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Hi! I’m Thomas I am the creator of FinalTouch, a niche application for the Mac
Besides that I also run
WeekendHacker a small boutique network for designers and developers
I write essays about design, technology and startups at
Black&White
Oh and I am co-founder of Hello

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Wanted!

I am looking for an objective-c developer for a project that I promise is interesting and challenging. Please contact me at thomas dot petersen at gmail dot com if you are interested

FinalTouch Product Income Report #1

FinalTouch allows you to create a hot key to slow down
the speed of your mouse when you need extra precision. This is the first in a series of reports about its doing.

The Background

This is my first in a series of monthly post about the sales
of the niche app called FinalTouch. It is as much a learning experience for me as I hope it will be for you. I will try out various methods and through analysis reflect on the data. Suggestions for improvements are more than welcome FinalTouch allows you to create a hot key to slow down the speed of your mouse when you need extra precision. This is especially handy if you have large monitors and have your mouse speed set high.

As some of you know I have decided to make an income report each month and share the numbers with you. I created this app because it's something I have always needed myself and because I wanted to learn about selling apps on the Mac app store. I outsourced for $500 worth of work the rest is my own sweat, blood and tears. Each month I will try out new things to see what works and what doesn't. I will hopefully get some input from the splendid peeps at HN but anyone really is welcome to chime in with suggestions.

I have been contemplating quite a lot about how to approach these posts. Being a niche product, actually being a product that people don't seem to realize they needed before hearing about it, I believe that SEO is going to be less important for promotion. But I think I have to dig deeper to understand how to approach it from that point of view. For now I will be focusing on the numbers I have and what I think are important things to highlight. Let me know if I you want me to include something.

An Overview

So how did I do? Before we dig into that let me give you a couple of things to consider. When I originally launched FinalTouch and posted a link on HN there was a lot of discussions about the pricing. I started at $16.99. Some people thought it was too high, some thought it was probably too low. A couple of people pointed out that the lower the price the higher the support cost and I do think there is some merit to that. A couple of people reported issues, those are now fixed and I am awaiting Apple to approve the update. In that respect I am glad i didn't set it too low since those issues would probably have amplified.

There seem to be 3 different approaches to the pricing strategy.

• Start low and then increase until your sales curve breaks
• Start high and then discount the hell out of it
• Start high and stay high. You are a niche product.

I have gotten a few comments about the price being too high. I can only imagine there are also a bigger number of people who think that the price is too high but just didn't care to say and and simply didn't buy. Most people who were vocal about it did seem to say that the app was priced fairly.

After comparing the number of visitors from HN with the number of sales I would say that on the surface it looks like the price was too high. But I don't think I have enough data to know just yet. After a while I did lower the price 50% to $6.99. It did seem to keep sales from coming to a standstill but as I said still not enough data to verify that assumption. Also since the time periods are different it's hard to know. And even after the reduction some people still seemed to think it was too high.

4 Important Events

Looking at the data and correlating it with sales I think there were 4 important events that had an effect on traffic and sales. I will go through each of them and try to extrapolate insights into what is going on. Now please remember that my numbers are not 100% exact as there is some overlap, but they are close enough to be helpful.

Event #1 – Hacker News

There is no doubt that getting front page on HN does give you quite a lot of views. I have been lucky that many of my blog posts have reached #1 and that gave me quite a lot of traffic. When I launched WeekendHacker I got 3000 signups in 48 hours (now at 6500 and 150 projects in and launching the website soon). This time I reached #1 and got around 150 points. But compared to flattering yourself with visitor traffic and signup conversion, selling a product is a much more humbling experience. On the internet asking for money for you product is almost heresy, but I have to say it's also one of the coolest experiences ever.
The numbers went something like this:

Now HN isn't a design centric community so I wasn't expecting too much. But as you will see later on it's not impressive and does seem to indicate that the price either too high or types of people just aren't on HN.

Event #2 – Dribbble

Dribbble is an invite only design community with some of the best designers in the world. The rules of dribble are simple. You post a 400X300 pixel image with something you are working on. People then comment on it, follow each other and can choose to like what you posted. It's a fairly successful site and the standard is generally very high. My first post was a snapshot of the FT app and got 56 likes out of +600 views which is pretty good.
The numbers went something like this:

Event #3 – Forrst

Forrst is another community I use but catered both for designers and developers. People share everything from links, to mockups and code. It's run by Kyle Bragger and I have been a member from the beginning. I actually got some of my original beta testers from there. Forrst has something called acorns which is a kind of currency that you got through a number of ways you participate with the community. I spent around 20 of those acorns which gave me a promoted spot and 3000 impressions. I only got 20 likes and a couple of comments. At this point the price was set to 6.99USD.
The numbers went something like this:

All in all pretty disappointing referral traffic although conversion is pretty good. I think the main problem here was that people don't always look at the promoted post. Or my post wasn't interesting enough for people to like it. In comparison when I first promoted it to get beta testers I had 63 likes and 25 comments, plus i got the 20 beta testers I was looking for instantly. Please note I made more sales than I had click throughs on the Buy button. It could mean that people are opening up the app store and typing in the name directly. Or people just happened to find it as they were browsing around the app store.

Event #4 – WebDesignersDepot

Last but not least and a little unexpected. WebDesignerDepot.com did a post called. "What’s new for web designers – Oct 2011" featuring my product first. WDD have 300K twitter followers and is part of the Smashing Magazine empire. I tracked the retweets of the article and it went through the charts. I can only imagine the traffic being around at least 50K for that post alone. Then I had a look at my stats. A much more humbling experience
The numbers went something like this:

Disappointing to say the least, but then again compared to the actual number of visits it's way better than HN. Then again the pricing was different with HN so maybe not.

Summing up the 4 events

Needless to say I am not a millionaire from this and probably never will be. But It's also important to point out that I have spent no money what-so-ever on marketing yet. I can see that people are starting to ask if other people have tried out FinalTouch, so at least I know it's starting to gain some interest without me being over it 24/7. If we compare visitor counts vs. sales then I definitely need a lot more WebDesignerDepot posts since they seem to both hit my target audience and people do seem to be interested in buying the product.

An encounter with a customer and a possible pivot opportunity.

September 17th I received a mail from a customer who bought my app and was happy but complained about a few things. We looked into the issues he had and it is now part of the update awaiting approval in the app store. But see this is not the end of it. As it turned out he was in a pretty special situation and had bought my app for a very special reason

Here is what he said we I queried him about his setup:

Yes you did read it right. a paralyzed man. The amazing software that allow for this is Original Instruments HeadMouse Extreme. It turns out that I had made an app that give him extra precision on the fly when he needs it. Proud product creator? You bet!

It turns out that Orin also sell third party software so I am trying to get in contact with someone from their sales department to see if they are interested in reselling this software. Could be an interesting area to move into.

Summing Up The Numbers

And now to the big question how much did I make all in all? Well the numbers looks like this

Not a lot but it's a beginning. The good thing is that when ever people get learn about the app they seem to like it. My guess is that some need more security either through other people they trust, through a demo or through video. So there are definitely things to improve.

My Conclusion

So here is my take on it. I have no doubt that once people understand the app they like it. But there are several things I need to be better at:

• It needs to be clearer what this app do.
  I am losing possible customers because it's not 100% clear what FinalTouch is and how it works.

• Need to get my app featured on many more sites.
  Until I better understand how to approach the SEO I will in large parts be depending on design sites writing about the app.

• Need to get my app featured on many more sites.
  Until I better understand how to approach the SEO I will in large parts be depending on design sites writing about the app.

• Will need to improve the product with a few more features
  A lot of people have asked me about the ability to turn of mouse acceleration, so I am looking into that. I am also getting a few request for the speed to be lowered even more. The problem is that to do that I will have to write a separate driver, which is doable but Apple does not allow for custom drivers on the app store as far as I am aware, which brings me to the next question

• Should I create a version that can be sold directly on FinalTouchApp.com?
  This would allow me to do more with the app and refine it even further. It might also allow me to improve my sales and perhaps look into doing a version for OSX sub 10.6.

• Need to be clearer on my pricing strategy
  I still need to figure out whether I am going for higher volume or higher price.

Until Next Time

Let me know your ideas, until then here are a couple of things I put on the list.

• A/B testing.
  The people at VisualWebOptimizer.com were so kind to let me try out their software. It's pretty cool and I will be using it for this coming month. There are a lot of things to test. Among others I want to test the position of the buy button, the text of the buy button, the price/no-price on the landing page and a bunch of other things. There is also some confusion about whether this only works for Magic Mouse which I have to deal with. My copy although acceptable needs to be much stronger so I will spend some time on that too.

• Make a better looking icon/logo.
  Let's be honest. The icon I have looks like sh*t. I need to rework that as it apparently really do have an effect on whether people download it or not.

• Tighten up the website.
  There are a lot of little things I want to change on the website to make it better and more refined.

• Get in contact with more design portals and designers.
  The list is made, now it's only a question of whether it will actually be well received.