Three months ago I released my first app, Whiteboard Capture. This application allows the user to take photos of their whiteboards using the iPhone’s built-in camera and then post-process them to remove artifacts from the image leaving only a crisp clean image of the important data on the whiteboard. After processing the user can save the image to their Photo Album so that they can share it via email. Simple, useful.
The majority of feedback on the application has been positive. I’ve been very encouraged by most of it. I have lots of ideas for the future including cropping and squaring the image, as well as additional filters.
Stability of the application has been a major thorn in my side. By nature of what the application does it uses a lot of memory. Any minor memory leak or delay in freeing unneeded memory and the application will crash with out of memory errors. As of version 1.3.1 I have hopefully addressed these issues. It’s not easy. One thing I’ve learned is that I need to have a beta test group that can really exercise the application. This is one area I’m going to improve on with version 2.0. Solid, battle-tested.
What I think people really want to see are sales numbers. I’ve been conflicted on how much information to share but have decided to just lay it all out there. I’m not getting rich off the App Store but I will be going to WWDC on the App Store’s dime. And I’m happy with that. Progress is being made.
To start off here are the total sales (minus Apple’s cut) for 88 days on the App Store: $2488.28
I’ve experimented with pricing the app at $0.99, $1.99 and $2.99. Since sales trend downward in general it was hard to gather meaningful data about the value of different prices. My gut feeling is that prices below $5 all end up with the same daily revenue. I believe this is what other developers were seeing as well.
For the first 2 months I was continually in the Top 100 in the Productivity category. Peaking at around number 45 on sales of 83 units a day. After dropping off the top 100 sales dropped and seem to have stabilized at around $15/day.
Here is a graph of sales over time. Annotations indicate when updates or other events happened.
Sales (with annotations of new versions):
Sales (annotations of price changes):
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