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Comment by silencio | Hacker News Reader

don't do it. we (colloquy, the irc client) submitted promo codes and requests to review to multiple people and review sites, and there was only one website who did exactly what you state. none of the rest wanted payment of any sort (ars technica, tuaw, daring fireball, etc.) and were all too happy to mention and review the app.

We've gotten more money from iTunes affiliate links to the application on our page (http://mobile.colloquy.info) than in sales from most of the iPhone-specific review sites that we could see. We've also probably made more sales promoting ourselves and providing support on Twitter.

(Also, for what it's worth this site in question seems to be super slow if you don't pay up $50 or pay for advertising, it's been a little over two weeks with nothing whatsoever. the promo code we sent will probably expire before they review, heh.)

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Totally unrelated to anything.

1. I love your program.

2. I just bought your iPhone application because you guys deserve at least that much from me.

I also love this game, I used to play the card-based version all the time. I'm just pissed off that you made it for the iPhone before I did!

Edit: whoops, I was talking about the OP's game! But, I also love your IRC client. I didn't know it was available for the iPhone, I'll have to check that out...

haha, not flaming us for charging for an open source app? :)

thanks though!

Hey, nothing wrong with charging for open source! It's win-win: you get compensated for your great work and we enjoy the benefits of having the source code freely available.

Thank you.

I'm getting close to having my own iPhone app completed. Would you be kind enough to share the list of sites that you sent requests to? Stuff like that would be really helpful.

Thanks!

This is the list I've been using. It seems to cover the big ones.

http://www.mobileorchard.com/9-places-to-publicize-your-ipho...

Dang, I was searching for that :) That's where we got started.

We also sent promo codes to..ars technica, engadget, appleinsider, tuaw, gruber over at daring fireball, chris pirillo (plus a few extra codes to give away to his viewers, which was additional publicity), and some others I can't remember.

Depending on your application you may want to submit to sites specifically catering to your audience. I know some of our promo codes went to people at IRC news/review sites since Colloquy is an IRC client. And as an example, if your app was a game, you'd want to send a code over to sites like toucharcade, run by the same guy behind macrumors, who also frequents hn as 'arn' :)

Thanks so much mahipal and silencio for the pointers, greatly appreciated.

I've reached the point where my app and its webapp counterpart are both technically complete, so I'm all about the polish now.

My app isn't groundbreaking (it's going to be living in the Entertainment category), but I think that the similar apps that are currently in the store suggest that there's a place for it. Most importantly, it allows users to be creative and share their product with others; I'm not the gatekeeper, just the groundskeeper (clean up after the animals that mess my garden).

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