A Windows Phone 7 App: The Numbers

24 Feb 2011 by Nigel Sampson

An avid reader of startup blogs I’ve always enjoyed reading about the companies that are completely transparent about their numbers, how the company is going and the history for those numbers. There are some great lessons that can be learned from other companies when they do this. So I thought I’d do the same for the first three months of my first app To Do Today.

A bit of history first, To Do Today was originally written with the idea of building my first app in a relatively known domain and to get my feet wet in building and releasing an app into the marketplace.

I released the first version around the 11th of November 2010, not long after the launch of the phone. Thankfully with a decent emulator released before launch I had a good head start to build what I considered my Minimum Viable Product, a very simple task manager, no categorisation or anything I’d consider advanced.

At launch the things that I thought made it unique was that it the app that fit the closest with Windows Phone 7 “Metro” design language and had some usability short cuts to let users select “Today”, “Tomorrow”, “This Week” etc. as due dates.

About two months after launch (early January 2011) I rolled out the first major update (1.2) including recurring tasks as a feature. It was one of three major feature requests I was receiving via email and given no other task app in the marketplace supported the feature I felt it was the obvious choice to concentrate on.

In late January, early February I released the next major update (1.4) that added categories for tasks, I’ve been receiving positive feedback for both releases and the average review score has been climbing.

The numbers

In total To Do Today has been downloaded 1,150 times in the last three months 234 of those have been paid downloads. The history of the trial vs paid downloads is as follows:

The initial trend that jumps out is the spike in downloads in the first month after launch, followed by a decline to a another steady rate, although in the last month or so daily sales figures are rising again. An interesting note is the complete lack of Christmas bump, I’m not sure why that is.

From what I can see the inadvertent price change in early January (discussed in What went wrong) and no effect on sales.

The latest version update looks to have had a positive effect on sales, I’m crossing my fingers that this continues.

What went right

Looking at the numbers you’ll see the conversion rate from downloading the trial (which is limited to four tasks) is hovering around 20% which I’m really happy about. Hopefully I can keep the conversion rate going as the marketplace increases in volume.

Given the market size of the phone users, the fact that the app hasn’t been featured by Microsoft or any major website the numbers fall in line with my expectations when compared other platforms in similar situations.

The “Metro” design of Windows Phone 7 really appeals to me and for someone with limited design skills a lot of the resources available allow one such as me to build something that looks like it fits in with the rest of the phone. I believe a lot of initial sales were driven by this.

The decision to reorder my feature priorities and release recurring tasks in the first update was the correct one. I believe getting recurring tasks out as a unique selling point (at that time) was beneficial.

The marketplace submission process has been fairly painless, the average turnaround on any submission was around 48 hours. There were a couple of rejections, initially frustrating but I think some of the feedback from the rejection made the app a better product.

What went wrong

One thing that got the best of me is that the Windows Phone marketplace doesn’t pre-populate the update forms with the existing details of the application. You have to re-populate all your tags, descriptions, categories and so forth.

This was where my attention to detail slipped and I posted an app update in the wrong category with the wrong price. The unfortunate extra detail on this is that the default category is Games / Puzzles, so suddenly my app moved from the standard menu into the Games hub. As soon as I noticed I pushed another update, in total it was placed incorrectly for about six days.

I’m not entirely certain whether the shift in category is related, but by the time it made it’s way back to the Productivity category it came in about fifteen places lower in the category and as since slipped further down the lists.

The price change was the other missed change, I had accidentally upped the price from $1.99 to $2.99, I noticed this pretty quick but decided to leave it as an experiment. It hasn’t had an adverse affect on sales, but I may lower it again to see if it has a positive affect.

At the time of wiring To Do Today received 21 reviews with an average of 6.95 / 10 according to the marketplace aggregation website on Windows Phone Geek. One thing you’ll notice a number of 0 / 10 reviews with comments that don’t warrant such a harsh score. This I believe is a side effect of the Zune software where people are entering comments without posting a rating and therefore rating it a 0.

Quite frustrating and no real way for me to deal with it. Looking at iOS and Android sites there doesn’t seem to be any better ways to deal with negative reviews in other marketplaces once they’re posted, but there are strategies to prevent them.

A great point of difference for WP7 are the Live Tiles on the home screen, being able to display useful information in those tiles provides a fantastic feedback mechanism and can add real polish to an app. A task management app really lends itself to a Live Tile as well. Unfortunately my attempts have been hampered so far in adding one, I’ve covered the technical reasons why in “Why To Do Today doesn’t have a Live Tile”.

Lessons learned

So what have I learned from the process so far?

The first is to check, double check and triple check the details of any submission to the marketplace, a stupid mistake by me here certainly cost.

Provide easy in-app mechanisms for users to send you feedback. This will give you a way to start a dialogue with a frustrated user that would be impossible if they just left a negative review. During the latest update I ensured the support email address on the about page was clickable, this tripled the amount of email feedback and I haven’t had a negative review since.

Where to from here?

From a functionality point of view I think To Do Today is pretty much complete. If the capability to add decent Live Tiles becomes available I’ll certainly be adding that. Otherwise the most requested features are different integration points which I’ll be leaving out for the moment. The goal being a simple stand alone app.

In terms of my next app I’m currently in the process of brainstorming that.

What I’d like to see

In terms of the marketplace I’d love to see better access to sales figures, compiling the above graphs was such a pain in the ass. Also populating updates with app details would be nice.

On the technical side, better Live Tiles, more integration with phone software and hardware would go a long way to being able to create better apps.