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Comment by sosuke | Hacker News Reader

So how much did he spend on advertising? Why is he saying that all of his advertising only goes towards a single day of sales? Shouldn't it really be seen over a week after and week prior to get a good idea of the impact it had?

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I don't think that was the point ... the point was he's achieved a prominent position in the Mac App Store, and that's not worth many sales.

I've spent almost no time in the Mac App Store, when I want software I go to Google and when I want games I go to iTunes.

Achieving a prominent position in the Mac App Store in a category like Developer Tools isn't worth many sales. That doesn't surprise me in the least.

Going against the old adage of "Don't dig for gold; sell tools to miners"?

Yeah but the gold have been dug for awhile now, plus there are competitors with just as easy access to the market and his is only a little different from the competition.

But there's a big, big pile of gold (normal iOS or even Mac users).

Developer tools can't be an easy market to succeed in. You aren't going to get many impulse buys.

That works great, unless said miners have an almost ridiculous quantity of tools just lying on the ground waiting for someone to clean them up a bit and start using them.

The point in the article is that it is ahead of other apps in Dev Tools from established companies who should be selling more than 10 copies a day.

He hasn't really achieved a very prominent position in the mac app store though. The post there shows he is 6 in the 'developer tools' category. I suspect this is one of the least used / lowest sales of any of the sub-categories. Most developers probably aren't looking in the app store for their tools, they already have them, and even if they are, developers make up a small percentage of mac users. Perhaps, only 1% of all mac owners are potential customers... Even less really because they must be mobile developers to make use of his application.

His sales vs position has nothing to do with the appStore and everything to do with being in an extremely tiny niche market.

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