Over the Christmas period, Matt Martel decided to offer free advertising within his reMovem app to other indie iPhone developers. I took him up on this offer for my BeerMap application. I want to thank Matt for such an excellent idea and I want to share with everyone the sales figures which I saw.
So below is a table and graph of the sales data for 7 days prior to the promotion, the 7 days during the promotion and the 7 days following the promotion. You can clearly see that the promotion had a big impact on sales. Interestingly, there is still an increase in sales following the promotion which is likely to be due to the increased rank of the app following the strong sales during the promotion.

Thanks again Matt!
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Every now and then I check for the competition of Subnet Calc and Subnet Calc Pro on iTunes. Today I found a couple of new ones called IPSubnet and ITcalc4. Now, I don’t want to be rude but these just don’t seem as easy to use as Subnet Calc and what’s more, they both cost 59p / 99c whereas Subnet Calc is FREE! Granted, Subnet Calc Pro costs some money but I am hoping to always have the free version there for people who just want a quick and easy subnet calculator on their device.
Comments are welcomed for any points you have to make about Subnet Calc or any of its competitors.
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I thought I’d post the latest stats I have for my sales of Subnet Calc:

Notice that there is a distinct jump towards the present. This was when I switched category from Utilities to Business. I thought it was quite surprising that it made such a difference just changing category, but it seems to have made a fair difference.
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This weekend has been surprising for me. Firstly, it has seen the start of some contract iPhone application work which I managed to pick up. Secondly, I have been contacted about joining with a couple of people to start looking into the market potential for mobile applications. And thirdly, I have been contacted asking if I’d like to apply for a job developing mobile applications.
All of these points have made me realise just how big the market is for mobile applications, and just how much of a growth area it is likely to be over the coming months / years. It’s very exciting and I am looking forward to being part of such an exciting industry. I’ll try to keep blogging about things I find out and hopefully others can learn from my thoughts or just enjoy reading what I am finding out.
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When I released Subnet Calc Pro, I worked out how many hours work I did on it and therefore how much money I would like to get back from it. Then I decided a price based upon how many sales I thought that I would get. I managed to achieve my money goal after just under 3 months of selling which I thought was extremely quick as I had imagined it would take more like a year to do that!
That is one thing that shocked me, but the other thing which shocked me is that my sales have been steady throughout the whole time I have been selling Subnet Calc Pro, with no sign of stopping yet. There was a spike around the time I released an update to Subnet Calc (the free version) which now has an up-sell page on it to encourage users to upgrade to the paid version. If there is a trend at all with my sales then it’s an increasing trend as well, which I am obviously very pleased with!
Here is the graph of my sales from 1st February 2009 until today, 16th May 2009.

The bottom line is that this has proved to me, and I hope others who read this, that the iPhone platform is a great platform to work with because you can go from never written a line of Objective-C to a full paid application, earning £££/$$$ a month. OK my app won’t support me fully, but it certainly is some very handy pocket money which will enable me to continue in my iPhone efforts and hopefully produce even more apps.
Posted in Business, Subnet Calc Pro, iPhone Apps | No Comments »