A Candid Look at Unread’s First Year

Let's say he was simply much better at convincing people and had twice as many people purchase the app as he did. He still would only have made $50,000 from a year of working 60 hour days; and the majority of that revenue came in the days after release while it was still "new" and receiving lots of free press attention (and is not likely to repeat itself in the absence of a marketing campaign).

Keep in mind he now has to support the people who purchased his app while delivering improvements to a new version. Since you likely converted a large chunk of the people who would be interested in your app during your launch free publicity phase, there's a smaller pool of potential customers out there. You can either spend money on building features for users who will never pay you again, or you can spend money on marketing.

Moral of the story here is that the success of a product usually has very little to do with the merits of the product itself and much more to do with marketing. Marketing isn't something you can DIY; it costs money and if you're selling a niche $5 app, you're probably not going to see much return from a marketing campaign either. Without significant marketing or winning the viral popularity lottery, you're probably not even going to make minimum wage off the time you put into your app. The author is just opening his books so other people know what they're getting into.

I think if Jared updated the screenshots to be full view, real screenshots, showcasing a flow of functionality, he'd significantly increase his conversion rate. Same with the website - more / better screenshots and he probably would have had my business.

Unread's greatness isn't like that of Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word has a thousand features, and they're all there to see on a screenshot. Tab dialogs with thirty tabs, windows with dozens of buttons, and so on and so forth.

Which may or may not be good, but it definitely is neither small nor modest. Microsoft Word is great, like Ghengis Khan's army was great, and affords impressive, even overwhelming photos.

Not so Unread. Its qualities not not easy to photograph.

Perhaps minimalistic UIs that emphasize DWIM and comfort are unsaleable in an App Store that gives prominence to screenshots.

First impression lasts. Steep grayscale gradient is firmly associated with an amateurish Gimp job and it's an exact opposite of polish. It's something that a noob designer would throw into an image to spruce things up.

I read his post, I went to the project page on his site and the app there indeed looks really good. It is polished, a total beaut. Then I followed a link to the AppStore and what do I see? A set of typical programmer-made screenshots. All that "polished" impression goes quickly down the drain and I leave the app's page in 2 seconds. Because the screenshots I see don't look good. Because of the cheesy background gradient :-\

In the iTC lab, the woman helping me said that every screenshot needs to stand alone in telling the story of the app. Every screenshot has to sell. And the app icon. And the title. And the description. She wanted me to pick one or two (no more) of the best, most compelling things about my app and change everything to highlight or focus on those two things.

She told me that potential customers have to "get it" in seconds. I was to make it as easy as possible for them to understand my app as fast as possible. She even told me what she thought the two things were for my app, which I agreed with, but she only got it after talking to me for 10 minutes.

While I agree the Unread screenshots are bad, I'm pretty sure that neither the gradient nor floating text is the problem. It's that the screenshots themselves are not focused on the one or two things that make this RSS reader worth buying.

There are actually 7 points made, in addition to the testimonial. But no one buys an RSS reader because of fonts, comfort, gestures, themes, sharing, OvershareKit, a testimonial, or even full-screen reading. They buy because they can read articles from their favorite websites. Why should I buy Unread? Not a single screenshot answers that question.

Again, I know I'm tearing into someone else's hard work here. But my own app's screenshots deserve the same criticism. Now that I know better, I hope others can learn from my mistakes.

Marketing an app well is just as hard as building one. I know how to do one and am still learning how to do the other.

Disclaimer: I also sell paid up-front apps in a crowded market with a bunch of free alternatives, so I feel his pain.