Awesome Software

With no fanfare whatsoever, I released JIRA Pal today. After my last post about how difficult it has been to market an iPhone app in a cost-effective way, I thought again about how it would be nice to sell something a little bigger. Something that I could sell for more than a dollar, so that I could afford to, you know, market it. Then I forgot about it and got back to work, because all of my ideas were worthless and dumb.

What it is

JIRA Pal is a Mac desktop program that keeps an up-to-date list of your current JIRA issues. Instead of having to interrupt your workflow to check your inbox for new issues, you get a growl notification when something happens to one of your issues. You can double-click on any issue in the list to open the full issue in your browser.

The list is organized according to your filters, so the view stays organized. And since it syncs automatically, in the background, you don’t even need to keep it visible. Just start it and wait for your growl messages.

Why I made it

Not long after having no ideas for a fun product project, I was frustrated with having to monitor my email inbox all the darn time for incoming JIRA messages. We use the excellent JIRA issue-tracking software at work, and although I like almost everything about it, I found that I was constantly having to interrupt my work to check on the status of various issues. One thing led to another, and soon I had a prototype JIRA summary fetcher on my desktop. It seems to me like a pretty useful piece of software, so … here it is!

It was clear from the beginning that advertising word ghost through google ads was a losing battle. I sell Word Ghost for $1.99 and net less than that from each sale, so the conversion rate would have to be pretty amazing to make an ad campaign worthwhile. At the same time, the biggest driver of sales on the app store is presence in the best sellers list, so it might be worth the expense to drive my app upwards in the list, even if the initial expense meant I sold at a loss for several days.

So I sold at a loss for about a week and a half, during which time I made five sales and spent about $50. Five sales was not enough, even in the word game category, to drive me up the charts at all. Unable to gain any more visibility into where I was losing visitors, I gave up for the time being.

There is, frankly, not enough data for me to make broad conclusions about the effectiveness of marketing iPhone apps with adwords. However I was able to take a couple of lessons away:

1. If you are going to advertise apps with adwords, you’re going to need an amazing conversion rate to make money.
2. I still think the graphics in Word Ghost aren’t good enough. The current version is a huge improvement over the first release, but my strong hunch is that a lot of the buy/don’t buy decision for app store customers is based on the app’s screenshots.