StencilsApp Blog

The good, the bad and the ugly

It's been exactly one week since StencilsApp was released in the AppStore and we've already learned a lot. Things that nobody could have told us and things that we never thought will apply to us.

The Good

Large and active audience

We've had almost 900 downloads with no marketing or advertisement. For a professional productivity app targeted at a somewhat limited audience that is quite impressive. I doubt we would be even close to those numbers on any other platform.

Warm acceptance

All the feedback we received was very positive. We got some nice suggestions, great questions and lots of support.
StencilsApp contains many features. Being powerful was at least as important as being easy. So the fact that the people we target were able to use it and seemed to like it, was a huge boost.

Account management and reporting

A detailed report of your downloads, purchases and profits is generated and stored up to 7 days in your web account. It's split by country, product and currency and gives you a good picture of the popularity of your products around the world. You can also download weekly and monthly summaries for your records.
It is really good.

The Bad

Reviews

The reviews on the AppStore are shown per country!? This means that your clients in Japan may not see a single review even if your app has hundreds in USA.
It probably makes sense for some products and definitely if you have different translations of the user interface.
However StencilsApp is in English only at the moment and exactly the same version is downloaded in every country. It seems like a loose-loose situation for the customer and the developer.
In addition there is no easy way to collect all the reviews for your product. There are 90 countries and you are expected to manually switch your iTunes to view the app in each.
Thankfully Apple provide a service delivering review data and much more. It can be accessed from other software and we found an excellent web site build around it, AppFigures. It's a must for everyone with an app on the AppStore.

Marketing

Promoting your app is hard. To get more downloads you need a higher rank, which is achieved by more downloads. Nothing else matters.
With 10 000 new apps every month the review sites are overloaded and the standard response is:

We'll probably review your app some day, but if you consider paying a fee or buying 6 months advertisement from us that could happen much faster.

The best option you have is the Web. However, you are competing with a large and well-funded SEO industry for a small chunk of the audience you reach. It's not impossible, but takes time, learning and valuable resources you could use to improve your product.

Our plan has always been to talk directly to people and companies by reaching them through blogging, forums and conferences. Considering the above points this still seems to be the best strategy, but I'd love to see some changes in the AppStore or third party products that let you focus and minimize your marketing efforts.

The Ugly

Ratings

They simply don't work (for us or our potential users).
StencilsApp is a tool for prototyping other apps. It's not for everyone, but the people that would benefit from it would probably keep it on their devices for a long time.
On the other hand, the only time you are asked to review a product is when you are deleting it?!
It's quite obvious that if your app is not generic enough, your ratings will be dominated by people who either don't need or don't understand it.
In our case this results in a very disappointing picture on the USA store:


Of course you could argue that the program may have some issues.
The problem is that there is no additional information. You are not required to give a reason for a bad rating.
May be a bad hangover, the kids made you angry or the neighbors were too noisy last night. Doesn't matter.

All the reviews and emails we got are in this spirit:


And still our product is currently in a group of farting, hand warming and bikini browsing apps. Not cool!

What can we do?
At the moment StencilsApp follows a trial model, popular for desktop and web tools.
You can try almost all the features for free, but if you find it useful and want the complete app you need to buy it through an in-app purchase.
The only missing functionality is saving to the device and sharing online, which we thought is quite fair. It is also explained in the app description, so shouldn't be a surprise if you read it.
Because the free version can download and run shared sketches, it also doubles as a player letting everyone in the world to review your ideas for free.

However this is hurting us at the moment and the only viable solution seems to be introducing a minimal charge even for the base app. This would hopefully make people read the description and try to understand what they are getting. It's still too early and we have more important work (like an iPad version, bug-fixing, new features and improvements), but it is very likely that our next update will follow a more classical purchase model.

If you want to help, please rate our app and write a short review with the reasons behind your score. Please note, we are not asking for 5 stars, just for your honest opinion and feedback.