On Tuesday, I participated in Two Dollar Tuesday.
Mike Dattolo from LittleFin emailed me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to participate. He plans to run Two Dollar Tuesday as a regular weekly promotion. One of his own apps, Compartments would be participating in the bundle as well along with Socialite. The idea was that Dropzone and these two apps would be discounted to $2 for one day only. The individual developers would simply reduce the prices of their apps to $2 in the Mac App Store for Tuesday only and we would keep all the proceeds.
I was totally unsure whether to participate. Dropzone normally sells for $14 and I was uncertain whether offering such a large discount was a good idea. I worried about a few things: That it would reduce the perceived value of my app, that it would upset other customers who missed the discount and that the support burden would be too high.
In the end I flipped a coin and decided to go for it. The results of the promotion have blown me away. So much so that I’ve decided to share the actual sales numbers with you all, but first lets take a look at what happened to my ranking in the App Store. Before the feature, my ranking in the Productivity category (U.S store) was averaging around 170 and I was not showing at all in the top paid apps category of the store. On the day of the sale I was propelled into the top 3, not just in the productivity category, but in the top paid apps overall:
People tell me that Dropzone was even beating pages and was second only to Lion for a short while. Unfortunately I did not get a screenshot of this. In Germany I even beat Lion and was the #1 selling app overall.
I have shown sales for the 19th, 20th and 21st to give you a rough idea of how many I was selling at the normal price of $14. There was a little bit of overlap with the 21st (maybe a few hours) as Mike had us set our prices well in advance so that from the start of the 22nd all three apps would be selling for $2. That is why the 21st is quite a bit higher.
As you can see, I sold over 6700 copies as a result of the sale. I have never before sold any amount close to this much before. When Apple featured me on the front page of the App Store I sold around 300 copies (that was at the old price of $14).
Lets see what this works works out to in terms of actual revenue:
So I made over $8000 US after Apples 30% cut has been subtracted. This is beyond my wildest dreams of what I expected to make.
A lot of this was due to the efforts of Mike Dattolo who did a fantastic job contacting bloggers and marketing the special. It was promoted on The Verge, Lifehacker and a number of other sites. You should check out his Compartments app, and I highly recommend participating in his promotion if you’re asked.
Thank you all for the amazing support and validation of my work.
Thank you for sharing your figures, it is really great for the rest of us to know to get a sense of just how much price and promotion affect sales. I would be ESPECIALLY interested in seeing the numbers for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday after they roll in.
What do you do next? Is a permanent price reduction the obvious next step or do you think it wouldn’t be worth it without the promotion?
It would be great to see a follow up on how the lift in visibility in the store feeds back into itself
I expect when the price goes back up the sales will still be higher than before the reduction?
Yup, this is what creative people do all the time. The power in numbers is amazing.
I was a very early DropZone user. I stopped using it because of two reasons: one was performance (we had an email exchange about this; you were very helpful but my issues unfortunately was not resolved), and second, nothing other than the SCP Upload works when I am using an SSH based SOCKS proxy. A pity. The dock based version also used to skip around over the screen. But I still loved the idea of the app. Then when you moved to the MAS and made it a menubar app, I was once again attracted to it, but with only SCP working, the $14 price tag was steep. So I held off. At $2 it is an irresistible deal. So I am a customer once again! SCP is the only thing that works even now, but for $2 that’s still a bargain. I would have paid $4 for that functionality. IMHO, $14 is a price point where people think a few times. I suspect your sales would be much higher if the price were just a bit south of $10. But you probably have sales data that shows otherwise. At any rate, thank you for the sale and the product.
Amazing figures. Is this a one off event? Should new customers get wind of this I don’t see them paying full price again, but waiting for this selected discount day…
Awesome numbers. Still 100% happy I bought it at full price (and even when it wasn’t on the MAS). Definitely a great app and I can’t wait to see the things that come over the next few months.
I agree with ravi, maybe 9.99 would be a nice place to settle after this deal. Pricing is a hard thing and I think only numbers and time will tell.
I’m very much agree with ravi. The app is useful indeed but the price point should be somewhere near $10.
Congrats on a very successful campaign.
I wish I could do that everyday.
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Hey, thank you so much for sharing the numbers! I too would love to know what happens over the next week and months as your app gets organic downloads from being in the Top Paid apps. Perhaps a follow-up post in a few days? 🙂
The permanent price point of the Application should be somewhere between $4.99 and $9.99
The whole point of being in a tightly managed App Store is that it enables a much higher volume of sales, you want your application to be within the “impulse” range for the American consumer.
Wish more developers would do this.
in term of sales , yes it mean a lot, but what about the support follow by it ? example no of support request from these people ?
To follow up on my comment regarding SOCKS, a workaround for the more geeky (which is likely true of you if anyway, if you are using a SOCKS proxy): I installed ‘tsocks’ using DarwinPorts and ran DropZone through it. What ‘tsocks’ does is that when asked to run non-socksified apps like DropZone it traps their network calls and routes them through the SOCKS proxy. And that works quite fine for me. I am now a fully satisfied customer :-).
Hi John, Just popped into your website to see what you’re up to! That is awesome to see your app doing so well and very interesting to see how the pricing impacts your overall sales. I’ll be interested to see in the longer term what price you settle on. See you soon hopefully 🙂
Hey Tim! Thanks. I’ve set the price at $10 for now. It’s definitely resulted in better sales and higher profits compared to $14. It’s very tricky to find the sweet spot.
Catch up soon!