apptoss

When they launched here, two friends of mine basically rented a Lyft car for the night, driving around nearly non-stop. They took the driver to dinner.

Can't imagine what Lyft's burn rate is.

I barely market them except for a lot of ASO lessons, keywords, iterations on the icons and screenshots. Got a few good media mentions but nothing I chased down. All the app review blogs, forum posts, tweets, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, etc. that I've spent so much time on? When I look at my PHG affiliate sales stats now, I can see that they're a tiny fraction of sales.

The best marketing I do is cross-app links. So each app has a "more apps" list. I get 80-140% conversion when people visit the app store from those links. (140% because they purchase more than one app in the affiliate window time.) I also have a free version of one app that's useful on it's own but then steers people to purchase other apps with some in-house ads. (I don't run ads for any other apps except mine.)

My iOS Indie-Nongame Numbers

First published app (an educational niche): $1,832 in first three months. $1,360 in past 30 days.

Second published app (a semi-educational game-related app): $49 in first three months. $6 in past 30 days.

Third published app (an educational niche): $360 in first three months. $385 in past 30 days.

I now have over a dozen apps. Three of those earn less than $100 a month and I've all but abandoned them. Four more also earn less than $100 a month but are part of suite of clones that address different niches. Together, the suite earns over $200 a month now. My top 4 apps earn more like $100, $300, $400, and $1400 a month now. Over the past year, those iOS apps earned me just over $40,000. Not enough to live on alone but it's not a bad start.