Dindy’s sales have been dropping lately. I believe the reason is that it got some bad reviews and the current rating on the app market (3.93/5). Being unable to test Dindy on all the different Android phones prevents me from knowing whether claims of it not working are real or a misunderstanding on the users’ end. After all, this app isn’t trivial.
What I do know is that I have some very satisfied customers on many different phones. Also, the app works great on all the Android emulator versions. Since phones don’t run the vanilla Android versions as the emulators run, this means I can’t be sure that successful testing on the emulator means correct operation on phones.
The Android app market has a lot of different phone silencer apps. Non of them has Dindy’s functionality, but in a way they are all competitors. A lot of them are free, too. I already tried dropping Dindy’s price to the minimum, which didn’t seem to help.
What’s really missing on the app market is an option to promote an app by giving it away for a limited time. Once you set the app as free on the Android app market it stays free forever. That’s a shame because I would have tried a promotional giveaway, had such an option existed.
People have suggested to give out a crippled (lite) version of the app. I’m not a big fan of this idea because what happens on the market is that users give lite version of apps bad reviews with comments like “add [insert paid feature here] to the lite version and I’ll give you 5 starts.” Kind of blackmailing the developer. When giving away a lite version you really need to think about the right mix of features in the lite version that will attract the most users to the paid version.
The way I see it I have two options:
- Invest in marketing – advertise Dindy to get recognition of the app and create a better looking website.
- Give Dindy away for free.
I’m not big on marketing and I need to think what’s Dindy’s sales potential, but how can I know that? I’m really tempted to give it away for free. If there was a way to back out of that I would have already done it.
First, is there a forum where people can ask questions and help each other out?
Second, you could advertise Dindy by giving away a second related app.
There are forums, where I already advertised Dindy. Not aggressively, though.
Giving away a second related app is something I though of doing. I actually had an app ready but I was afraid that second app would be misunderstood as well and will end up hurting Dindy’s sales. I guess I should have created a simple quality second app, such as an alarm clock or something like that.
Thanks.