Comment by BrandonMTurner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BrandonMTurner | Hacker News Reader

For what its worth, this data might play a role in debate but doesn't provide proof either way:

Our app is #8 in our category in the App Store and #13 in for the category in the Android Marketplace. It is free and has no advertisements; only available in US / Canada markets for both. We only get about ~1250 downloads a day on Android and about ~3500 downloads a day on iOS.

With that skew in raw downloads combined with a variance of stereotypical buying habits on each platform it is easy to see a way where iOS revenues could outweigh Android revenues by a lot.

From our standpoint, at our scale, advertisements are almost worthless to the amount it would hurt our brand. No agency, in Google itself, has shown us revenue predictions that make our mouth water. We have also experimented with a few direct placements (heavily target to our audience, and we did the design work of the advertisements ourselves) but will likely not continue with that in the future because of how bad they perform.

But you're using the app as a hook to get them to purchase something else right or why bother? Or are you saying that loseit has no monetization strategy?

Because I would have thought that making money out of a weight loss app should be easy. You're talking about a market that will pay silly amounts just for the idea of being thin. That you see people advertising all the time for products to solve the problem because there's so much money in it.

Right now we make very little money from the advertisements and / or products we sell (We sell Fitbits, Withings scales, our book, tshirts). We have a strategy that we have not executed on yet but have been heads down working on for the last few months.

You might be surprised by the buying behaviors of "Do-It-Yourself" weight loss users compared to the rest of the industry. Much of users come from Weight Watchers because they don't want to pay anymore. Moreover, no one goes to WW thinking they are going to get anything for free, where 100% of users come to us thinking they will not be spending a penny. This is something we will work and try to rite the ship as we execute our plans. Once we do that, we will have the other half of the data that I mentioned (in my original comment) about which one brings in more money. As of right now, Lose It! is free and we lose money as we build our platform and brand.

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