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How to Choose a Profitable Niche
- BigBalli 13y agoHey Trevor, great second post. I agree with most of what you say but have to point out that you left out a big technique: search trends. what you describe is finding apps that are already there and competing against them. A different approach would be analysing search trends and match against niches with no apps. For example, I remember discovering that paddling was a huge "industry" (as a sport) with ZERO apps. For this, you would use services such as SearchManSEO or mobileDevHQ to identify niche "hotness" or the oldschool SEO way using GoogleTrends/Keywords. hope it helps, Giacomo
- trevmckendrick 13y agoExcellent point. There is a lot of data out there for sure. I just wanted to cover in this post how to identify profitable niches.
- tocomment 13y agoHow exactly would you use GoogleTrends/Keywords to identify niches?
- waterside81 13y agoI think they mean if you have a hunch on what might be a trend, check out the search trends on Google. If it's going up and to the right, you might be on to something.
- areeve 13y agoYou can also use something like Market Samurai to do keyword analysis. But by god, do NOT give them your daily email address, they will spam the crap out of you. Handy tool though.
- diziet 13y agoAlso check out https://appstorerankings.net https://appstorerankings.net for App Store Optimization services. The model Trevor used for DL estimation is pretty good, actually.
- swanson 13y agohttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.trevormckendrick.com%2Fhow-to-choose-a-profitable-niche%2F&rlz=1C1CHKZ_enUS430US430&aq=f&oq=cache%3Awww.trevormckendrick.com%2Fhow-to-choose-a-profitable-niche%2F&aqs=chrome.0.57j58.833j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.t...
- trevmckendrick 13y agoThank you. Definitely going to be tweaking my WP config after this week...
- justhw 13y agoQuick Cache is lightweight and superb, I highly recommend it. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-cache/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-cache/
- ra 13y agoOr run the DNS through Cloudflare's free plan... you get protection against a range of WP exploits then too.
- jakerocheleau 13y agoI've actually never seen this caching plugin before, thanks for the reference.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoWrite your expected-high-traffic blog posts out to an S3 bucket and send that URL out.
- saym 13y agouse Syte instead! https://github.com/rigoneri/syte https://github.com/rigoneri/syte
- jamesaguilar 13y agoThe high school stats student in me really doesn't like that regression line plotted against two datapoints.
- trevmckendrick 13y agoFair enough. I was just doing an example with two data points. Of course the more points you add the more accurate the line.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoIt's not a matter of accuracy in this case, it's a matter of whether the regression has any meaning at all. Any regression can fit two data points, even a parabola. Of course, there are intuitive reasons to suspect that that is not the actual form of the distribution, but you can't actual show it from data with just two points. But I have to assume that you did more data points when you actually performed this study yourself. Up to that point the methodology is really useful, so don't take this as criticism of the entire post.
- trevmckendrick 13y agoGot ya. I did do more data points myself. Thanks for the commentary.
- omni 13y agoEven with more data points, I'm not convinced that App Store ranking is a good independent variable. At best, this seems like a very poor proxy for ad store impressions or downloads. However, I would be very, very surprised if the relationship between those legit metrics and app store ranking were anywhere near linear when you're comparing the top 5 or so to the rest of the top 25.
- trevmckendrick 13y agoPaid App Store rankings are determined by # of downloads, so not sure why that doesn't work as a reasonable (albeit not perfect) proxy. And agree 100%, def not linear.
- relix 13y agoTrevor, after reading this article I wanted to subscribe to your list because it was interesting, and you sold the future content well. Apparently I was already subscribed from a previous article which I liked as well, so consider this a huge compliment, you're doing great!
- trevmckendrick 13y agoThanks!
- Paul_D_Santana 13y agoI agree. Thank you for this topic series. I look forward to every Tuesday's email! I have to ask though, why bother calculating the daily revenue? If a paid app is in the top 25, isn't that enough of a sign that it is profitable?
- muzzamike 13y agoWhat I found most interesting about this is how outdated the Distimo data is. I have a couple game apps in the Games Trivia category, which is conveniently less popular. According to Distimo, in May of last year it would take roughly 600 dls per day to reach the top 25. We're averaging 1000 downloads a day with each game and neither has cracked the top 60. Amazing how much a difference a year makes. Anyone know if Distimo has done a followup more recently? Thanks for another great article Trevor.
- trevmckendrick 13y agoI'll have to ask them. I would love an update as well. The good thing is that app downloads have only increased since then, so any estimates based on this data will be conservative.
- fieldforceapp 13y agoAgreed, Trevor, good content. And maybe you're going to address in part two, but how does the presence of IAP factor into your considerations. In other words, not just profitability but doesn't business model also matter? Or do you just assume free/paid/freemium apps will be required in any niche and plan accordingly?
- trevmckendrick 13y agoGreat question. My first app wasn't free with IAP, but that's what I highly recommend to do now. It gets you a lot more downloads which helps you rank higher in search results. If you do go with a paid app I'd recommend something people will pay at least $5 for.
- TylerE 13y agoI wonder at what point there is a backlash here? I know myself, personally, I almost never download "free" apps anymore, because the IAP is so obnoxious.
- trevmckendrick 13y agoDepends on the IAP and the app really. More importantly we should be careful to extrapolate our behavior to the iOS masses. There's tons of apps I would never spend a dime on that are doing extremely well.
- the_cat_kittles 13y agoI feel the need to commend you on a very elegant and resourceful way to reasonably approximate an important piece of information!
- trevmckendrick 13y agoThanks. I hope it wasn't a pain to read. Took a long time to boil it down to the bare essentials.
- dreamdu5t 13y agoI'm curious, has Trevor McKendrick ever built a business from a niche he identified using this method?
- trevmckendrick 13y agoSure have :) Check out this post from last week: http://www.trevormckendrick.com/my-first-year-in-the-app-store/ http://www.trevormckendrick.com/my-first-year-in-the-app-sto...
- drd 13y agoTrevor, great work, I got another approach performed on Android market. The problem with categories in app markets is that they are high level classifications. Therefore, considering them as niche doesn’t tell us much. I performed a functionality-based analysis. I think this gives us a more precise niche definition. Here is my analysis: http://www.drdacademy.com/?id=an-analysis-of-the-android-app-market-part-2 http://www.drdacademy.com/?id=an-analysis-of-the-android-app... By the way I don’t think fitting a curve on two points on your result plot is right. Normally, we need a reasonable sample size.
- nhm 13y agoThis is a really interesting companion to Trevor's posts. Google providing those download "bins" lets us get some great insight into more accurate metrics. Thanks for sharing!