iPhone App Entrepreneur

An inside look into one developer's sales numbers

John Casasanta from Tap Tap Tap, the maker of Tipulator and Where To? has written an incredible post describing his application's sales numbers. I encourage every developer to check it out. John includes the amount Tap Tap Tap has spent on marketing and how that affected his sales, as well as some background on why he has decided to share this information. Mad props to John and Tap Tap Tap for sharing this. 

How is your app doing? Probably not that bad.

Completely throwing out scientific analysis in pursuit of a late-night feel good session, Apple's numbers today (10 million apps downloaded) indicate that each application in the App Store (around 500 at launch, near 800 today) has been downloaded approximately 12,500 times on average. Of course, most developers will have to wait to see their sales numbers, and obviously paid applications will have less downloads than free applications, but sometimes its just nice to see the numbers and feel good. My sincere wishes go out to all developers for success moving forward. 

1.42 apps per user - looks bad but its not

If you take the number of original iPhone sold (approximately 6 million), add in the number of 3G iPhones sold this past weekend (1 million), and divide by the number of applications sold in the App Store this weekend (over 10 million), you get an average ratio of apps per user of around 1.42. This number is actually worse when you consider iPod Touch users aren't counted.

Not all is bad, however, because when we break it down these numbers start to look a little better. Common sense tells us that a user who has been in the App Store has downloaded more than one free application, and many have downloaded paid applications. Therefore, while the average seems low overall, its likely that some users have a lot of applications, and other users don't have them at all. Wisdom tells us that some people just haven't gotten to the App Store yet. I predict that as people become more and more aware of the App Store, and as iPhone 1.0 users and iPod Touch users upgrade, we're going to see the average number of applications per user jump significantly. 

This of course, will be helped along by Apple promoting their own and other's free apps. Many people see Apple's apps as competitors, or just things Apple has done for fun. I think its more useful to see them as a huge marketing initiative. Despite what some would think of as near ubiquitous news coverage, not everyone is aware of the App Store. Apple has an incentive to introduce users to the App Store because so much of the device's value lies in mobile applications. So while the average number of apps per user currently seems low, I think we'll see Apple make a strong push towards getting every user in there to at least check it out. 

Quick Math

For anyone who's interested, if you price your application on the iTunes App Store at $.99, you need to sell 143 copies to make each $100.00.

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