Tag: story

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:

Why am I going indie?

This is the first post on this blog and I would like to explain the reason I am leaving freelancing a going into the indie world. This whole story is for me about the freedom and control what you could have over your life. When I started working as an employee it felt great to have a salary and it was the first moment in my life when I had that option to spend my own money. Before that my parents supported me so everytime I spent on something I needed to rationalize to myself that why I’m buying this and that. This was the first step of going into the direction that could lead me to an absolute freedom and control over how I spend my time. I did work for a startup and then to a more like a normal company. (having revenue and all the boring stuff) I worked there for a while and I learned a ton about how to do proper app development. In that time, I started thinking about this new movement called digital nomadism, which now is probably super bad sounding, thanks to all the drop shipping courses and life coaches who are trying to sell a dream to other people, but this is a different story.

Continue reading “Why am I going indie?”