I took part in a Western MA Developers podcast last week. It was a lot of fun and definitely captures the spirit of how our conversations usually go. We cover a broad range of topics including the bug tracker market, refunds in software, whether to be Rich or King in a venture, and a philosophical discussion of Rich Hickey’s Time is the new Memory concept.
Category Archives: Entrepreneurship
FounderCast
A couple of friends and members of the Western MA Developers Group have started a PodCast called FounderCast that’s worth a listen if you are interested in software entrepreneurship.
The format is a roundtable of technology three company founders (@dougmartin, @cemerick, and @paulhake). In the first three episodes they have discussed the tools they use (development and sales), how they got their first customer, customer service and other topics. The pilot is unedited and rough, so don’t judge it on that one — by the third episode it got significantly better. You can also follow @foundercast on twitter.
More interesting iPhone pricing articles
From Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail blog, I got this link to some interesting iPhone pricing and sales data.
Having more than doubled over the last two months, Gaming remains the largest category accounting for a quarter of all apps. The fastest growing categories were Education and Lifestyle. Medical is the newest app category and as of the end of November there were over 80 medical apps, the 10 most popular of which were free. Among Game apps, Racing, Music, and Sports were the fastest growing Game sub categories.
And, here’s another iPhone app pricing article I got from John Gruber’s DaringFireball. In the article, Peter Cooper uses popularity as a stand-in for units sold and and tries to figure out which apps have the most revenue. Put this one in your RSS feed if you are interested in hearing more as this installment covers mostly the Games category.
Interesting iPhone App Pricing Articles
When I was trying to figure out a price for Habits, I found a few articles that were interesting. This one from Andy Finnell made the rounds on Reddit and advocates for busting through the $0.99 mentality and pricing applications in the $9.99 range.
The fix for pricing too low is really simple: raise your prices. Most $0.99 apps should become $9.99, $4.99 apps should become $14.99, and so on. With a $9.99 app, you’d make $7 per copy and at 16 copies per day, you’d make about $40,000/year. That’s not a great income, but that could potentially support one iPhone product being developed in some Iowan’s wheat field.
This other article from Andy is also good.
John Gruber made an interesting point when he linked to Andy (software with higher prices needs demos and refunds)
Tap, Tap, Tap has had a couple of AppStore hits, so what they have to say is also very interesting.
iPhone apps are typically much smaller and more focused than desktop apps and as such, should be priced accordingly. In addition, you need to take into account the much larger market that you’re dealing with here… Apple is selling well over 10,000 iPhones per day and these are all potential new customers, plus all the existing iPhone owners and iPod touch sales.