Contrast · B2C · indie app studio
Buy ads for paid-upfront apps
Lost money; spent thousands of dollars in the early App Store
Failedpaid-social
What they did
Early in the App Store, spent thousands of dollars on paid advertising for paid apps. Has done very little paid advertising since, relying on organic channels.
What happened
A money-losing proposition with paid apps.
- Stage
- early
- Effort
- Thousands of dollars
“Early in the App Store, I actually did spend thousands of dollars trying to make it work. And like with paid apps, it just was total money-losing proposition.”
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from Contrast
All 6 Contrast tactics- Email the Apple evangelists shown on WWDC slides when your developer account stallsAn Apple evangelist phoned back; became a lasting contact
- Ship a phone-first app that follows iPhone design rules and gets a top blogger's linkFounder calls the link a turning point; no numbers
- Raise money from family with a written case for why the App Store is a dealFamily invested; business still running 17 years later
- Buy a spare iPhone, jailbreak it, and study the 500 apps already out
More from this episode
- Weather Up: Pitch journalists with a short demo video in a Twitter DMCovered by TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacRumors and BGR, even by writers who rarely cover apps
- Weather Up: Hold new features back for one big launch to get attentionDownloads fell to ~15 a day during the 4-year wait; guest calls it a big regret
- Weather Up: Launch just before Vision Pro ships to avoid 'where's your Vision Pro app?'Landed an hour before Apple's DMA news; fewer articles, no social buzz, no Apple feature
- Weather Up: Launch a weather app at $40 a year with no launch saleClose to 2,000 subscribers, but press readers balked at $40 next to a $30 competitor
- Weather Up: Relaunch with one or two new features and a limited-time sale
- Weather Up: Pre-select the yearly plan on the paywall, not the monthly oneMonthly default got ~10% more subscribers but 60% lower revenue per user in month one
- Weather Up: Put a feature demo video on the paywall, with hosted price buttons belowWent better than expected; built in under a day; guest gives no numbers
- Weather Up: Test $40 against $39.99 for the yearly plan
- Build a mirror app and rank for the word 'mirror' in the App StoreCaptured 6-8K of 10-20K daily 'mirror' searches at peak
- Make a $0.99 app free and sell themes plus a $10 bundleMany bought the $10 bundle; earned $10 a sale instead of $0.99
- Contrast: Give developers a revenue share instead of paying them by the hourStopped losing money on stalled projects; partners working on the side ship slowly
- Launch Center Pro: Save features for big paid-app launches that spike revenueUp to $60K in a launch week vs hundreds of dollars a day otherwise
- Dark Noise: Add interactive widgets when iOS 17 ships to land in Apple's listsPicked first in an editorial list; 'massively impactful', no numbers; other lists did little
- RevenueCat: Launch again and again, dressing up each fundraise as a launchFirst Reddit post got some traction; no numbers