0:00:00Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective.
0:00:03Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing news of note in iOS development, Apple, and
0:00:07the like.
0:00:08I'm your host, David Smith.
0:00:09I'm an independent iOS and Mac developer based in Herne, Virginia.
0:00:11This is show number 97, and today is Tuesday, November 27th.
0:00:16Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.
0:00:20All right, so this is kind of a follow-on to this last weekend, which here in the US
0:00:25was Thanksgiving and the traditional start
0:00:29of the holiday shopping season.
0:00:31And along that, there's this thing we call Black Friday
0:00:33and Cyber Monday, which are both terrible names,
0:00:36but just generally refer to this practice and process
0:00:40whereby people who sell things, put them on sale
0:00:46the Friday after Thanksgiving
0:00:47and the Monday after Thanksgiving
0:00:49to jumpstart sales and get ready for the holidays.
0:00:52And then you think a little bit about hub sales.
0:00:55I put my apps on sale for Thanksgiving,
0:00:57checked the weather, and my recipe book were both on sale.
0:01:00And I kind of wanted to talk a little bit about sales,
0:01:03how they work, the mechanics of that,
0:01:05as well as just kind of like why you should do them,
0:01:07why you shouldn't do them, how often you should do them,
0:01:09those kinds of things.
0:01:11So basically, the mechanics of putting an app on sale
0:01:14are fairly straightforward.
0:01:16iTunes Connect has made this a lot simpler in recent years.
0:01:20Basically, in the rights and pricing area of iTunes Connect,
0:01:24you just specify a schedule for pricing for your app.
0:01:27And you can do this for apps as well as for in-app purchases.
0:01:29So if you want to put an in-app purchase on sale,
0:01:32you can also do that.
0:01:33Just make sure that your app is smart enough
0:01:35to always be refreshing the bundle price before you
0:01:39display it to the user, which I think
0:01:41you sort of have to do anyway, but I've definitely
0:01:43run into that trap before.
0:01:45But basically, you can set a schedule.
0:01:47And this can basically be as arbitrarily complicated
0:01:50as you want.
0:01:51But it can only be as granular as a day.
0:01:55And essentially, you can set the price to change at midnight
0:01:59on the day that you set it to.
0:02:00So if you wanted it to go on sale on Saturday morning,
0:02:04essentially, you would set the date to be Saturday and at 12
0:02:08o'clock PM.
0:02:10And I think it's in the local time zone,
0:02:11though I'm not 100% sure on that.
0:02:14The price will just change.
0:02:15And users buying the app at that point
0:02:17will just see a different price in the store,
0:02:18will see a different price in your app for an in-app purchase,
0:02:20and will take effect.
0:02:22You can set an end date or not.
0:02:24And when the end date arrives, essentially
0:02:26at midnight on the day before you set at the end,
0:02:29it will appear and that'll be it.
0:02:33Sort of the new price will change.
0:02:35And so when I wanted to go in and put my app on sale,
0:02:37I just set--
0:02:38for me, I was dropping the price at $0.99 for two days.
0:02:42So basically I said from now until--
0:02:45in this case, it was the Saturday--
0:02:47the price should be $0.99.
0:02:49And I added that, and then it just said from now
0:02:52till Saturday, price will be 99 cents.
0:02:55After that, it goes back to its old price, which worked great.
0:02:58It's really nice that they automate that.
0:03:00The only thing that's tricky is, of course,
0:03:02if you're going to do any kind of update in the app's
0:03:04description, which you probably will, just indicate,
0:03:07hey, the app's on sale, or this is a limited-item offer,
0:03:10get it for now before the price goes up.
0:03:13You can do all those kinds of things.
0:03:15Make sure you go in and undo them as soon as you can
0:03:17after the sale's off.
0:03:19Just you're not sending the wrong messages to your users.
0:03:22But as for the mechanics, that's really it.
0:03:24And like I said, it's pretty straightforward,
0:03:25nicely automated for you.
0:03:27One thing to be very careful about heading into the
0:03:29Christmas season is typically over Christmas, iTunes Connect
0:03:35is down, and I believe this year is the same.
0:03:37I think it may even be down for a longer window this year.
0:03:40Something like the 21st to 27th sticks in my head, so I'm
0:03:43not sure about that.
0:03:44But basically, you want to be very careful about doing
0:03:47scheduling price changes during the outage window.
0:03:50That's for two reasons.
0:03:51One, sometimes they just won't apply.
0:03:54And there's, you know, often their iTunes Connect
0:03:56documentation will tell you this, that during an outage,
0:03:59you know, any changes you make
0:04:00may or may not actually happen.
0:04:01And if they don't happen, that's not great.
0:04:04If you're, you know, you're lowering your price,
0:04:05expecting it to jump back,
0:04:07say like you lowered your price,
0:04:08trying to boost your rank going into Christmas day.
0:04:11This point was highly possible.
0:04:12There will continue to be that price on Christmas day,
0:04:14which may not have been what you wanted.
0:04:17Second, any time you make a change in something
0:04:19in iTunes Connect, there's some chance
0:04:21that something could go funny.
0:04:23Exactly what that is will vary a lot,
0:04:24but you just never know.
0:04:26Something could just go funny.
0:04:27And I've had this before.
0:04:29Like, one of my apps was just sort
0:04:30of unavailable for purchase for a day,
0:04:32because somehow iTunes Connect got stuck in a weird state.
0:04:35Who knows?
0:04:37That kind of stuff happens, and so I'd always
0:04:38be careful about doing it before what is traditionally
0:04:41the biggest sales day of the year, which is Christmas Day.
0:04:44So just be very careful about changing prices
0:04:46too much right around Christmas, I'd probably recommend
0:04:49just doing anything you want to do, get it set up,
0:04:52and then just kind of lock it in for the Christmas ride.
0:04:55So just something to keep in mind.
0:04:58Then I was going to kind of think about
0:05:01how effective are sales?
0:05:03Do you actually end up making money?
0:05:05Is it a really useful marketing tool?
0:05:07I'd say maybe.
0:05:10Generally speaking, I found sales to be--
0:05:14Typically I don't lose money on sales, but I rarely make a lot more money.
0:05:19When you do a sale, you're kind of having a couple of different goals.
0:05:24Really, there's probably three.
0:05:28You're trying to boost your rank and attract more users that way.
0:05:30You're trying to get exposure from the variety of services and websites
0:05:34and things that talk about app pricing that you'll hopefully be flagged as like,
0:05:38"Oh, on sale today," and you get a little bit of publicity and exposure that way.
0:05:41And you're hopefully also trying to encourage those users
0:05:43who are very price sensitive to download your app
0:05:46if they wouldn't get downloaded otherwise.
0:05:48If they're just in their minds,
0:05:50like I only buy 99 cent apps,
0:05:51and there's nothing you can do,
0:05:52no you can't make your app,
0:05:54there's no amount of awesome that you can build
0:05:56into your app that will make it sell to them,
0:05:59you're just trying to attract that user
0:06:00and sort of integrate the curve for them
0:06:02and be like, you're going to get that little bit of,
0:06:05that segment of the market you're going to be able
0:06:07to monetize.
0:06:08And to some degree they work,
0:06:10I mean, I've put apps on sale and sometimes I've lost money.
0:06:14Sometimes I've just broken even, which is sort of good.
0:06:18But like this last one, I had two apps on sale. My recipe book and Check the Weather.
0:06:22My recipe book did much better in revenue, which is great.
0:06:26The sales seemed to work and kind of coincided well with, I guess, Thanksgiving and the cooking going on.
0:06:30So that was great. Check the Weather, on the other hand, didn't really do
0:06:34much better at all. I basically broke even, maybe slightly lower in sales,
0:06:38which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
0:06:40I mean, from a revenue perspective,
0:06:42I'd rather in some ways have more users
0:06:44because hopefully they're going to like it
0:06:46and share it with their friends and things,
0:06:47but it's definitely another thing
0:06:50you're always going to make money on.
0:06:52And I think especially the effect of a sale
0:06:55wears off dramatically after a day or two.
0:06:57It's not the kind of thing that you put on sale for a week.
0:07:00You're going to get a better impact
0:07:01than if you put on sale for a day or two.
0:07:03For me, I just put it on sale, I think,
0:07:04for basically two days.
0:07:07it was basically Thanksgiving and Black Friday.
0:07:09And I think that after, you know, sort of,
0:07:12it seemed as though that was, you know,
0:07:14my rank in other changes that were happening on late Friday
0:07:18were, seemed to have basically settled out.
0:07:20And so it wasn't the kind of thing
0:07:21that I was continuing to see an advantage,
0:07:23and so I may as well raise my price
0:07:24and make a little bit more money on the revenue side.
0:07:27And that's really speaks to a little bit
0:07:28of the frequency question,
0:07:30how often should you put your apps on sale?
0:07:32Traditionally I would say you don't want to do it too often.
0:07:36it's always tricky if you create this expectation with your users
0:07:39that they should be waiting for the app to go on sale before they buy it,
0:07:43because it's entirely possible, or if not likely, that they'll forget about it,
0:07:48that something else will catch their interest and they'll use that instead,
0:07:53or just that if you've gotten someone's attention to be thinking about your app,
0:07:59you want them to buy it.
0:08:01You want as few reservations you could possibly have in their mind
0:08:04as to why this would not be an awesome time
0:08:06for them to give you a couple bucks.
0:08:08And so you just want to be very careful about,
0:08:10if they go to App Shopper or one of those kinds of sites,
0:08:13and I'm not sure how many people do this kind of shopping,
0:08:16but I'm sure there are a fair few,
0:08:18go to a site like App Shopper
0:08:19that shows you the price history,
0:08:21and if it looks like every couple weeks
0:08:23it's bumping down, bumping up,
0:08:25jumping down, bumping up,
0:08:26you're probably going to be,
0:08:28they're probably going to wait for it to bump down again.
0:08:31And so for me, I typically,
0:08:32I'd say I put my apps on sale.
0:08:35It's maybe kind of like a semi-annually,
0:08:37maybe every six months, once a year, something like that.
0:08:40It depends on the app, it depends on if there's
0:08:41a good situation or a reason for it to be on sale.
0:08:45But typically I try to do it no more frequently than that.
0:08:48There's a period of time I even were,
0:08:50I used to, there was a time when you could,
0:08:52I found a little pattern where if I dropped the sale price
0:08:57on Saturday, it would boost my rank,
0:09:00and then I would raise my price again on Sunday
0:09:03and it would boost my revenue
0:09:04'cause Sundays were my heaviest volume day
0:09:06and so being slightly higher ranked would be beneficial.
0:09:10And I tried that for a little while and it sort of worked.
0:09:11Like I was squeezing out an extra like five or 10%.
0:09:13This was a couple years ago.
0:09:15I'm not sure if the app store would respond
0:09:17in the same way as it did then,
0:09:19but what I found with that,
0:09:20being frequently changing the price
0:09:22is that I got a lot of people who were really upset
0:09:25when on Sunday they bought the app
0:09:26and it was more expensive
0:09:28and they kind of felt cheated because I was constantly
0:09:32bumping the price lower and higher, lower and higher.
0:09:34And if they missed a window, it kind of felt annoying
0:09:36to them.
0:09:37And that was, as soon as I sort of started getting
0:09:39that feedback, I stopped playing that game.
0:09:40It just wasn't worth kind of this extra 5%
0:09:42that I was squeezing out to have all these people
0:09:44who were really annoyed at the price changes.
0:09:47And they're like, "What's going on?
0:09:48"My friend bought it for, got it for 99 cents,
0:09:50"I got it for $2.
0:09:51"He got it for 99 cents, I got it for $2.
0:09:53"What's going on?"
0:09:54And so I just kind of stopped that game
0:09:56and kind of moved on.
0:09:57But that's sort of how you do it and the mechanics of it.
0:10:01Like I said, sales are great to have a short-term goal
0:10:06if you're trying to target something specific.
0:10:10Otherwise, there's not really that much point to it.
0:10:13I think generally, you raise your price,
0:10:15it'll probably make a little bit more money.
0:10:17Unless you're going after ranks, if you're going after--
0:10:19it's like when I launch Check the Weather,
0:10:21I dropped the price of $1 because I
0:10:23thought it would make a little bit more money there.
0:10:25And it did, I think, in terms of being
0:10:27able to have that extra rank support when you really are ranking aggressively.
0:10:31But otherwise, it only has limited effect.
0:10:34All right, so that's the main topic for today.
0:10:37I'm going to talk a little bit for the last part of this, just about, this is kind of
0:10:41more of the personal section or whatever.
0:10:44I'm just going to talk about something that I've been struggling with recently in the
0:10:47hopes that other, you know, sort of it's helpful to hear that someone else is struggling with
0:10:50it if you are yourself.
0:10:52And it's this constant, it's sort of the problem of focus.
0:10:55It's something that I've struggled with a lot over the years.
0:10:57I've written articles about it.
0:10:59But it's just something that is so difficult, I find,
0:11:02as an independent, where your time is your own.
0:11:06There's no one telling you you have to do anything
0:11:08by a particular time.
0:11:09And that makes it incredibly difficult
0:11:11when you are trying to get things done.
0:11:13That you have lots of different sort of,
0:11:16like lots of different fingers and lots of different pies.
0:11:20And you can always kind of be moving between things.
0:11:22It's hard to know what's the highest priority,
0:11:24what you should be working on.
0:11:26And it's really discouraging and often even depressing
0:11:29when you kind of go through a day
0:11:31and you're just kind of like, man, I got nothing done today.
0:11:34I did lots of tiny things that don't really add up
0:11:36to hardly anything being done.
0:11:39And there's no accountability for that
0:11:40because you're just independent.
0:11:41Like, what are you going to do?
0:11:43And I guess the encouraging thing that I'd say is,
0:11:46what I find is you just have to kind of work your way
0:11:49through it.
0:11:51Whenever I had to hit these spells,
0:11:52and I had a couple last week where I just couldn't
0:11:54get anything done, you just kind of have to work out
0:11:57what are the tricks that can try and jump start you
0:12:02into the zone or jump start you into a productive place.
0:12:06And just focus on those.
0:12:07There's not a lot of, I wouldn't say there's necessarily
0:12:09a lot of, I don't even know, these productivity hacks.
0:12:13It's not like you need to reorganize your to-do list.
0:12:15Your to-do list needs to be better.
0:12:16You need a bolder bolder, redder red,
0:12:19to steal Merlin Mann's phrase.
0:12:21It's not that you need to organize
0:12:22what you need to do better.
0:12:23You just need to get yourself in a chair
0:12:25with fewer distractions, focus on your task, and do it.
0:12:30And for me, this is how I kind of do that.
0:12:32Like when I hit this, I think it was last Thursday,
0:12:34I just couldn't get things done.
0:12:36And I was like, okay, I need to focus.
0:12:38So for me, what I do is I have sort of like,
0:12:41it's almost like I have an emergency stash of music.
0:12:44And they're songs that I don't go to very often
0:12:47because they're a little intense,
0:12:49but they really help kind of focus
0:12:50and amp me up and get me going.
0:12:53And for me, it's a band called Dragon Force,
0:12:56which if you're not familiar with them,
0:12:57they're this kind of strange,
0:12:59I don't even know how to describe them.
0:13:00It's like speed power metal, maybe.
0:13:03I'm not a big sort of power metal fan in general.
0:13:06This one band, they have tremendous tempo,
0:13:08they play at tremendous speed,
0:13:10and for me, it's almost like audio caffeine.
0:13:12I put Dragon Force on,
0:13:14like my pulse quickens, and my fingers go a little faster,
0:13:18and it's like I just took a triple shot espresso,
0:13:22followed by a Red Bull.
0:13:23Like I am on, you know, sort of on for it
0:13:25when I'm listening to this music,
0:13:27and it kind of gets me pumped, gets me jazzed,
0:13:28and I just sit down, the Dragon Force on,
0:13:30and just sort of grind it out.
0:13:32And often that is painful, that is sort of hard to do.
0:13:36I don't really want to do it,
0:13:37but it's just something that you just kind of
0:13:38force yourself to do.
0:13:40And if you put around yourself
0:13:41a couple of those types of things,
0:13:43like you just go to, it's almost like you have
0:13:44the power song if you ever did that
0:13:46when you're going running.
0:13:47Like you put it on, you're like, yeah, I'm going to do it.
0:13:49And like you save that for the, you know,
0:13:51so that it's not all the time,
0:13:52you don't want to waste, you sort of waste it too often,
0:13:55but for me, you just kind of have to find that environment.
0:13:57And it just, everyone's different.
0:13:58I know if some people were like, they can't get focused,
0:14:00they go somewhere, they have a particular place,
0:14:02whether it's a coffee shop or a park,
0:14:04or it's a certain kind of place in their house,
0:14:06and it's just trying to get into that place
0:14:08where it's like, okay, this is my productive place,
0:14:10I can't slack off here, I'm in the mode,
0:14:12and you just force yourself to do it.
0:14:14And it is painful and hard, but often it works.
0:14:17So, just kind of sort of something I wanted to mention
0:14:19because I often struggle with it,
0:14:21and maybe that's helpful to someone else.
0:14:22And if you ever find yourself needing a little audio caffeine,
0:14:25check out Dragon Force.
0:14:26They're pretty awesome.
0:14:27I'll probably have a link in the show notes
0:14:29if you want to find out more easily.
0:14:31But otherwise, that's it for today's show.
0:14:33As always, if you have questions, comments, concerns,
0:14:35I'm on Twitter @_davidsmith.
0:14:37I'm on AppNet @davidsmith.
0:14:40The podcast feed for the show,
0:14:42as you can find on the website, developingperspective.com,
0:14:45or on Twitter @devperspective.
0:14:48Otherwise, I guess have a good week.
0:14:49I'll talk to you on Thursday,
0:14:50And happy coding.