It has been two months since the last “numbers post”. It covered the Valentine’s Day promotion, spike in sales, and subsequent settling out at a very nice level. Here’s a recap of what things looked like at the beginning of May (revenue was about $1500 per week):
The Plan
Mother’s Day happens at the beginning of May (in the US and Canada anyway, I’m afraid I was too busy in April and I missed Mother’s Day in a lot of European countries). I figured it would be the perfect time to do another push.
If there’s something I learned from past experience, is that the more you manage to concentrate any kind of promotion, the more effective it will be. So in preparation for Mother’s Day, I created a new update (with iPad support), a couple of new in-app purchase items (new set of seeds and some fertilizer bundles), and sent out the usual announcement on the Flower Garden mailing list, Facebook page, and Twitter.
But in addition to all of that, I tried a new strategy: I gave Flower Garden away for free. Yes, completely for free.
The idea sounded really scary at first. After all, I would be giving away my baby for free. Would I lose a lot of money doing that? Would it depreciate the perceived value of Flower Garden? Would it annoy loyal users seeing an app they paid for given away? Fortunately it appears that the answer to those questions was no.
The reason I decided to give Flower Garden away for free was mostly to get it into more people’s hands. I was thinking I would lose some money initially, but then more than make up for it when I turned it back to paid because of all the extra users and word of mouth. There is already a free version with a limited number of pots and seeds, but people are hungry to download paid apps for free.
To add extra impact to this price change, I had Flower Garden featured as the free app for Mother’s Day weekend in Free App Calendar. Unlike other free app web sites, the folks at Free App Calendar are very developer friendly and are not out to take a cut of your profits or charge outrageous fees. It was an absolute pleasure dealing with them.
Mother’s Day
On Saturday May 8th, a few minutes past midnight the day before Mother’s Day, I switched Flower Garden over to free. Now I was committed!
Right away there was a lot of positive reaction around the announcement. Everybody on Twitter and Facebook were responding really well and spreading the word. Major sites like Touch Arcade and 148Apps covered the Mother’s Day promotion and got lots of extra eyeballs on the sale.
After the first day, the data was in: Flower Garden had been downloaded 12,500 times. That was great! As a reference, Flower Garden Free was usually downloaded between 800 and 1,000 times per day, so that was a 10x improvement.
On Sunday, Mother’s Day, things got even better. News had time to propagate more, and people were sending bouquets like crazy, so by the end of the day there had been an additional 26,000 downloads. That’s exactly what I was hoping for!
As a matter of fact, it was doing so great, that I decided to leave it for free as long as the number of downloads was significantly higher than what the free version was normally getting. After Mother’s Day downloads started going down, but they were still pretty strong the following Sunday. Here’s what the download numbers looked like for those 9 days:
The important question is how much revenue was there during that time? I was giving the app away for free but it had in-app purchases. Would they make up for it? The answer was a resounding yes!
Mother’s Day went on to become the biggest day in terms of revenue since Flower Garden was launched. Bigger even than Christmas or Valentine’s Day! Things started going down after that, but still at a very high level. The little bump towards the end of the week is a combination of the weekend (which always results in more sales), and the feature of Flower Garden on the App Store across most of Europe.
These numbers took a bit to sink in. It really shows that in-app purchases are definitely tied to the number of downloads. If you manage to give away twice as many copies, you’ll probably get close to twice as many in-app purchases. That effect is amplified if you have multiple in-app purchase items available.
It’s also interesting to notice that revenue didn’t follow the same drop-off curve as downloads. It wasn’t nearly as sharp. I suspect two things are going on in there:
- Some users downloaded Flower Garden during the sale weekend and weren’t interested in it at all. Downloading it was a knee-jerk reaction to any app that goes free, so that never translated into an in-app purchase. Users later in the week however, probably downloaded it because they received a bouquet or were interested in it, so they had a much higher likelihood of buying something through the Flower Shop.
- Fertilizer. Fertilizer is the only consumable item available for purchase in Flower Garden. Unlike a non-consumable item, the number of sales is not tied to the number of new users, but to the number of current, daily users. The more users launch your app every day, the higher the sales of consumable items. Some of the new users of Flower Garden went on to buy fertilizer later in the week, making revenue higher than you would expect from the download curve.
Flipping The Switch
The number of downloads on Sunday May 16th was slightly over 2,000. At that point I decided that it was close enough to the number of downloads Flower Garden Free was normally getting, so I flipped the switch back to paid. Things were going great, so messing with it was a pretty scary thing to do. Even scarier than it had been setting it free in the first place.
During that week, Flower Garden rose up on the charts. It reached #73 in the top games in the US and was charting very high in all the subcategories and on the iPad charts. As soon as I flipped the switch back to paid, it dropped out of sight from the charts. Fortunately, within a couple of days it came back to its position before that crazy week.
Most importantly, Flower Garden Free, which had dropped quite a bit during that promotion, immediately went back up to the top 100 in the Kids and Family subcategories like before.
As you can expect, as a result of giving it away for free, the ratings on the App Store went down quite a bit. While it was a paid application, the ratings were around 4 stars, but they dropped down to 2.5 stars after that week. It seems people love a free app, but are very quick to criticize it and give it a low rating (especially if it has in-app purchases).
Fortunately bad ratings can be easily fixed with a new update, and some encouragement to users to leave positive rating on the App Store. Now it’s back up to over 4.5 stars.
Aftermath
Now it’s two months later and the dust has had a chance to settle down. Apart from the very nice sales spike during the sale, was it worth it? Again, the answer is a definite yes.
Here’s the revenue since the start of the promotion:
As you can see, it quickly went down, but it settled at a reasonably high level. In fact, compare this two-month period (highlighted in blue) with the previous sales:
Before the promotion revenue was hovering around $1,500 per week, now it settled down to about $2,400 per week. An average day today is bigger than Christmas day! Very nice change!
I think the reason why it settled at a higher revenue level than before is because it got more exposure during that week. Lots of people sent bouquets, which introduced new users to Flower Garden. It’s the viral effect I was hoping for from the start, and although it never reached epidemic proportions, it has been enough to keep Flower Garden alive and well.
Adding iPad support as part of the latest update probably helped too. The iPad market is smaller than the iPhone one, but a lot of early adopters are eager to find good apps for their new toys. The smaller market size also allowed Flower Garden to appear in the iPad charts more easily, increasing exposure that way.
Here’s a breakdown of where revenue came from in the last month (I’m excluding the period where Flower Garden was free to get a more accurate view):
As you can see, consumable items (fertilizer) account for almost half the revenue. Consumable items are a factor of your current userbase, so getting a large influx of new users can result in a permanent revenue increase instead of just a sales spike. It also shows what a small percentage actual app sales are, which explains why even while Flower Garden was free, revenue was still up.
Conclusion
This was a wild ride again! It was definitely worth doing the promotion and it definitely brought home how powerful free can be. However, I’m trying to decide the pricing scheme for my next game, and even though free plus in-app purchases is very tempting, I’m not sure it’s the way to go.
What do you think? Are new games better off being free with in-app purchases, or can indie games be successful being paid (and still having in-app purchases)?
This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of indie iPhone development blogs featuring two posts per day. You can keep up with iDevBlogADay through the web site, RSS feed, or Twitter.
In-game point bundles are nothing new. Even before the time of in-app purchases, 
For two weeks, I debated with my wife and close friends with startup experience. I drafted a list of pros and cons to quitting my job to pursue an iphone project and stared at it for hours. Those of you who have made the leap or considered it may recognize some of the points or have more of your own to add:
Apart from typical facebook posting and email-a-friend features, I decided to employ a “refer-an-agent” feature which would enable users to invite others to join their network, essentially a grouping of users that correlated with how effectively their app could process scanned creature data. The larger the network, the more credit users would receive for uploading data, and the better they would perform in leaderboards and achievements. The approach was an “everybody wins” style where anytime any user in the network gained a referral, every single person in the network would benefit from the growth of the network. The hope was that this feature would gain a viral quality. 
Considering the App Store was flooded with free apps and that I had no name in the industry to immediately convince users to immediately pay for my app, I concluded that the most likely approach for success was to release a free app with In App Purchases. This appeared to be the best way to get as many users to at least try the app and decide how much they wanted to spend to access more functionality. Initially, I offered the following items: