exactly why you have that great gut feeling (or a terrible one). "I think talent, luck and frequency are the biggest factors." I would replace frequency with experience and maybe 'resources' can be thrown into that group, but I'd pretty much agree with that.

by pud 16y ago

yoda_sl 16y ago

Agree with you on "talent, luck"... One thing that definitely help small company or individual developer is to get one big site to cover the app. It's definitely boost the initial launch of the app and can keep the momentum going for a few weeks. Obviously getting featured by Apple is the biggest jackpot a company/developer can get. In fact in order to get a good coverage from well known blogger is to release an app that most likely strike the writer because you are filling one of his need. But you better provide a good & solid app to get a good review. So whenever one of my app is getting close to its release date, I start scanning the various well known blog sites and see if I can find one (or many) blogger(s) that may have a greater interest than just a random one.

phillryu 16y ago

To clarify I wouldn't say I'm advising people reverse engineer and clone past hit apps, it's more trying to figure out some recurring traits that tend to pop up again and again in almost every successful hit app, and testing against these traits with your ideas. Once you get in the habit of running through this list, or your own that hits up your idea from a lot of different angles, you can just focus on coming up with lots of random ideas, mostly terrible, some of them pretty good to great, and save the quality ones. It's good to have some consistent system I think for judging the quality of app ideas, always really nice understanding exactly why you have that great gut feeling (or a terrible one). "I think talent, luck and frequency are the biggest factors." I would replace frequency with experience and maybe 'resources' can be thrown into that group, but I'd pretty much agree with that.