Weather Up · B2C · weather app with widgets
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
Failedpr-launch
What they did
Scheduled the launch and posted the date/time as the embargo on the release's press page, squeezing it in ahead of the Apple Vision Pro launch. Apple announced its DMA compliance the same hour; some outlets published early, 9to5Mac waited a day, others skipped it. In hindsight: avoid windows when the App Store editorial team is busy and wait a month.
What happened
Fewer outlets wrote about it, no social halo, and Apple has not featured it.
- Stage
- launch
“I was trying to squeeze it in ahead of Vision Pro, and I thought so much air was going to get sucked out of the room from Vision Pro.”
“So there was like layers there of one, it didn't get written about by as many outlets as would have likely written about it had it not.”
“So, hindsight 20/20, I should have just waited a month, and let the Vision Pro stuff blow over before launching.”
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: 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 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