First weeks with Papermill

papermill.me

16 pointsbarredo2 comments

Some interesting insights here. There might well be a lot more the developer could do to target his audience better. The pricing is not well explained and the model doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. One would think it would be easier to go after recurring revenue, perhaps even arrange a deal with instapaper to sell subscriptions on a percentage of revenue model. It seems a lot less awkward than "buy this account from someone else with recurring payments" then pay an upfront flat fee for an application.

Hi Tim,

Yeah, a revenue split model would work much better but unfortunately Marco hasn't chosen an 'official' Android client just yet (and doesn't seem disposed to) and has mandated the subscription model for all third-party apps. It's understandable, given his wariness of Android (which is seemingly somewhat justified.) I am going to make a concerted effort to make the app appeal to users who don't know about Instapaper or the model, though. I've been concentrating on providing the best possible app to those who already understood both of these to the detriment of new users who don't know the service at all, the logic being that if you know what Instapaper is, it's because you're already aware of the excellent iOS apps.

Ryan (the developer of Papermill)

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