3 Weeks already, $0 income – what are we doing wrong?

I'm co-founder of MinoMonsters. We launched our game on iOS but spent a lot of time prototyping on the Android market. Our android prototype has 250k+ downloads and 2k+ reviews. Here's some steps you can take today to try to move the needle.

* Test your screenshots! Assume that 50% of the people in the market will never read your description. Right now, your screenshots communicate "Samurai game". Try a different direction, maybe one more Sudoku focused.[1] Test lots.

* Test your app icon. Test lots.

* You should have a purchase already. Review your monetization strategy. Most developers err on the side of under-monetizing their game, in the hopes that they won't "make players mad" or some other nonsense. Spoiler alert: you're wrong. Start your re-education here: http://www.edery.org/2012/08/your-first-f2p-game-where-you-w...

* Doing games is hard and a lot of what works in games is non-obvious. Be very skeptical of advice you get from anyone that hasn't done games.

* There is only one "tried and true" marketing channel - getting featured on the platform. Outside of that, you need to hustle hard to get your app featured in other places. You've reached out to "a few" sites and forums. Expand your reach to 10x as many sites and forums. Point to your past reviews as social proof for potential future reviews. No one site is going to bring in all the downloads - it's about building buzz and the snowball effect.

That's all I can think off the top of my head.

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[1] - No one can tell you what's going to work best. The only way to know is to test.

You're going after the wrong target market. Sudoku apps are for middle aged women (Yes, I generalize, but it's pretty much the only game my mother plays on her Android phone).

Stop targeting your ads at Android related users (Android forums, games review sites). Go find a place where the people who will actually play your game hang out and then advertise there. Mothers group forums, parenting forums, business traveler hangouts, school teachers - whatever.

We may have reached Peak Sudoku on mobile devices.

Also, your price is "Free". That may be why income is 0.

Maybe try making a game there isn't already 50 million ways to play it.

Sorry, but Really!? You expect a game that is also in every single newspaper in the world and has a puzzle book on every single book selling stand to do really really well because why? You launched it and sent it to a few app review sites? That's not all it takes to advertise something, there has to be a reason for someone to choose your game over the 50,000 other Sudoku games. And looking at it, there really isn't.

This is the perfect example of a why many devs here on HN need to stop undervaluing the benefits of a non-technical co-founder that can seriously rock the marketing side of stuff.

What I see here is a pretty good looking app. Sure, it lacks things like scratch marks, but a solid version 1.0. However, you have really not done very much to promote the app. Emailing press and posting on forums won't get you far. The press get hundreds of review pitches a day - you can't expect to email them out of the blue on launch day and get them to cover your app - especially when it is not exactly noteworthy (it's not the first app of its kind).

Learn to hustle. The newspaper ad under the sudoku puzzle was a good idea.

Well here's some advice: since you've written an article about your game, link the name of your game to the app store or a review or something. Also, mention that it is free since it is free. And explain what the game is and why anyone should care. In other words, you are always advertising and the biggest mistake people make is to not remove the roadblocks from all the roads. Marketing is easier when you realize, by default, no one cares. Not in a rude way, but no one will put in effort to care about something for no reason. Give them a reason.

If your game is a cool evolution of Sudoku, then focus your initial marketing efforts on places where people discuss that game.

Find where your customers are, then spend your time and effort there. Go to those specific forum boards/google groups and be helpful and cool. Don't just barge in and spam everyone with new topics. Help people out first. Ask senior members to review your game and give you direct feedback. Take their concerns/comments seriously.

Trying to market to everyone simply dilutes your effort.

Make sure you have a good keyword rich domain name like sudoku-pro.com or sudoku-evolved.com or something (I have no idea if those names are taken). Highlight how your product stands out from "generic" soduku games.

Setup a simple landing page (e.g. from a wordpress app template) with more information that details how great your game is specifically for Sudoku fans.

Add google analytics or kissmetrics to the landing page.

List your landing page in google for indexing (be patient it takes a while).

Then buy a little traffic on adwords when people search for the keyword Sudoku (like 50-100 clicks). Limit your budget at first. I'm not suggesting you spend a lot. Just a little.

Check google analytics to see the keywords that showed up on your page. When people click on an adwords ad, it shows the keywords they searched google for.

So, if someone clicks your ad for "Bacon-flavored Sudoku", you will see in your logs their search term of "delicious tasting sudoku"

You can learn a lot about what people are looking for this way and then fine tune your messaging and even your product to fit what people are looking for.

Hope that helps.

You released a free app in a crowded market. You are going to need something exceptional to stand out.

Searching for "sudoku" in the Play store returns "at least 1000 results" for Android apps. Potential buyers are unlikely to discover yours on its merit alone even if it is the best in the field.

Review sites are unlikely to want to review "yet another sudoku app". Your 1000+ competitors are all asking for reviews as well. Unless you can offer a compelling narrative or give them an interesting reason to write about this app in particular you should not be surprised that there seems to be little interest.

Your app also requires significantly more permissions than some of the other most popular sudoku apps. I don't know if most users care but given a choice between several free sudoku apps that might make a difference.

18MB seems pretty heavy for a Sudoku app. And it comes with a lot of permissions, and it's free with no obvious monetization strategy?

I don't have data to tell you those things scare away users, but they'd sure as heck scare away me.

I totally feel your pain. It seems a very well done game.

Unfortunately there are already hundreds of sudoku games, so a user will hardly find i.

I can give you a couple suggestions anyway: send it to the guys over androidpolice.com every 3 weeks they make a list of the best games that just came out like this one http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/01/15/40-best-new-android-... so I think you might have good chances of getting in there more than a fully featured article.

Post it here. I think HN is more than willing to review your game.

Post it on reddit.com/r/android it's a very open community and they often try apps for people that ask nicely.

Go buy an ad in the Newspaper right under the Sudoku puzzle.

So many freemium models invest hundreds of man hours into development then expect to pay $0 for advertising. It doesn't work like that. If you invested 100's of hours into dev, then get ready to spend 1000's of hours marketing, or alternatively buy your way into the market which is expensive.

Good luck!

Curious what your 'freemium' strategy is for this app. Crafting a strong freemium strategy seems to be a very difficult task which is probably why many companies struggle to find that perfect balance.

Rocketcat games had a huge problem selling their game "Punch Quest", which was stunning due to that game's high quality. They ultimately realized that the money drops were too generous, that links to buy stuff were lost in the UI, that not enough compelling upgrades existed, etc. What you have built seems to be very polished and I think it's a very interesting take on the genre, but I think you might be in similar territory here.

I'd also guess that the lion's share of people that pay for sudoku games are not the type that would want RPG elements mixed in. They are probably an older demographic that values simplicity over everything else. When the game "10,000,000" integrated rpg elements with "match 3" style gameplay, the masses loved it because it was a convergence of two types of gameplays that had similar demographics.

"Is It hard to promote mobile apps?"

Hard when you are a few years late, in a genre (Sudoku) where there's not much room for innovation in game play.

On top of ALL the comments here, which all have very valid points - even if you had a brand-new, innovative game concept, it's still damn hard to get traction and visibility in the app store(s). Nobody knows why this game is so good or that he needs to have it, and for some of those games, it's really a shame. The situation is comparable to web sites a few years ago. There's basically the SEO way - sideline promotion, forums, reviews, people skills etc. and there's the SEM way. If you invest enough to push your way up in the store through advertising (Trademob, the company that I'm working for, estimates around 10-100k, depending on category and target market), you'll eventually be paid back through the resulting organic installations coming from the visibility once you get into the top charts. TL;DR: In 2013, even for killer apps, there's no way to the top except through the hardship of promotion on all possible channels. Viral campaigns, PR, spreading the word, posting, blogging, and often pure money investment as well.

Sorry, pal!

Like others, I would have to point to the choice of making another sudoku as a critical flaw. When a game is the same game as every other, it gets very little buzz or word of mouth...unless it has some overwhelmingly strong new feature to add value.

Content items like art, storytelling, quantity of levels and pre-scripted events are mostly reflective of how video game development budgets tend to be proportioned against marketing budgets, where as the marketing budget gets bigger, more money is spent on making a lavish production that slightly outclasses the competition. These things help when a game has an existing audience that needs to mature into a more elaborate experience, but they have strongly diminishing returns on investment.

Software features like multi-player, solvers, hints and tutorials, puzzle generators, are all good incremental extensions that can get people's attention, and many of these features are relatively cheap compared to additional content. Unfortunately, all of the big, obvious features for incrementally extending sudoku have been covered - there's no chance of gaining a lot of new users in this market when it's so thoroughly saturated.

Monetization has also been saturated. Game monetization follows a pattern typical to innovative technology: Innovators can go pay-to-play if they're selling the privilege of a new experience. A good number of niche games can slip under the radar, making good profits for the innovator, but not enough to get attention. If the game is so profitable that it attracts a lot of attention, clones will appear and add incremental improvements, which pressures both price and quality. Eventually price collapses as free-to-play versions appear. However, free-to-play is _not_ the last step - open-source is. When people are hacking together polished, open-source versions of the game design, it's usually well past profitability, and sudoku is definitely in this category. (Exceptions to open-source as the last step exist, but are mostly related to the relative costs of content vs. technology)

Which leaves you with "create a new, sudoku-inspired game design." Game design is the underlying source of both profitability and popularity in the videogaming sector, but it means having design skills in addition to production skills - formulaic processes for making original, marketable designs don't exist. The vast majority of people in the sector understand either original(but unmarketable) or marketable(but unoriginal), but have trouble recognizing when a design decision and a marketing decision are related, and what the implications are. And since maximizing marketability is more likely to keep you in business, industry consensus always biases around it.

This is what's wrong with your game: - It's on Android. In my experience Android apps don't monetize as well as iOS. - It's Sudoko. There are a lot of Sudoku apps out there. - It's free. You probably need to change the pricing model.

Try soem of the suggestions given in the comments above and let us know what happens.

You made a sudoku game and most people who want a sudoku game already have one.

Try a little AppStore SEO

Using my AppStore SEO tool (still in beta) I see you only appear in the results page of one popular search phrase "amazing sudoku"... http://www.straply.com/app/android/guru-mobile/empire-of-sud...

But some other Sudoku apps appear in the results of hundreds of popular search phrases... http://www.straply.com/app/android/genina-com/sudoku-free/so...

Perhaps you could try expanding your description to include more of the popular phrases related to Sudoku?

But the real problem is what everyone else has been saying. Sudoku is just too crowded.

Hi. I play a lot sudoku and I will not try your app. All the fancy you added to the sudoku game may be interesting, but the first thing I noticed is that your sudoku game is not ergonomic: on a touch screen, you MUST make the grid as big as possible. Personally, I use a sudoku game where I can put remaining possible digits in cases. If the purpose of your game was to improve my sudoku level, there would me more than 4 levels. I do not know who are your clients. I think that if I had a good free sudoku game (better than the one I am using), I would accept to pay (not too much) to have one more feature: the possibility to play a photographed grid.

One of the things you're doing wrong is that social sharing bar which, besides bring completely tactless, overlaps the content on mobile devices such that reading the article is impossible—even when scrolling due to it being fixed.

Tony Wright has a good write up about free vs paid iOS apps here http://www.tonywright.com/2012/how-to-evaluate-a-paid-iphone...

To respond to those asking why I made YET another sudoku game... Well, ... As I explained here : http://www.buildnrun.com/sudoku-as-an-arcade-whould-you-play...

This game is in the pipeline since a few month now (I made few mistakes by not being lean) but I wanted before the end of the year get it out and see how it's really look like to be out there in the wild. And YES it is out, and I'm not feeling like throwing it, so I need to see what I can make out of it.

There are very good piece of advice bellow though.

I agree with the commenters that there is just too much competition for Sudoku apps. I don't think the game I have on the android market https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moore1474.... is nearly as polished as yours, but it gets a couple hundereds installations a day with little marketing from me, because there aren't very many games like it on the market.

The game looks fantastic. I think you developed for the wrong platform. On iOS you would have seen tangible results.

I've been trying to get off the ground with a few Android apps myself [1]. A few suggestions:

1. As others have noted, test screenshots and icon. People looking for a sudoku app probably want to see a board playing sudoku.

2. SEO. There aren't keywords on Android like there are on iPhone so everything goes on the description. I think you might be better off with a bit longer description with more keywords.

3. Keep working on outside promotion. You picked a really crowded niche. When I search for Sudoku on the play store it tells me there are over 1k results. That is not going to be an easy thing to crack so you really need to get an outside feature and get word of mouth working for you. The multiplayer aspect should help with that.

4. Look at more aggressive monetization strategies. I haven't tested it yet (my device is currently dead and charging), but it sounds (and from the screenshots looks) like you might be being too passive. You have to ask people for their money before they will give it to you. Don't give away too much of the game and make it obvious how to upgrade. You have to provide lots of value or they won't want to obviously, but you can't give away so much that people think the free version is "good enough"

[1] - http://www.entrelife.com/2013/01/case-study-of-android-vs-ip...

When I go to your app’s page, these are the things I see (in order): 1.) smiling samurai on top, 2.) a bunch of menu pages in the screen shots + 1 sudoku puzzle, 3.) a description that’s more tell than show - “the most outstanding sudoku app”. The problem is, I have no idea what makes your game so special. You have about 3 seconds to grab someone’s attention before they hit the back button. I don’t see anything here that differentiates this from other sudoku apps in a meaningful way.

As an answer to the actual title of the article, yes, it is hard. It can't be any other way.

The answer to the question here: there could be many reasons for this. The one that stands out is the fact that the market is very crowded and thus, to get traction in the early days, you need a lot of marketing. The method you have adopted (blogs, forums, videos, etc.) sound like a good start.

To make money — and since the app is free, I presume you are looking at ads — you will need traffic. That traffic isn't going to come in a month; it may not come at all. It seems you've had high expectations and are disappointed at not meeting them. So, yes, here are some of the things you did or are doing wrong:

* the market and the offer (as a combination, not separate) — A crowded market and a me-too offering. There has to be something distinct, something that makes you stand out in a market as crowded as this.

* the marketing itself — You need to be a lot more aggressive in marketing, get your app out on a lot more places. Even if a few blogs aren't publishing as quick as you'd like — and there's a reason for that — be persistent. With this kind of an app, it will be difficult. But not impossible. Get traffic in as many ways as you can.

In some ways, as far as the traffic is concerned, you are also limiting yourself. Why advertise on just game related forums? You can go anywhere you think there is a good percentage of Android users and post. Build some reputation and you will drive some traffic. Again, the key is to be persistent. You may not meet your expectations but the traffic will go up.

Great job on getting something out there! You have made some mistakes, and set some really high expectations, but you have something that you can learn from, if nothing else.

As others have mentioned, Sudoku is a rather crowded market.

Still, your take on it looked interesting so I clicked over to the Play store intending to install it. I then saw that your app wants the "phone status and identity" privilege, which is an automatic no-go for me. Perhaps your potential customers do not want you to know what their phone number is, or the phone numbers of the people they're calling?

These are some thoughts and ideas from the launch for "Tommy Teaches the Alphabet" (www.tommyteaches.com)

1- I knew that this was a crowded segment and had no illusions as to the high probability for failure. In fact, my assumption was that I would have to almost personally make every single sale until other aspects of the "plan" could start to generate them.

2- I also assumed that the app would not do well by itself and would require a family of related apps that could cross-market themselves.

3- The app was built with an SMS-based recommendation mechanism from the very start. In fact, the code is there to extend this to email and social, but I wanted to see if SMS would work well first. Testing is important.

4- Enhanced cross-marketing would be turned on as new apps are released in order to make parents aware of the expanded line-up.

5- The current thinking is that half the apps are going to be absolutely free. The working hypothesis being that they will drive traffic to paid apps.

6- Being that the target users are small kids you really can't have advertising and in-app purchases. Including these things can have viscerally negative reactions from parents. Probably not a good idea. Apps geared towards adults have huge advantages in this department.

7- Given the expectation of having to exist in an already crowded segment I also put forth another working hypothesis for the problem of getting eyeballs to the app. The idea is that, in some ways, it is far easier to market and test (A/B testing) on the Web than on the App Store. Therefore, a companion website was, so the idea goes, of crucial importance. The primary goal of the website being that of a conduit to the various app stores.

8- These days you have to consider strategies beyond iOS. That's why I said "various app stores". The website could also vector traffic to other platform's stores.

9- Website traffic would mostly consist of adults looking for learning tools for their kids. Here's an opportunity to also potentially generate revenue with other branded items and/or affiliate revenue.

10- A website for an app like this can also become a destination in and of itself. Porting these games so that kids can also play them online could be a great way to sell them on mobile devices. Parents might see their kids enjoy them online and want to have time natively on their devices for when they are out of the house. The jury is still out on this idea.

11- Once a few more apps are out I plan on issuing press releases and generally making the product far more visible to relevant sites and reviewers. My thinking here is that doing so with one app might not be the best investment of time and money right now. Multiple apps means more hooks in the water. Therefore, the probability for conversion might be greater.

12- Having one slow-growing app in the market is good in that it will help you identify issues and usage patterns with the app that you are never going to see in your own testing. I've already integrated user feedback and bug fixes into this one app that would have been a disaster to deal with in the case of having tens of thousands of downloads.

13- Analytics are important. Without this data you are blind. I understand my app's usage patterns far better today than I did in the few weeks that it has been out. This tells you where you might want to focus.

14- As I said above, being the my assumption is that I'll have to sell every single copy myself, I have acted accordingly. For example, I took one of my kids to get a haircut the other day. A woman was there with her little girl. They had an iPad. I handed her my phone with the app running and ONLY asked for her opinion. I left them alone and said absolutely nothing. When I got back from my kid getting his haircut she told me that she bought the app and had some interesting feedback. The moral to that story is: Get out there and show your app to everyone that might be in your target market. And, yes, while you are trying to sell, the most important thing you want out of the interaction is to understand why someone might NOT want to buy it so you can improve things.

15- Don't expect overnight success. It could take a year to get to the point where you consider the effort worthwhile. If you are not OK with that then don't jump into the mobile app market. Very few apps become overnight money makers without a significant (read: expensive) marketing push from every angle).

16- Don't give up.

I have hopes for the web+app model. The website has thousands of visitors per day due to my efforts. And the site isn't even finished or optimized in any way yet. I don't have solid conversion numbers yet, but I think that, with time, it could be a good driver. It'll be interesting to learn if the apps and brand can become more powerful as a web property than a mobile app. In other words, an inversion of sorts: start with a mobile app and discover that there's more money to be made on the web. Good question.

Sudoku is probably just as tough, if not tougher, than the children's segment. Get creative.

We run www.slidedb.com which is a developer driven website for mobile games. Whilst our site is only new so the installs we drive will be small, it is one more outlet for you to promote your game (add it here www.slidedb.com/games/add). And because all content shown (including the homepage) is posted by the community / developers - you are not hoping an editor decides to cover your game, any coverage you get is entirely dictated by the effort you put in and what you post.

We have been running simarly themed sites ModDB and IndieDB for years now reaching over 200k+ visitors daily. We hope to bring the same independent developer driven coverage to the mobile space in time.

It's a great looking app - you definitely have a sense for design. However, like many others have already mentioned, Sudoku is overdone.

While you may still gain some traction here (14 5-star reviews is a good start!), you definitely have some talent to use on your next project.

If you go for another game, try to come up with an entirely new gameplay-type. Or at least pretend it's a new gameplay type by not using the gameplay type as part of the game's title. Halo isn't called Halo: First Person Shooter for a good reason.

You made a game. Youre competing with every other game and other forms of entertainment. Id say regroup and refocus on writing software that solves pain points. Read patio11.

Unrelated to discussion, but I proof read your article for you: http://pastebin.com/Hd3YyqA6

This is why: http://i.imgur.com/QspUu.png

You're getting overwhelmed by 1000 free versions of the same game.

Price: Free

Platform: Android

1) Congratulations on shipping. That's more than a lot of people do.

2) There are too many Sudoku games out there. The product is fundamentally flawed.

3) Cross-promote. You need to somehow get a friendly slightly bigger player to put a link in their game to your game, and visa versa. The difficulty is that you can't really supply clicks. So, play on their sympathies? Indie dev, hometown dudes, etc?

This game looks great.

Unfortunately, it plays horribly.

* There is no easy way to see when all of one number have been found.

* It is very easy to accidentally click the wrong number (thus losing points).

* Only one level is available without purchasing

What does this game even provide over the dozens of free Sudoku games? As far as I can see- nothing, aside from some pretty graphics.

I wouldn't be paid $2 to play this Sudoku game.

Just downloaded and gave it a minute. Mute doesn't work. Reproduce: start app, hit mute, start game, and this tremendous gong noise rings out when the round starts. Would uninstall right there.

Also, on the Play Store, it's "Empire Of Sudoku - Single", while in my app list, it's "Sudoku Empire". I had to look for it after installing it.

Spend some budget on marketing. Or find free distribution channels. What worked best for me was to create a channel on Playboard (http://playboard.me) and add my app. Or just ask one of the more popular editors to add it to their channels.

I don't install apps that have a banner that says 'FREE' in their logo. I always suspect these games to be of very low quality (I have no clue if that's true of your app as well) and that they are packed with micro transactions. This is how I see it from my user's point of view.

The op here: Many have said that maybe the market is crowded with "sudoku" games. I do agree, that may be in part a reason.

However, I'm talked to many indie developers that have built very nice game and by nice I mean addicting that are unable to cross the 1k downloads.

"Now this is not our first mobile apps, we’ve made some in the past that got after a few months (without any advertisement) 30k downloads"

Quick tip. Cross promote your new app to your established audience.

...Wait. It's free? Were you expecting to make it up in volume?

I see that you are getting it posted on Facebook pages and G+. Why not give it its own facebook promotional page? Ask all of your friends to like it, use bufferapp, etc.

How do you know what you were building was something people wanted before you started building?

What steps did you take to find this out before starting?

Why does your app require permission to look at my phone calls?

It's Sudoku.

did you try appgratis?

I have 3 sudoku apps on my phone; I can tell you what you are missing: scratch marks. At higher difficulties, it is absolutely necessary to be able to note eliminations or possibilities within a square. Without that, the best you can hope for is casual sudoku player, but soduku is by nature not a game for casual players.

It's yet another sudoku game. No matter how good it is, or looks, you compete with the multitude of free sudoku games out there.

Try something more vertical niche, and hunker down. A fill-in-the-blank game is not super-profit worthy. Even Rovio took a decade before they hit it with Angry Birds.

I think this is a problem too: Price: Free

Well, unless you make up for it in quantity...?

Your main problem is that your app is a sudoku game. There are literally thousands of sudoku apps on Android (I just verified with a search). Your app probably doesn't even show up in the search results, which are limited to 20 pages on Google Play.

If you want to make money with anything, you start with checking your competition.

So my advice to you is - make an original game.