First post of a regular one that I intend to publish on the site.
Interesting: out of the 20 most downloaded apps in Productivity ( 10 paid, 10 free), 8 of them are note taking apps.
Looks like there’s a real need out there: it’s 40%.
Competition will be tough. Let me know what you expect from a note taking system, it could be interesting.
Interesting as well, the best ranked paid apps obtained a less good Gross profit position. I had a look and understood, they’re both a 0.79€, a price too low to actually earn money selling apps. Note Apps making good position in profit are typically 3€99 and 5€49. It’s still a rather inexpensive price (in the sense that you as a customer will not hesitate too much if it solves you’re problem, we’re not talking about 30€ or $) to earn money to build a solid company: 10.000 downloads and your gross profit is at 50k€, it means roughly 27k€ in the developer’s pocket, excluding taxes and Apple’s commission. Not enough to even pay yourself , not even talking about hiring devs to build a strong product.
tough huh ?
Well, here you see that we as developer in this rather ‘cheap’ app market have to bet on two things:
– big, big volumes. just count on luck as even with the best MKT in the B2B business, reaching millions is hard. No angry birds in this field.
– recurrent revenues from your engaged users. I mean recurent for interesting online paying services, the way Evernote is playing it.
About Evernote, it’s there in the free top 10 and off course not in the gross profit ranking. Anyhow, they’re now 120 people there, having 20 millions (yes millions) free downloads, but converting 800.000 people to pay for their online services, for a total of 18M$ revenue. Not bad, and a good strategy on their side.
I have to admit I’m not yet decided on which is the best way to go
sources: AppAnnie
