Personal experience
In the past few months, I quit my job in Beijing, stopped writing the tech blog I’ve been writing since sophomore year, and went from being an iOS engineer in a big company to being a busy indie developer at home.
These are the 17 apps I have published on the App Store, among which Nihon Cam is my main work at present, flash and Nihon are the second. Nihon Cam and Nihon were both recommended by App Store editors.
At present, my monthly income of independent development is equal to my previous salary. My App has been downloaded 56W times in App Store. Almost all the design, development, operation and other content of the application are completed by me alone.
And the point is, I gradually found that the vast majority of the knowledge that needs to be used in this is only known by others, but you do not know it.
Your company inside the product little sister, operation little sister, sales little sister to master the knowledge, you can actually through simple combat, to quickly acquire. You can even be more sophisticated than they are, converting knowledge directly into money through code.
Dry goods
The following content is suitable for the crowd
An engineer who has been exporting code steadily in the company, but has never released his work in the App Store, or any Android App Store, or wechat mini program, or even made a few hundred yuan or less than 100 downloads. And friends who have been rejected over 100 times by Apple. No kidding.
This is probably more suitable for mobile development, especially iOS development. If you don’t have your own tech stack here, you can collaborate with people around you to make things.
What if I can only write code, but I don’t know anything about design
Gif Master is an app I made in sophomore year and have given up maintenance for a long time. I made my first fortune on it, and it’s still downloaded occasionally to this day, and you can see that the “design” is almost entirely based on the iOS specification.
Change the background color of all navigation bar, TAB bar, prompt text and so on to uniform dark color, buttons, text and so on are all uniform white, so that one dark and one light constitute a simple theme color. The ICONS are all off-the-shelf materials found on sites like FlatIcon.
In this way, you can create a “not ugly” App with a simple page and a bunch of code to change colors and frames without drawing any prototypes or designs. If you go to the App Store and search, you will find that many list, browser and calendar apps are not good-looking at all, but that doesn’t stop them from making money, as long as they are not ugly. The important thing is to take the first step and build something. (Do you think Taobao App is good-looking?)
I don’t know what kind of App to make
Another way to think about it: a list App: a TableView/ListView plus a local storage calendar App: find a ready-made calendar on Github, plus a local push notification photography App: Well, as long as you learn how to use GPUImage, you can make beautiful picture show 70% of the functions of the notes App: TextView + local storage + ready language to text SDK……
To have good ideas, good ideas, this is a huge topic, and I don’t have the ability to talk about it completely. But what you can do right now is to take those apps that you use all the time, but there are always some things that don’t make you happy, and make one yourself, and don’t do the ones that don’t work, that’s fine.
But only when you make it, when you use it and find the flaws, when your users give you feedback, will you really feel like you’re making your own product. Instead of being forced by the company’s product to fix a bug that only one in 100,000 people will encounter and that forces you to work overtime.
However, after their hard work to a small, medium-sized project to make money, how to do, continue to read ~
How can I make money with my own App
Generally speaking, there are three ways to make money:
- Make paid App (iOS and Android overseas market only)
- Free App plus in-app purchase, which means “pay to lock up more features”, is available on iOS and Android, where iOS has been able to achieve stable and sustainable monthly revenue with IAP subscriptions
- Plus advertising (the only way to make money in the Domestic Android market)
As this is the focus of the article, I will elaborate on it below
How does App do payment and in-app purchase
1. Should you charge for your App or make it free? For the iOS App Store, if your App is really good, there is no alternative to it to some extent, and you want to monetize it, you can do paid apps. Or if your product has high server pressure, you don’t want a large number of free users to overwhelm your server, you can also choose to make a paid App.
In addition, I recommend that you use the free App + in-app purchase model, because the App Store, free products and paid products are on a different order of magnitude. Many people are interested in your product, but they can’t just pay for it based on preview videos and screenshots in the App Store.
The paid subscription model has a long history, just think of QQ members. Now this model has been extended from streaming media subscription (such as netease Cloud Music membership and IQiyi membership) to tools (such as VSCO’s annual membership fee of more than 100 RMB).
This actually solves a huge problem for you, which is that your core loyal users need to keep paying you. In the later stages of your project, you may lack an effective promotion strategy. In this case, you avoid the problem that you need to maintain and improve your existing product without more user growth, and users will build a relationship with you, preventing you from running away after a wave of profits.
After all, continuous payment requires a determination on the part of users, so it is more suitable for those apps that are of high value to users.
Add AdMob ads to your App. I wrote it more than two years ago.
Here’s some more information:
- In cases where there is no data matching, where you don’t know who your customers are and you can only randomly deliver ads to your customer service through a third-party SDK, the click-through rate of your banner ads can be very, very low, like 0.1%, which is almost like a false touch. (This is why the Headline model is so powerful, because they know what you like.) Plus, your App is likely to be tool-based and end in 60 seconds, so if you don’t have a large user base (at least 1000+ downloads per day), the AD revenue is likely to be very low.
- If you’re doing something like a Reader, where people are going to be looking at PDFS for tens of minutes, and you put a banner AD there all the time, you can make good money. This method can also be combined with the above mentioned internal purchase, such as paying 6 yuan to remove advertising. You can have a combination of revenue that allows both free and paid users to meet their needs.
- The most profitable ads on the market right now are video incentive ads (access links come with their own ladder), which don’t require users to click on them, as long as they are forced to watch them once, they can make money. This works if the mini-game is about to go to the next level, or if the user downloads a file from your App and you give it to them in exchange for watching one of these video ads. If you do a good job, maybe you can make 50 yuan from 1,000 AD displays. If you have 5000 users and each of them sees it twice, you can make 500 yuan. The more users use it, the more money you make.
I don’t have money for advertising. How can I promote my App
You can find links in the Settings pages of the two apps, color Card and Time Card. You can click to download my App or find the entrance to download these two apps in my App. Thus, a matrix of mutual promotion of apps can be formed. Any App in this matrix is recommended by Weibo and wechat public accounts and gets traffic, which can help other apps improve sales. This is the easiest and cheapest way to promote.
Just find friends around you, or try to contact some developers and trade with them.
This only applies to paid or in-app purchases, both on the App Store and Google Play. Many apps and websites that promote applications need to give benefits to readers. If you are willing to take the initiative to provide App or internal purchase exchange codes to them, they can benefit each other. Of course, specific to find these public numbers, micro blog operators, you need to go to private chat.
3. Dynamic price mechanism (already popular abroad)
- Through the paid App to limit the exemption, to achieve the surge of traffic (free wool everyone wants to take a handful), with the way to sell their own advertising, and then restore the price. After a long time, they can be exempted again.
- Determine a price that maximizes your profit by changing the price regularly, such as 1, 3, 6, 8, and 12, one by one, to look at the revenue. If the App has a major redesign, the job can be done again.
ASO
App Search Optimization is to let users find and Search your App through various means, so as to obtain natural and stable traffic. Here are two methods:
- First of all, you should be clear about your competing products and which App users may be highly overlapped with yours. You should recommend your App by leaving scores on relevant Zhihu issues, weibo promotion and other places. In this way, other people will search for your competitive products or other relevant content on Baidu, Zhihu, Weibo and even wechat, which can increase the exposure of your App.
- If you’ve already accessed App Store Connect (formerly iTunes Connect), you don’t know how your App’s keywords are written. There are a lot of skills in it, for example, the word you write should not be too “big”, for example, if you write a “wechat”, “douyin” such words traffic has already been carved up, you write one more is useless; Your keyword should not be too small. It should get at least 1,000 searches (www.qimai.cn). Your keywords should also fit the tone of your App. For example, if you make giF-related tools, users will not download the keywords of financial apps if they find them. This word should be your competitor’s word with moderate traffic. When users search for this word, you should be in the top three, because no one will look at the App after the fifth. The more important traffic than keywords is the main title and subtitle of your App. Don’t just write your App name in this place. For example, if your App is called “Daily List”, you might change it to “Daily List – Little fresh to do list” to get more search terms like “little fresh to do list” and “to do list”. That’s real money.
Recommended reading
Getting Started: How do indie developers solve backend problems
Getting started: I can write code, how to do indie development
Step up: How do developers use data analytics to achieve exponential revenue growth
Advanced: How indie Developers can Monetize In-app Purchases — Subscription