Weather Up · B2C · weather app with widgets
Hold new features back for one big launch to get attention
Downloads fell to ~15 a day during the 4-year wait; guest calls it a big regret
Failedpr-launchfeature-development
What they did
From 2019 held a finished Apple Watch app, then home screen widgets, then waited to add interactive widgets, each time deciding the feature was no longer novel enough to get press and Apple attention on its own. Shipped everything together as Weather Up 3.0 in early 2024.
What happened
No updates for years; Apple stopped featuring the app, no launch bumps, downloads dropped to ~15/day and the app lost money for ~18 months. In hindsight he should have shipped the watch app in 2020 and widgets separately.
- Stage
- growth
- Effort
- About 4 years of withheld features
“Like, we should have shipped the Apple Watch app in 2020 probably, when that was ready.”
“Like, Apple stopped featuring the app because it hadn't been updated in a while. We stopped getting any kind of bumps from these new updates and things like that.”
“that's the beauty of subscription apps too, is that except for the getting attention, there's no incentive to hold back features”
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from Weather Up
All 12 Weather Up tactics- Ship a big update that gets featured by Apple and the press~$100K in the update year with almost no ads; halved the next year without updates
- When someone leaves a hard paywall, send a push offering 7 free daysFew took it and few of those paid; being replaced
- Pull Google AdSense ads and move to a hard paywall with a 7-day trialAds caused bad reviews and complaints; app lost money for ~a year without them
- Let people close the paywall, give them 7 free days, then lock the app
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: 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: Buy ads for paid-upfront appsLost money; spent thousands of dollars in the early App Store
- 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