Meanwhile…
February 17th, 2009
It’s been an exciting weekend, to say the least. I was checking iTunes Connect as soon as I got out of bed each morning, still bleary eyed from having just woken up. I’m not going to post any sales numbers yet, there’s not enough data yet to draw any kind of reasonable conclusion yet. However, I will post some at some point, I promise. I will say that given the fact that I hadn’t sent out any press releases or promo codes until this morning, I was pleased with the sales so far. I’m not going to be challenging the top 10 any time soon, but it feels good to have any sales at all.
I’ve been looking for a good way to track all my app sales data. The best tool I’ve found so far is AppViz. It will download your daily sales data for you and generate all kinds of pretty graphs. My biggest complaint is that the export feature doesn’t really export the data in a useful way. What I really want is a tool that will generate data that I can import into Excel or Numbers and do my own graphing and statistical analysis on. Ideally I want each country to have it’s own spreadsheet so that I can graph individual countries and then also graph total sales. I might end up building my own tool. That just seems silly, though.
As I hinted at above, I spent this morning (and this afternoon so far) sending out press releases announcing the launch of Dapple. I’ve been sending out promo codes to iPhone gaming review sites in the hopes that I’ll get a few reviews out of it.
My friend Jaysen wrote up a great review of Dapple on his site: I, Game Maker. He is a friend of mine, so I can’t say he’s completely unbiased, but I feel like he provides a pretty honest review of the game.
I’ll probably spend the rest of the day finding sites to send my press release to. Tomorrow I need to get back to my 360|iDev presentation. Time’s running out! Oh, and they just released full descriptions of all the talks at the conference on the 360|iDev site. The conference is going to be amazing. If you’re an iPhone developer, at least check out the website and see if you can make it.
Owen
I read his review today, and it’s really good review. It felt unbiased — and he compared it to some other games. If I had the iPhone I would definitely be playing it right now instead of reading the reviews.
I must say I am a pinch curious/nosy to see those sales numbers. I guess I’m curious whether a games developer can make a living from the iPhone? I’m really hoping the answer is yes .. but I will have to wait for the rest of the sales numbers.
Keep blogging man, I am living vicariously through your blogs.
The great pingback fairy informed me of this post
I’d love to hear your thoughts on improving the export feature of AppViz. Hopefully I can save you the work of writing your own. Trust me, it is more painful than originally anticipated.
On press releases: have you seen prmac.com ?
Thanks for the information. I’m in the final staged of submitting my app (still waiting on banking contract) and I’ve been wondering about marketing and press releases, etc.