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Actually only a pretty minor boost to Mac sales. Nice windfall of iPhone app sales to the people who got the Mac app though. Ended up selling about $5500 of th

Actually only a pretty minor boost to Mac sales. Nice windfall of iPhone app sales to the people who got the Mac app though. Ended up selling about $5500 of the iPhone app over the past week (usually only sell <= $400/month of the iPhone app itself). This will probably be the first month where iPhone revenue is more than Mac revenue. Support has been kinda rough lately, hopefully it will die down. Sometimes I look at these MacHeist sort of things as kind of a Faustian bargain. But I think it'll have been well worth it. I'm looking forward to sending a limited, tasteful email campaign to those 300K people when my next product/version 2 launches.

patio11 17y ago
Support has been kinda rough lately Let me take a stab in the dark: you've found that folks who pay less for your application have higher expectations for it, are unwilling to read the documentation, are ruder, and cause many more support requests per customer than your customers who paid full price do? How'd I do? This phenomenon is very common with shareware developers. Higher prices tend to scare away many of the pathological customers.
- dangrover 17y ago
  Yeah, kinda. There are quite a few wackos like that (I've seen it all in the past week), but overall it's not too bad considering I have 300K new "customers." I had no qualms today about raising the price of the iPhone app back up, now that it's fallen off the top 10 charts. It's kind of a support intensive piece of the app (e.g. it requires wifi to sync, and a lot of people have shitty wifi). I did release an update right before MacHeist that fixed some edge cases in the syncing (see my presentation here: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=899656 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=899656). That seemed to help somewhat. I've found the difficulty of the support load can be better quantified by the number of unique requests rather than the number of requests. I hired someone to help a few months ago to do support. I felt felt very lazy/extravagent/unresourceful doing so, but it's been a huge help, especially with MacHeist. She can't troubleshoot every issue, but that's perfectly fine, because she does a great job weeding out the riff raff. And she has a way thicker skin than I do dealing with customers. I also launched a fancy new support section for my site at the same time as the MacHeist thing. Also, there's a special box for MacHeist visitors at the top of every page that kinda tries to get them to buzz off: http://files.dangrover.com/macheistbox.png http://files.dangrover.com/macheistbox.png
  - patio11 17y ago
    I'd describe that as "prominent, effective self-help options", and your implementation is brilliant. Seriously -- if you write that up in a blog post I will cite it for a decade. I try to strike the balance between "I am always, always happy to talk to my customers" and "There are thousands of you and only one of me so I can't talk to you all every day". Mostly I fix the app and website to answer the common issues without requiring my input and, for the recurrent ones (cough Registration Key management) emphasize that they get their answer a day quicker if they use the lookup form than if they send me an email asking me to, essentially, please use the lookup form for them. (Apropos of nothing: I would gladly abandon Registration Keys if people actually paid money for software that wasn't access controlled. Happily, the change from downloadable software to a web app has eliminated this issue for about 70% of my customers.)
- david 17y ago
  Irk, I've found that freelancers have the exact same problem. The better deal you offer someone, the more demanding they get and the more they are convinced that you're ripping them off.
mronge 17y ago
What kind of sales did you have with your mac app before MacHeist? (If you don't mind me asking)
- dangrover 17y ago
  It's been a really weird year with no real patterns. The best month the business had was May, when it took in about $15K, and the worst month was November when it made only $1K, and up and down randomly between those. Averaged out, it looks okay, but I've been kind of panicking lately, even though I have a product launch coming up and obviously some exposure lately. I've been pretty incompetent at running the business and continuing to develop the app, but I've had a lot of lucky breaks. I think next year I'll have my shit together more.

patio11 17y ago

Support has been kinda rough lately Let me take a stab in the dark: you've found that folks who pay less for your application have higher expectations for it, are unwilling to read the documentation, are ruder, and cause many more support requests per customer than your customers who paid full price do? How'd I do? This phenomenon is very common with shareware developers. Higher prices tend to scare away many of the pathological customers.

dangrover 17y ago
Yeah, kinda. There are quite a few wackos like that (I've seen it all in the past week), but overall it's not too bad considering I have 300K new "customers." I had no qualms today about raising the price of the iPhone app back up, now that it's fallen off the top 10 charts. It's kind of a support intensive piece of the app (e.g. it requires wifi to sync, and a lot of people have shitty wifi). I did release an update right before MacHeist that fixed some edge cases in the syncing (see my presentation here: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=899656 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=899656). That seemed to help somewhat. I've found the difficulty of the support load can be better quantified by the number of unique requests rather than the number of requests. I hired someone to help a few months ago to do support. I felt felt very lazy/extravagent/unresourceful doing so, but it's been a huge help, especially with MacHeist. She can't troubleshoot every issue, but that's perfectly fine, because she does a great job weeding out the riff raff. And she has a way thicker skin than I do dealing with customers. I also launched a fancy new support section for my site at the same time as the MacHeist thing. Also, there's a special box for MacHeist visitors at the top of every page that kinda tries to get them to buzz off: http://files.dangrover.com/macheistbox.png http://files.dangrover.com/macheistbox.png
- patio11 17y ago
  I'd describe that as "prominent, effective self-help options", and your implementation is brilliant. Seriously -- if you write that up in a blog post I will cite it for a decade. I try to strike the balance between "I am always, always happy to talk to my customers" and "There are thousands of you and only one of me so I can't talk to you all every day". Mostly I fix the app and website to answer the common issues without requiring my input and, for the recurrent ones (cough Registration Key management) emphasize that they get their answer a day quicker if they use the lookup form than if they send me an email asking me to, essentially, please use the lookup form for them. (Apropos of nothing: I would gladly abandon Registration Keys if people actually paid money for software that wasn't access controlled. Happily, the change from downloadable software to a web app has eliminated this issue for about 70% of my customers.)
david 17y ago
Irk, I've found that freelancers have the exact same problem. The better deal you offer someone, the more demanding they get and the more they are convinced that you're ripping them off.

mronge 17y ago

What kind of sales did you have with your mac app before MacHeist? (If you don't mind me asking)

dangrover 17y ago
It's been a really weird year with no real patterns. The best month the business had was May, when it took in about $15K, and the worst month was November when it made only $1K, and up and down randomly between those. Averaged out, it looks okay, but I've been kind of panicking lately, even though I have a product launch coming up and obviously some exposure lately. I've been pretty incompetent at running the business and continuing to develop the app, but I've had a lot of lucky breaks. I think next year I'll have my shit together more.