The Minority Report

Yesterday, some dude wrote about his trials and tribulations developing an app for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Here is my stream of consciousness about him getting slashdotted and the end results.

First, here are the results of his getting slashdotted (I was totally dying to know what happened):

So, some number, since I had dozens of emails/tweets/comments asking about this:

Page Views:
Day prior: 626
Slashdot day: 25,307!
Traffic increase: ~40x

Sales of Dapple:
Day prior: 4
Slashdot day: 17
Sales increase: ~4x

Clearly the Slashdot post did have an effect on sales, although it was a small one.Streaming Colour Studios » Blog Archive » The Slashdot Effect

Wow, 25,000 pageviews and only 17 sales. He sold
1
out of
1489 people viewingHe sold 1 out of 1489 people viewing. I have never been good at math but that is like a 0.04789asdf694% conversion. That sucks! They say in all the Internet marketing material I’ve ever read that your conversion ratio should be around 1.00%. I’m hoping, cause I like this guy’s balls, that he get’s a little lingering effect from that press. Regardless, $85 sucks balls. Only $31,915.17 to go…

He comments on his pricing here:

This was the biggest thing I got feedback on. A lot of people asked me if I had considered lowering the price of the game. The short answer is: yes, I’ve thought about it a lot. Like I said in my Numbers Post, I have a lot of plans for ways to promote Dapple in the coming weeks and months. I’ll leave it at that for now.Streaming Colour Studios » Blog Archive » The Slashdot Effect

Again, after reading about…and playing with some of my own Internet marketing pricing, I question his decision to price the app at $4.99. Now I may be a lowly chicken lawyer and don’t know jack shit about the App Store or iPhone development but sometimes for a quality application, product or game you have to price UP. Yes, it’s less intuitive and yes, he’s locked in now, but pricing dirt cheap sometimes conveys that your product is cheap.

There is a reason why products on TV sell between the price points of $19.99 and $29.99 because there is tons of research that says that is the price point people think is not too cheap but not too expensive. Is his game worth $0.99? Yes. Is it worth $4.99? Yes. Is it worth…$19.99? I doubt it but $0.99 and $4.99 seem to be volume pricing. Is he going to get volume traffic to his application? Is he going to get 32,000 purchase volume from the App Store?

He’s on the right track with this viral marketing campaign…I’m calling a spade a spade here…but could he have priced higher?

Bottom line for me is, his game seems good. His marketing seems good. He seems like a cool enough cat. He got me to subscribe to his blog and write two posts on his troubles and this one might be the longest post on the site period.

I really hope that he is successful and makes millions on his app.

Owen, hang in there for two more years buddy. Keep making cool games and you’ll hit it. Establish your reputation with this game and keep going.

Oh and finally, buy Dapple here, here and here.

Here is how to play the game. It’s like Bejeweled or Bedazzled but with a painting twist. It’s cool lookin’.