Under The Bridge

Well, apparently we’ve now established what phase 2 of the successful iPhone developers’ business plan is!

(If that’s a trifle obscure of a cultural reference, what we’re making there is an analogy to the South Park underwear gnomes‘ business plan:

Phase 1: Write iPhone app.

Phase 2: ???

Phase 3: PROFIT!!!

Sound like anybody’s business plan you know? Yeah, thought so.)

It seems that, perhaps not so surprisingly, Phase 2 is “charge $299 and up for joke apps”. No, seriously.

… Along with fellow prolific indie developer Adam Saltsman (Canabalt, Wurdle), Refenes developed a “joke game” for iPhone titled Zits & Giggles, consisting mainly of popping virtual pimples.

Like so many other iPhone games, Zits & Giggles launched at $0.99. Sales were never remarkable, and they eventually tapered off entirely. But rather than pursue a traditional marketing strategy like offering the game for free for a limited time, Refenes did just the opposite: he raised the price to $15, exorbitant by iPhone standards.

Shockingly, “the day I put it up to $15, three people bought it,” Refenes said.

“So,” he continued, “I said, ‘I’m going to put it up to $50.’ Four people bought it.”

After observing that fortuitous trend, Refenes decided to test its resilience by boosting the game’s selling price every time at least one copy was sold.

“I stopped paying attention to it for a while,” he recalled, then “I checked it on Valentine’s Day, and 14 people bought it at $299.”

The game has now reached a price tag of $350.

Based only on Refenes’ sales figures for a limited number of the game’s many price tiers, Zits & Giggles generated at least $4,431 at the $15, $50, and $299 price points alone. It currently holds an App Store customer rating of two and a half stars out of five, with only two written reviews, one of which reads in its entirety, “It’s hilarious.” (Its official description still claims it costs “a FRIGGIN DOLLAR.”)

“My conclusion to all of this,” Refenes said, “is that the people who you’re selling to on the App Store are not necessarily gamers.”

Not necessarily sane gamers, in any case, one suspects. We’re all in favor of preferring the upper half of the demand curve as a matter of policy … but tales like this make you wonder if it’s not actually more of a hyperbola than an actual curve. Or that people are just strange.

h/t: iphonesb!

Here’s an intriguing option for financing your app development — appbackr, “The New Way To Finance Your Apps”:

1. appbackr helps connect developers with big ideas and small pockets with wholesale funders.
2. appbackr users can pre-purchase apps they want to see developed at a wholesale price.
3. With cashflow from appbackr investors, app developers can focus on what they do best.
4. Sell your app at retail prices, and purchasers make the profit on each unit they own.

That does sound intriguing, doesn’t it? There’s some more detail in Mobile Orchard’s post about them:

The wholesale buyers are arranged in a queue. The first wholesale buyer’s units are covered by the first sales in the App Store. The latter ones are fulfilled in order.

The developer gives the full amount of the sales covered by the wholesale units to the wholesale purchasers. After the units in wholesale queue are completely sold out the relationship with the wholesale buyers ends and the app developer gets the full amount of all future sales.

appbackr also offers wholesale purchases for finished apps. Here the scenario is that you’ve finished an app — it’s in the store — and you want a block of cash up-front. You sell wholesale priced apps to a buyer who then earns back the full amount as they sell in the store.

Wholesale buyers make $0.20/unit for concept stage apps or $0.12/unit.

Certainly a novel way to structure your venture capital efforts, yes. If anybody’s intrigued enough to check it out further, please share your experiences!

Just in case you managed to miss this so far, Technical Q&A QA1633 has the official scoop on creating easy to read iTunes Store URLs for a specific application and/or company. The three types are:

• Company Name:
  http://itunes.com/apps/<companyname>

• Application Name:
  http://itunes.com/apps/< applicationname >

• Application by Company:
  http://itunes.com/apps/<companyname>/< applicationname >

The rules for constructing <companyname> and <applicationname> are basically to convert the text displayed in the App Store to lowercase ASCII and remove anything without an obvious counterpart in that set, with the exception that “&” becomes “and”. Like these examples:

• Sega => http://itunes.com/apps/sega
• ngmoco, Inc. => http://itunes.com/apps/ngmocoinc
• Chen’s Photography & Software =>
  http://itunes.com/apps/chensphotographyandsoftware
• Ocarina => http://itunes.com/apps/ocarina
• Watchmen: Justice is Coming =>
  http://itunes.com/apps/watchmenjusticeiscoming
• Brain Challenge™ => http://itunes.com/apps/brainchallenge
• Spanish Class 2 – Bueno, entonces… ¿qué pasó con el cinco? =>

  http://itunes.com/apps/spanishclass2buenoentoncesquepasoconelcinco

There are some extra caveats, like that these are not guaranteed to be unique in which case they bring up a search page, so it’s very likely a good idea to hand craft and test these individually rather than construct them programmatically. But hey, baby steps.

So let’s say that you’ve been reading about making demo videos for your app using the simulator, and figure yeah, that sounds like a good idea … but OH NOES! The workflow you want to show involves native applications like Maps that don’t run in the simulator! What to do? What to do?

Well, those savants over at Mobile Orchard are on the case for you.

… However, when the app is run on iPhone Simulator, Safari is launched and a standard Google Maps webpage is loaded. A similar effect can be accomplished in iPhone Simulator by creating a mock Maps application that uses screen shots taken from the native Maps application on the iPhone.

Creating and using a mock application involves three steps:

1. Capture screen shots from the native application on the device.

2. Download a mock application from GitHub and customize it.

3. Create a demo build of your application to launch the mock application instead of the native one.

Sounds like a pretty big time sink, yes? Well, not really, the article provides a pretty complete-looking tutorial and code for a mock application, so hey if you have something that you were just chomping at the bit to do a video of, check it out!

Good article over at Mobile Orchard today:

Five Tips for Producing a Demo Video for Your iPhone App

One of the best ways to showcase your application’s functionality is to produce a great video. A video is one of the few opportunities potential customers will have to experience your application before buying it. And, a great video is an important key to getting iPhone app reviews. Here’s five tips to get you pointed in the right direction:

Worth the read. Check the comments as well for alternative suggested workflows!