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Comment by clemesha | Hacker News Reader

   In the App Store, it's ranked by units sold ...
   I will be higher up in the charts, which will get me 
   more exposure ... volume of sales doesn't change 
   linearly with rank either, it's quite exponential.

This is a great piece of insight, much appreciated.

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Yep, I seriously believe this is the absolute key to using the way the App Store works to your advantage. At a certain point, the rank of your app will help to increase the rank of your app. Strange but true.

If you were going to game the system and you spent $10000 or even $20000 to get your app into the top 5, you'd make your money back within a day or two, and your app would be remain "sticky" at the top (provided it wasn't awful).

It seems your original article is currently down for me, so excuse me if this is a repeated question.

Do you think it was a mistake to start at $1.99 based on your theory? Should the entire aim to be to go as cheap as possible to get into the top 10 in the first place? (Or is that unlikely unless there is some other form of catalyst, e.g. Apple feature and therefore you may as well have the price at $1.99 / $2.99 until that happens?).

I think tha maybe I should have started at $2.99, but definitely not 99c. Every user that found Trainyar at that time would already know about it and wouldn't have just stumbled upon it. I think the 99c price point is only worth doing if you're reaching users who haven't heard of it, so they're willing to take a risk.

Interesting, so start a reasonable price until you get a trigger point (e.g. Featured by apple) and then lower price to remain in the top apps.

> At a certain point, the rank of your app will help to increase the rank of your app.

Do you believe this also applies for users searching for a specific keyword or combination of keywords? The 'above-the-fold' phenomenon. For example, 'baby feeding'? How did you do on keyword searches before you were selected by Apple (though Trainyard is a pretty unique name)?

Congratulations on your inspiring success! Are you going to release the original Tic Tac Toe game now?

I have to be honest, I really don't think generic keywords matter at all, the vast majority of users only use the charts unless they already know what they're looking for.

I may do the tic-tac-toe game at some point as a multiplayer game.

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