The tale of how to make a million in Belarusian

Meet: Slava and Sergey. Citizens of the Republic of Belarus. They have heads on their shoulders, in connection with which Paul Graham , 37 signals , Nassim Taleb , etc. are periodically read. Over the past year, they have been able to break the linear relationship between the time spent on work and the result obtained. In the sense earned a million. Rubles. Not Belarusian. On one program for Android. Per year.

Our heroes did not have experience, strategy, advertising and special hopes for success. However, let's give them the opportunity to tell everything ...


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Sergey: a few years ago, watching the growth of the smartphone and mobile Internet market, we decided to try to implement one idea on the then popular j2me, but quickly realized that this platform has a number of conceptual limitations. In general, users would not be very pleased with what we did and we did not see the potential. In addition, the fall crisis of 2008, which came with leaf fall, made me forget about dreams for a long time.

Glory: in the spring of 2009 we returned to our plans, the benefit of a new interest appeared: Android Dev Phone 1 and the SDK. Now we can say that the most correct decision of ours was to abandon the pre-crisis global plans. We decided to write something small - a thing in itself - and go through a full cycle from idea to Market.

This is how Setting Profiles were born - an application that can store a set of settings in profiles and switch between them depending on time, location, calendar events, etc. Choosing from what could be useful for themselves would be sufficiently generic (that is, not connected with a particular culture) and would have a large potential audience.

We are so engaged in the development that we haven’t even conducted an analysis of competitors. Now it looks ridiculous, but at that time we did not know that a similar application ( Locale ) won the Android Developer Challenge I in 2008, and its authors received $ 275K as a prize.

Sergey: then it was about six months of writing code that took away midnight hours and weekends - family and work still demanded our weekdays as before. Finally, on December 2nd, 2009, we released a free copy of SP on the Market, and five days later - a paid one.

Development exhausted, proved protracted. If we wrote our program together fulltime, we would have been in two months.

So, what is the result for the year:

- 40 thousand downloads of the free version and 10 thousand downloads paid;
- getting into the Top Paid on the Android Market in the Tools category;
- cumulative sales for the year of about $ 32,000 (from 30% takes Google, and 70% goes to us);
- at the peak of popularity (July 2010), AppBrain ranked Setting Profiles Full to 63rd place among all paid applications on the Market (and 13th in the Tools category).

Glory: we did not wear rose-colored glasses and did not expect that our offspring would be sold in Belarus, so we made an English version of SP with a view to the western market. By the way, we were not mistaken - we have out of 10,000 buyers, it seems, only two Belarusians.

Sergey: about the “sight” it is loudly said. In fact, we had a modest hobby project, what a startup there is. See what the bar was in our correspondence about a month before the publication of the SP:

Sergey: did you think about the number of copies sold?
Slava: thought - 10
Sergey: 10 thousand or 10 pieces? :)
Slava: just what the icon and the domain to recoup. H.z. about copies, it would be easy to finish, but we'll see
Sergey: I also thought to pay back the phone itself and to register on the Market ($ 25 - approx. Dikud ), so 300 copies should be at least :)

So, everything that happened after three hundred copies “warmed up” us during the continuation of the whole experiment.



Fame: it was very difficult to determine the price of the paid version. The first price was chosen as follows: $ 1 is too cheap, and $ 5 is too expensive. We stopped at $ 2.95. Later, adding a lot of new features, we increased the price to $ 3.99. On sales, as can be seen from the graph, this did not affect the worse.

In general, the loyalty of the audience depends on the price of the product very much. For example, in early 2010, Locale closed its beta and began selling version 1.0 with a price of $ 10 per base, plus making paid plugins. Naturally, people began to actively seek cheaper alternatives and write about their findings on the forums. That is, switched to SP as well.

Sergey: we did not connect the peaks on the chart with anything and their appearance remains a mystery to us. Probably in the reviews someone popular mentioned. But I can say for sure that the dynamics of sales depend on the country in which the Market displays the application in Featured Apps (in different countries it does not have a different schedule, the algorithm is unknown to us). But the pace of sales of phones with Android with sales somehow do not correlate at all. Although the market, obviously - where there is a device.

Here are the statistics on the distribution of sales by country for the year:

• United States - 59.13%
• Germany - 9.14%
• United Kingdom - 8.21%
• Australia - 2.30%
• Netherlands 2.22%
• Other 19%

And over the past two months:

• United States 42.85%
• Germany 8.02%
• United Kingdom 5.98%
• Russian Federation 5.00%
• Spain 3.86%
• Other 34%

Glory: in general for promotion and marketing, we are rather an anti-example, because practically nothing in this direction. We did not spin at all. At the very beginning, on a couple of English-speaking forums, they announced the light and pro versions, answered questions about the SP functionality, and that was all. I have the book " Android Apps Marketing - Secrets to Selling Your Android App ", but I did not even open it. We ourselves would be interested to know the difference between "gravity" and "active promotion", but this is probably not something that we experience a fan.

By the way, about the birds. We had been thinking about making money on the shareware market for a long time, and therefore an account at an American bank, registered with one of us, turned out to be very useful. We did not think about payment withdrawal methods. Honestly, the absence of this headache is very good.

Sergey: despite the convenient withdrawal of money, there were news in the form of a clever feature of the Market. Here, in contrast to the AppStore, there is an opportunity to cancel the purchase within 24 hours (we have 17% of such failures). On the one hand, losses, on the other, those who do not really need SP are eliminated. It means that they will not write anything offensive about SP anywhere. There is no need.

Glory: they decided not to fight Varese. Not too long. The program is cheaper than a cup of coffee in a decent place. Anyone who is ready to go to sites, download and install update handles does it for some other reason than to save money. At the very beginning, we noticed calls from w3bsit3-dns.com and found the Full version on it - politely asked to be removed and immediately removed there.

Yes, and it is inconvenient. For example, we have a license check ( Android License Verification Library , LVL), but it is active only in freely available beta. In releases on the Market LVL do not use, because Those who bought SP from a country without the support of paid apps through the Market Enabler will lose it.

Sergey: a lot of time left for support at the beginning, more than development. But we understood that without user interaction, SP will have neither development nor sales.

Now the scheme is as follows: calls are collected via e-mail, published in the program's card on the Market. We set up an answering machine that sends the requestor to uservoice.com (Russian equivalent - reformal.ru , dikud comment ), if there is a suggestion or to the support google group, if there is a problem. Further, as far as possible, we respond to the letters in the group. Sometimes it helps to respond to the community, which is very good.

Glory: we do not fight with competitors and do not track. Moreover, from the author Tasker , (and a little later from the authors Locale) we received an invitation to develop a compatible plug-in architecture, but unfortunately we haven't reached our hands yet.

Sergey: it was stuck in iOS when I once read the criticism of the iPhone of some eminent comrade, where 50% of the points were easily solved by applications like ours ... At first they were surprised that no one had written this yet, and after talking with people who wrote under iOS understand that to implement the functions of SP on iOS in principle is not possible.

Prior to release 4.2.1, there was a problem not so much in the absence of multitasking, as in the banal inability to change the phone settings with a third-party application.

So until now, with a special program on an iOS device, you cannot, for example, turn off the sound during a meeting, turn on WiFi only at home, allow GPS navigation if you get into the car and the device is connected to external power, etc.

Glory: anticipating possible questions from the news about the recent developer contest for Android, read on Habré, we answer. Did not participate, because it is not interesting. And there is no time. In general, it is positive when the cellular operator does not spend money on the next billboards, but holds contests for them and ignites the developers. In our countries, they are world-class, no doubt.

By the way, we can recommend an undeserved unnoticed evangelist from the development of Derek Sivers . We often see very inspiring posts on his blog.

Perhaps this story can be finished.

Oh, I almost forgot. About the moral of the story.

When I asked the guys what the message of the story was, the answer was: “Our goal is not to promote, but to show our experience to those who want to program for mobile OS. Life in Russia is cheap (except Moscow), winters are long - Western programmers have no chances against ours in this niche :) ”

PS This post continues the topic of an interview with the authors of popular programs for Android, which has already become a tradition (remember, it was Titanium Backup last time).