Tag: app

How to Create Preview Videos from Podcast Episodes? The Story of My New App – Podcast Preview

I had an idea after sawing Tim Ferris’s Instagram Story. It was a short video from a part of his podcast, one smart quote from the guest. It was really interesting and I decided to listen the whole episode. I really liked this small promotional video he created and I asked one of my friend who has a podcast show that he would use videos like this to promote his podcast. He said absolutely but there are no good tools to make this at the moment. There is a web service called headliner which promises to do this, but it only works on desktop, and you have to upload the whole mp3 file to their server and what you get it basically a really simple video editor. Not exactly the short video made in seconds which was in my mind, so I decided to make an app like this.

At this point, I still wasn’t sure about the idea, so I decided to ask Courtland from Indie Hackers about the idea. He has one of the best podcast I always listen so he has experience with products and with podcasting too. He replied and gave me so many suggestions I am really thankful to him!

The MVP

Based on Infinite Stories I had a huge advantage, I already built a video editor app and I was able to reuse the video editing engine I built for myself. This made the development so much faster. When this happened I already had a deadline. I had my flight ticket to the 6th of April to fly to Spain and walk the el camino there. I had only two weeks to release something and I felt I can not wait until I come back to try out this idea. So I worked all the evenings and weekends to ship the first MVP on time, which I was able to do it, the 1.0 was out on the 5th of April.

It was able to do a simple user story: add your RSS feed, select an episode, select the timeframe and aspect-ratio, customize the final video and save it to your camera roll.

Product Hunt launch

I decided to quickly get more feedback about the application by launching it on Product Hunt. I got a few emails suggesting me features which I started to implement in the newer versions of the application. This was great because this was based on podcasters who are actually using the application.

Being Open

I decided to build this app with complete transparency. April was the first month for this application and I want to share the progress how I will try to make this app popular. Even if I fail it’s a fun experience and I’m happy to be open about the result of this small application.

In the first month the app got 166 downloads:

This doesn’t seem to much but you have to keep in mind that this is a super niche app so, in my opinion, it’s not a bad start! You can clearly see the results of the Product Hunt launch

According to the monetization, the app has a subscription model. It offers two kind of subscriptions, $5/ month or $40/year for the starter version and $10/month or $80/year for the professional version each has a 7 day free trial in the beginning. This might seem like a lot of money for this but my idea was that this app helps you to increase the number of downloads of your podcast which can make you money, so it’s a much easier value proposition.

In terms of revenue, I got 3 free trials after the product hunt release and two of them converted to paying customers, which made earn $35 after Apple’s cut.

Right now there is another trial for a starter monthly plan but that will elapse in May so I’ll include the revenue there if he converts to a paid user

Plans for May

In May I’m planning to focus more on promoting the application and try to increase the revenue to at least $100. In the meantime, I would like to make the user experience better. I already added two more ways to visualize audio:

 

Summary

This is obviously not the normal success story which people likes to share, but it’s a good starting point and gives me a reason to write about in the next month too.

You can find the app in the App Store or just clicking here!

If you are interested in the future, you can subscribe to my email list and I’ll let you know when the next update will come out!

I write about my experiences every week, if you would like to get notified when I publish a new article, please subscribe here:

Infinite Stories 2.0 – create the best Instagram Stories

A few weeks ago I finally finished and launched the 2.0 version of Infinite Stories, which was a huge update. My idea was with the update to have a bigger piece of the making of Instagram Stories. With the 1.x versions the workflow looked like this:

Shot videos and photos -> Edit them in an app or on the computer -> Use Infinite Stories to slice them -> Share on Instagram

After 2.0 I wanted to offer simple editing options, so the users will do this workflow instead of the previous one:

Shot videos and photos -> Edit them in Infinite Stories and then save the slices -> Share on Instagram

This was not an easy task, but I spent so much time working with AVFoundation and now I have a basic understanding of video editing on iOS. At that time one of my main selling points, to share landscape videos without cropping became part of Instagram Stories so the sales were dropped too. What I decided is to try increasing the number of downloads while offering a lot of stuff for free, so the lower conversion will be compensated by the number of users and the overall revenue will be higher. When I finished the 2.0 I was a bit worried about releasing it because I already had a lot of active users who I didn’t want to piss off, so I made a test flight version of the app and spent one week testing everything and trying to fix all the issues.

This turned out to be a good idea because there were many problems. I fixed most of the crashes and then I decided to share it on Product Hunt which in terms of upvotes worked well:

I got some really nice feedback about how to improve in the future but in terms of downloads, I only got a small bump. I think the reason of this is that Product Hunt users are mainly not my target audience. However, there are good sides of launching on Product Hunt too, the app was featured on iDownloadBlog too! (Link to the article) This boosted my number of downloads.

So what is the state of the app now? The number of downloads is about 2 times higher than before and the revenue is a bit higher too, but not as much as I expected. The app is out and you can find it here.

It was a nice experience to work on the app and nowadays I’m thinking about how I could improve the sales and the number of downloads. I also learned a lot during the development which gave me some new ideas how I could reuse the knowledge about video editing in other iOS apps, which I started already.

I released a new app called Podcast Preview 2 weeks ago, which is based on Infinite Stories but I’ll tell you about it in the next post!

I write about my experiences every week, if you would like to get notified when I publish a new article, please subscribe here:

How to post long and landscape videos to Instagram Story

Folks coming from Google here is an app that allows you to post landscape to your story: matekovacs.com/stories

This post will be about how I came up with an idea and how I solved it with an app. I would like to tell you how I created Infinite Stories which is available in the App Store.

This is definitely not a guide how to build profitable apps because before I built this app, I didn’t do any market research, I just needed a solution to a problem that occurred to me. The problem was that I wanted to post to my Instagram Story a video that I recorded earlier. This video was recorded in landscape mode and what Instagram does in this cases is that it crops the video and uploads only the center of it. In my case, this wasn’t a good option. I wanted to show the whole video fitted into a portrait video because that’s what Instagram supported. I quickly searched in the app store, but I didn’t find a good solution to my problem. Another problem that I faced that the maximum length of a video in your story could be 15 seconds, any video which is longer than that could cut after these seconds. My video was also longer than 15 seconds, and there was a few solution in the App Store for this problem, but I decided to build this feature into my app as well instead of going through 2 apps everytime I want to share a longer landscape video.

So this was the two problem that I wanted to solve. Nothing really complicated and definitely not a “house on fire” problem. I created the first version of the app in 3 days while I was doing support for my other apps, so as I logged my times, it wasn’t a full-time work on it, I would say it took me 14 hours to release it in the App Store. My workflow was pretty straightforward, I opened up Sketch and created a logo that shows to me the main functionality of the app and tries to tell that this is connected to the Instagram Stories as well. So I came up with this:

Infinite Stories Icon
Infinite Stories Icon

After that, I wanted to create the views in Sketch because that helps me to figure out the structure of the app before I begin coding. In this step, I decided that the whole app will be a bit different from a “normal” iOS app which uses the mainstream UITransitions to push views in a navigation controller or show them modally. I’m usually using them, but I wanted to get some experience in creating custom transitions. This looked like a simple enough app to experiment with.

In this step of the design process, I made another decision to change the monetization model a bit. First I wanted to make it a freemium app with ads in it until the user buys the “pro mode”. This sounded a good idea to me, but then I realized how much I make with my ads in my apps and how distracting and ugly are those. Ads today in these small niche apps doesn’t make too much money, while it shows to the users that you don’t value them and their time. This is especially true for the interstitial ads. God, I hate them! So I switched the model a bit and decided to offer the longer video feature for free and I put cropping feature behind a paywall. To be clear, I just checked my sales and yesterday I earned 47 USD with the sales in the store and 2.63 USD with my ads. It’s not even in the same league.

After I decided how and what to do in the app I implemented my ideas and quickly uploaded the app for review in the Itunes Connect. Two days later my app was ready for sale. I made some sales and it looks like my users are quite happy with the current version of the app.

This is how I came from a problem to a working app in the App Store in a week.  Right now I’m looking to get some traction to the app and trying to figure out how to reach the influencers on Instagram to show the app to my audience. My long term plan with this app is to eventually become the go-to application for Instagram Influencers to create and edit the content they post. This is obviously a lofty goal but I already started collecting some feedback from my users to figure out what else they would use in an app like this.

You can find the app here!

If you have some ideas please write me an email to me[at]matekovacs.com

 
I write about my experiences every week, if you would like to get notified when I publish a new article, please subscribe here:

Is building apps a viable business?

The reason

I’m writing this post because I can hear from people that the gold rush of the App Store is over. This is absolutely true in a sense of building a shitty ios app probably makes you 0 revenue now. A lot of people are downloading less and less apps nowadays than a few years ago. Just read this twitter thread and you’ll get what I’m talking about:

This is definitely not a good sign when you want to start doing what I’m doing. Although I think this question is not that easy to answer. It’s something that we should not ignore of course, but my opinion is that this whole marketplace is more mature than it was a few years ago. Which means more competition and a more income for the winners.

What led to this conclusion

I think it’s easy to say nowadays that doing App Store Search Optimisation (ASO) is mandatory to get downloads. It’s still on of the best ways for sure, but I think it’s not enough. It also has some risk involving if all of your sales are coming from one source. What if Apple will change the algorithm? What if somebody will do it better than you and lose the first place? To be fair it’s absolutely true that the people are using the app store discovery and the search less and less. A good solution, in my opinion, is building other streams of downloads. This could be a blog doing SEO for the keywords which are related to the app. Or building up your online presence or creating Youtube videos to generate leads. Maybe using App Store Search Ads or cross promoting inside your applications. The conclusion is to create at least another channel to sell your apps. Personally, I’m really bad in this right now, because the majority of my downloads are coming from the App Store search, but I’m experimenting with the Search Ads and I started building my online presence as well as you can see here. I’ll write another post about the search ads as soon as I’ll have enough data to share but it looks like that it could work.

Bad signs

There are some examples that show that the App Store business is over. And there are articles telling the same thing.
There is nothing wrong with this article, but I would state that when you are talking about the people who are building apps are in two separate categories: The ones who are not really committed and the ones who are. I was in the first category for a long time, I had a few apps I built and even some revenue, but I never took it that seriously because I had another income stream, it was just a hobby. I believe there is always space for the second mentioned category, while the first one is increasing heavily with the newer tools and easier ways to publish apps. This is distorting all the data we have, and can not really say anything about the people who are 100% committed going indie.

So what is the way to succeed?

I wish I could know this! I’m still experiencing and trying to figure out what to do and how to improve my strategy, but in my opinion is that having multiple streams to generate downloads highly impact your success rate in this field. My strategy is that if there are 100s of other devs who are trying to sell their apps, the best thing I can do to stand out is finding those steps they are not comfortable taking. One of these is writing about my journey, including my failures as well! In long term, this is helping me being more structural with this process and maybe getting some awareness in this field too.

Possible outcomes

When I started this experiment, I considered it as a huge risk, because worst case I lose the money I could possibly earn in this year. Well, this is actually true, but my opinion about the size of the risk changed. How I see now, is this is an investment with a few possible outcomes. The best one is if I am able to build up a portfolio of apps that generates me enough money and I don’t really have to worry with this anymore. The second is that I fail to deliver what I planned and I need to go back to freelancing. This is still a win in long term because with the portfolio I’m building I can charge much more than I did before so still it’s a win. The third is if I don’t do anything and I have to just go back where I was before, I would still consider that as a win, because how many 25 years old guy can afford to spend all of his time what he likes to do and not worry about money. So basically I could have an awesome gap year. This is not happening for sure because I already started working on my own apps not just having fun in the library day by day. After all, for me, only the first two outcomes are possible now, which is not really a big risk.

I’ll post about my experiences about once a week, and if you would like to get notified when I publish an article, you can subscribe to my email list here:

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