Aditya Kothadiya’s Blog

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4 months ago I launched my part-time project – a Voice Call based reminder iPhone application – JustRemindIt. When I launched it, I had promised that I’ll keep writing my experience about launching, marketing and running an iPhone application business. But, I didn’t keep up my promise and didn’t write anything about it. I just launched the app, and then that’s it. I didn’t work more on the app after that. I did some basic feature enhancements and bug fixes, but not major feature announcements. I didn’t push for any marketing either – absolutely nothing – I know, it was a big mistake. No, I didn’t loose any interest in the project, it’s just that I got too swamped up with my other social commerce startup Shopalize that I couldn’t give enough attention to this project.

JustRemindIt is probably one of my best part-time projects. It solves a real problem for many people, it has “wow” effect in how it solves that problem, it has paying and happy customers, it is growing steadily without any efforts, and it still has great potential in future. Though I was not actively working on this project, whenever I used to get some time, I kept improving it bit by bit. I plan to launch a big update for this service very soon, so stay tuned. But there is one thing I was quite regular about this project – monitoring the stats pretty much once in every few days. I just looked at the stats today morning and thought I would share those with you all to give an perspective on how iPhone app economy works. Hope these numbers will be useful to you in your endeavors.

Setting the right expectations

Since JustRemindIt is not a “gaming”, “social” or “local” iPhone app, I didn’t expect to have huge download success. In fact, it’s a reminder application to increase your productivity, I thought the targeted audience on iOS platform will be very limited. Since iOS platform is primarily a entertainment platform and not a productivity platform, my expectations of going it viral or featuring in top charts were very low. On top of that, I also have a freemium business model, so I kept my ambitions and projections quite realistic.

Ok, now let’s dive into the numbers, and then we’ll discuss some lessons I’ve learned so far.

Stats for last 4 months

1. Number of downloads

JustRemindIt iPhone app is free to download on the app store, and it gives you few free reminder credits to try out the app before you need to buy more credits. The whole business model was based on the “pay-as-you-go” premise. I think this model worked quite well instead of charging upfront money to download the app. In 4 months, the app was downloaded close to 1400 times. First month had the highest downloads, as I had done some launch publicity that time. After that, without zero marketing efforts, the download rate is quite constant. On an average, there are 10 downloads per day.

2. Number of registered users

JustRemindIt iPhone app requires users to register to JustRemindIt service. I knew that this design strategy had a flaw and I would loose some users, but I decided to use this approach from future plans perspective. I’m planning to launch a web application of the same app in few days, and wanted a way for users to sync up their iPhone and Web app reminders in a seamless way. I could have achieved the same results using different strategies, but it would have required more work and delayed my launch. So I launched with a strategy where users need to register before they start using the app. And sure enough, I dropped 40% of users. I’ve around 60% users of all users who downloaded the app registered with JustRemindIt service.

3. Active users

Since it’s a productivity based app, my assumption was many users will not continue using this service after first few uses. Typically productivity specific initiatives generally don’t last more than first few days when our energy is high. With this understanding, I assumed that if user schedules more than 3 reminders using JustRemindIt app, then she’s an active user. Currently I’ve little more than 25% of total registered users as active users. In active users also, not all users are equally active. Roughly, 20% of active users drive around 70% activity, remaining 30% activity is driven by rest of 80% active users.

4. Number of reminders

The activity by active users is to send reminders to themselves or other people. More than 1100 reminders have been sent so far using JustRemindIt service in last 4 months. That’s about roughly 10 reminders per day. Of course, weekends are less active than weekdays, but I’m just giving you a rough idea. Anyways, this is quite less than my expectations, so this is one area where I want to focus on and improve these numbers.

5. Paid users

As mentioned earlier, I give few free reminders for new users to try out, but once they consume all free credits, they need to recharge their account with new reminders. As of today, around 5% of registered users have recharged their account after using free reminders.

6. Paid plans

I’ve $0.99, $2.99 and $5.99 paid plans to recharge your account. The $5.99 is the most popular plan with 80% users purchasing this plan. $0.99 is the least popular plan.

7. Repeat paid users

Again, people might recharge their account once, and then might not come back to recharge again. So I wanted to measure how many of these paid users have recharged their account more than once. Approximately 15% users of paid users have recharged their account more than once. Those are the truly happy and loyal customers!

8. Revenue

Finally, revenue – probably the ultimate metric you want to track. First and foremost, this is my first project, which is making real revenue by “charging users to pay to use your product”. I had few other projects in the past which made some money through Google AdSense, but this project gave totally different satisfaction and sense of achievement. In fact, having paying customers is the ultimate validation of your idea. So probably nothing keeps me motivated and excited about this project than knowing that I’ve paying customers, and that list is continuously growing. Anyways, back to numbers, I’ve made decent few hundreds in last 4 months. I haven’t reached to 1K mark though, may be it will happen in few more months once I launch the Web application with Premium features and monthly Subscription plan.

9. Profit

The app is profitable if you don’t consider the time I had put in initially in developing it. Right now, it makes more money than what I’m spending on server and call expenses. So I might like to say it’s a profitable business, but as we know, technically it’s not if we consider my time involvement.

10. Customers

Though I launched and positioned my app initially for consumers on iOS platform, and though they are the majority of registered users, the most active users are actually small professional and personal service businesses. Businesses are actually finding this service more valuable than consumers. So definitely, my next focus will be to cater these business users with advanced features.

Lessons learned so far

1. Positioning your service uniquely is very important.

There was no dearth of reminder services on both web and on iOS platform when I launched this app. There are many Email/SMS based and some Voice Call based reminders services on the Web, and there are also many Email/SMS reminder iPhone apps and very few Voice Call based reminder iPhone apps on the app store. There are also few Text to Voice Call reminder services on the Web, but there was no iPhone app in the app store which was doing Text to Voice Call conversion for reminders. So I decided to start solely on the iOS platform to position uniquely and then expand to Web application once I have enough traction. I also decided to just focus on the Voice reminders than doing all Email/SMS reminders to begin with. I think it worked quite well. I don’t think I would have gotten these many registered users solely on the Web application in 4 months, especially given so much competition in this space. Definitely now I’ll expand to Web application, and will also add Email and SMS reminders, but if I would have done that before, then I think I would have gotten compared with all other apps and services out there, and would have lost my uniqueness or “wow” factor as explained in next point.

2. Having little “wow” factor makes a good difference.

Reminder services are not new. Voice reminders are also not new. But Text message to Voice Call was something new. Or at least, it was not obvious to many people. This feature or approach added “wow” factor to my app. Many people’s eyes light up when I explain them how my app works – just type a text message and our service will call the receiver as a voice call. And naturally they download it, tell other people, and so on.

3. Having a real business model for your part-time projects makes your efforts all worth it.

Part-time projects are fun to build and launch, but not after that. No one likes to “maintain” the project. Everyone wants to “launch” cool new things. As soon as your project gets into a maintenance mode, you start loosing the interest and motivation to maintain it. That’s where having a real-business model and paying customers makes a huge difference. Not because you’re responsible to provide your customers a reliable service, but because it’s a great satisfaction that you’ve build something valuable and useful that people are actually giving you their money.

4. To make real business on the iPhone app, you’ll need a lot bigger scale and hence lot more marketing efforts.

My goal for this project was not to build a real startup out of it, but more to study and understand the app store and SAAS based app’s economy. I also priced my product with low margins because my goal was not to make lot of money out of this, but was to get more people use it and have some of them pay you that covers its cost. I also didn’t work at all on the marketing front, which I definitely plan to do more now going forward. But based on my current revenues numbers, I’ll need lot faster execution, lot more focus on marketing and sales, and lot more volume to make this as a viable business that can support me.

Plans going forward

1. Support and new development

As said earlier, I’ll be launching a web application of this very soon – may be in couple weeks with basic features. It’s primarily targeted for professional and personal service businesses. Then I will continue adding new premium features with monthly subscription based plans for these businesses. I’ll continue supporting my existing customers, in fact that’s always a higher priority for me than adding new features. I also have lot of feature requests for iPhone app from existing customers, so I’ll definitely work on those as well one by one.

2. Marketing

As said before, I didn’t good job in this, and I want to fix it for future releases. I’ve some interesting ideas and plans for this, and I think it’s just a matter of time that I need focus on it and execute it.

3. Get help

As I’ll be super busy with my other startup Shopalize, I won’t be able to give lot of attention to this project to achieve above tasks simply on my own. I’m trying to find some ways to delegate this work in some ways. I’m thinking either I’ll outsource this entire Product Development efforts to low cost centers, and I just take care of Marketing, Product Management, and Customer Support efforts going forward. Or the second option is to get someone as a partner on the board who wants to learn and build this business in his/her part-time.

Anyways, I hope this information was useful to you and hope you’ll do more right things while launching your next iPhone app business. Also, if you want to join me, or know someone who would like to help me on this project, please feel free to contact me at aditya@justremindit.com. Also, let me know your thoughts and suggestions about how should I execute it in much smarter way in the comments section below. Looking forward for your inputs.