mergeconflict322 === [00:00:00] James: Every morning, I've been waking up, making myself a lovely aeropress coffee and alongside it, 12 fluid ounces of productivity. Goodness. With magic mind, it is a little tiny productivity shot that contains a magical combination of 12 active ingredients that actually make me focus more, make me feel more creative, have more energy, more motivated, and have way less stress. I love magic mind. I've been drinking them almost every single morning for the past several months and it's mixed. Awesome. Goodness, like matcha, little bit of honey in there has some tumeric in there. Some lion mains mushrooms in there, and what's really cool about it is that it's easy to drink, taste delicious and makes me happy whenever I drink it. What you can do to get 20% off your first order is go to magic mind.co/merge and use coupon code merge, 20 checkout that's magic mind.co/merge with coupon code merge. M E R G E two zero checkout. To get 20% off your first order. Thanks to magic mind for sponsoring [00:01:04] Frank: this. We pop [00:01:11] James: Frank. It is the follow up show of all follow up shows. Do you know what we're talking about today [00:01:17] Frank: at all? Well, thankfully we've only had about five shows in the past, so it could only possibly be five different topics. So I'm gonna go with in-app purchase on the monkey tracking thing. That's not that's that's not at all right. Is it? Um, or, Nope, I don't count it. What's [00:01:37] James: what are we follow up in you're Oso close, which. Actually completely hilarious. Cuz today it has been six months since I released my first applications with in-app subscriptions. In app [00:01:49] Frank: subscriptions, right. I keep saying purchase, but yeah, the, the whole, the whole trickery was, uh, you flipping over to that model. I'm excited. Um, I'm, I'm sure there's a new version of some kind of in-app billing plugin that I can download resulting from whatever you're [00:02:08] James: about to tell me. Okay. So here's the beauty of all this Frank, there is no new updates to code. There's no new anything. . What I wanna do today is talk through what I've done in the last six months. Why I did it and was I successful? Did it make any money, Frank? That's the real. And at the end of the day, did I put an effort and did I make. [00:02:32] Frank: did you make more money? Did you make less money? Uh, did the season still affect you in the same way? Six months is a good amount of time. I definitely prefer years though, because gosh, my apps definitely go through a yearly [00:02:45] James: cycle. Yeah. It's maybe we'll do a full one year update year over year, year, two year update year over year to see what happens. But I do think that six months will be relatively. Fascinating for us to kind of dive through where I was, where I'm going. Mm-hmm and where I'm at. And luckily, go ahead. [00:03:08] Frank: Oh, I was gonna say, just remind us which app this is James. You have so many apps and everything. Well, give us the elevator [00:03:15] James: pitch. Okay. So here's the thing, folks. So I have three applications in the app store that are four, well, four applications, three within app purchases. Four apps four and app purchases three with subscriptions. Okay. Three subs, three subs. Yes. Okay. So when I got started, I had one mega app, which is my stream timer. It's a very simple countdown application. Frank use it all the time. I use it all the time. It counts numbers on a screen. We fixed a bug that is now rolled out fully and people love it. It's. [00:03:49] Frank: I have to say, it's here. Best app. I don't have a bicycle and I don't have the big number in the middle of the app app, but, uh, I, I, I love your app. I use it every [00:03:59] James: week. Thank you. And that brings me to the next one specifically is my cadence application. So all apps that start with my, or my apps and my cadence is a bicycle app that talks a Bluetooth sensor. And bingo Bango. We're good to go. Now, the other one, which you wouldn't have at all is for a local ski area over in the, oh, where I. [00:04:23] Frank: Right. I okay. So I, I may, I said the monkey tracker, but really the Iowa tracker, but no, yeah, yeah. The little resort app. Are you still locally famous for that? Like, do you get free food and things like that? [00:04:36] James: Well, I do get to ski for free, which is good because it is free for everybody. That's a benefit. So it's a free, um, you got free skiing out of it. Yeah. I just have to drive, drive there and park for. That's the [00:04:49] Frank: best dude, free [00:04:50] James: skiing, free skiing. Great. Can't get that anywhere else. Free skiing. I didn't, [00:04:54] Frank: even if you told me I forgot. Congrats. [00:04:56] James: thank you. Um, so yes. So in this, what I did was a few things. One is that in each of those applications I had, I'm really gonna focus in on the, my application. So my stream timer and my cadence, and for each of these, I had put in a promo in. and in each of those, what it did is it unlocked more functionality. So for my stream timer forever, it was a free application with everything was free. And I was like, huh, well, this is my number one app that Mo the most people on windows and Mac have installed compared to any app that I've ever released in my entire life. Maybe I should try to monetize this people have it. So all of the functionality that was in my stream timer, I left completely for free, but I added pro features. So instead of. One or two countdown timers. Now there's like six countdown timers, instead of one way to do string formatting. There's like four different ways of doing string formatting. There's new count ups. There's a display time thing on there. There's widgets and get there's all these little things that basically nobody needs. And I was like, what if people just give me money? What if, what if I do a promo? And I just ask for 20 bucks. [00:06:11] Frank: I, I I'm here, but has this shipped because I don't feel like I've been solicited fully. I, I would've given you 20 bucks for random features. You say I don't need . [00:06:24] James: Yeah, it's in there. You know, I, I literally did a popup when I updated did all this stuff. There are a bunch of tabs. And when people click on the tabs, if you don't have pro mode, then it will ask you to go to the pro tab and update. There it is. [00:06:37] Frank: It's the smallest, tiniest little thing at the end here. Yeah. So congrats. But you gotta make that look like a little award icon [00:06:47] James: or something. it's like, I don't want your money, Frank, a star. [00:06:51] Frank: Remember when you put a cute little star. Go back to [00:06:54] James: the star. Ooh. Now that being said in my cadence, this was the exact same thing. Originally when I first started developing it, it, the whole idea was connecting to Bluetooth sensors, putting a, uh, a thing on the screen. A number, which is how fast you're going. It's your cadence? It's literally my cadence, cuz I'm riding a bicycle, a stationary bike. And I would put a number on the screen. Then everybody started asking for more features and history and charts and graphs and this thing and that thing. And I said, Hey, man, I got, I got a full time job. I can't be, I can't be developing apps for you. I develop apps for myself, but then I said, okay, let's just add all these features and this'll be fun. So I added a pro mode, which again was a single, these are both pro pro modes. Single in-app purchase. One time fee, give me money, get all the features for the life. That's my favorite one, right? We've done episodes. Yeah. And in that one, I said, you'll get all the pro features. You get history, you get all the stuff. And I did do the two coolest things, I think ever, which was when I introduced promo, I started tracking people's rides in app, just in a sequel like database mm-hmm . But even if you didn't have promo, I still recorded them anyways because it's like, 0.1, zero kilobits of data. So why not record it into the database? Which means. If you install the app ride 20 times, then upgrade to pro your 20 rides are there, which is kind of cool. . Now I also put a little star icon on the home screen, and this is sort of my favorite thing I've ever done. And when you tap on the star icon, it says, Hey, You're like, what is this thing? You need to know? You wanna know what it is when you tap on it, that will become the history button, but it tells you about promo all the features, all the cool stuff you get, et cetera, et cetera. So it's dual purpose, uh, advertisement without being in your face. It's just, Hey, it's there. And if you wanna get rid of it and turned it into a history button, you can do that. And for years, Frank, that's all I had was just give me 5, 10, 15, whatever $20. It was different tiers. And I'll give you. [00:08:55] Frank: Uh, and to recap, you asked for a pretty reasonable thing, a dollar a month. I don't really think you can go lower than that. is there even an option? Oh, is there 50 cents? I think we discussed this. Dollar a month or $5, six months or $20 for my stream timer. Well, I'm one of those people that doesn't believe in paying for [00:09:15] James: software now I'm just well, because you know, the one time purchases worked well, but like you said, is like, Hey, I could potentially do some subscriptions and make more money over time if people are gonna use it. And I also wanted to be more flexible. Offered up what the subscriptions were inside of my stream time. Right. My timer. And I did one month, six months, one year. And my cadence, I did okay. One month. And that was it. Yeah. Okay. [00:09:43] Frank: Gotcha. Um, yeah. And they're all auto-renewing right. So people have to manually cancel, but I think it's reasonable. I think, unfortunately, it's the world we've moved into trying to get a promo into my apps, pro everything. Um, I, I, I, sorry, I'm being hesitant because I'm, I'm really hoping this worked out, but I've had bad luck in the past, so I'm, I'm, I'm being hesitant. I just think you really do need a little star icon in my stream [00:10:12] James: timer. I probably do need one in my stream timer. That is correct. Um, I would say that would probably be, probably be much, much better in general. uh, in my cadence, the monthly subscription to that is, uh, how much is it? 49 cents. It is the cheapest that you can possibly give money. So really, really. Yeah, I don't think I'd go down that low because here's the problem I ran into is, and I've, I've adjusted these numbers around, uh, they were 99 cents. And the idea that I had was I had these one time purchases as a main option, then I added subscriptions later. So I wanted to honor all of my pro subscribers, but I wanted to do the right thing, which was still offer up that one time purchase. If you wanna just go all in and gimme some money. Go for it and you'll get everything at the end of the day. So that's sort of what I was really hoping to drive for, um, with my applications. So in that regard, I felt really good about, um, you know, what I did. I, I felt like solid that overall. I was like, Hey, this is. A good option for my users because I honor all the previous ones and I still will, you know, honor. Yeah. This cheaper mode, if you want over time, I still give you those options and flexibility. And so for me, I felt really, really solid about that offering. [00:11:46] Frank: Yeah. I mean, as someone who's just using the free version um, I think you've been a little overly generous, honestly. I think you should have a few more popups and things like that. It's okay to ask for money. I think it is. Um, but overall, yeah, I think you handled that part very well. Yeah, I think a lot of money on the [00:12:09] James: table. yeah, I think overall it was solid, but let's do a year over year enough, so nervous [00:12:17] Frank: this. Okay. Okay. Enough? Yeah. Let's enough talking. What happened, James? [00:12:21] James: Are you rich? So am I rich? So the best thing that I could compare overall, when you go into, I'm gonna just do app store connects because the apple app store is my number one platform. Okay. And the only thing I can do right now is compare Q2 over Q. Uh, [00:12:38] Frank: fair enough. Okay. So the app was fully released last, uh, last [00:12:43] James: year Q2. So I had integrated all, so both my cadence and my stream timer had single time in-app purchases all of last year. Okay. And all of this year. And then this year, okay. Is when I introduce subscriptions into the applications. Roger. Roger. So the here here's the conundrum like did, did I make more money? Did I make more money in subscriptions or did I make more money maybe in, um, I don't know, one time sales, right? Because you know, subscriptions can lead to conversions. [00:13:21] Frank: I would also slightly be interested by won't make you do the math, uh, per capita. So I'd like to know per download money per download also. Mm it's a slightly different number. That's a, um, because you will have some natural growth and you wanna do a per capita and to normalize it a little. [00:13:40] James: Oh, my gosh. Frank is really busting out the, oh, I'm sorry. [00:13:45] Frank: I think this livelihood depends on numbers like this, [00:13:48] James: so well, we can do some math open up Kalka and let's get that. Kalka a Brewin. [00:13:55] Frank: Oh, you're gonna hear a cookie clackety keyboard now. [00:13:57] James: Woo. So. Um, if we look at this in general, we have to remember that I do put a lot of time and energy into subscriptions. There are actually kind of a pain in the behind we've talked about and done full episodes on it, um, all up. And if we, if we look at it, we know that subscription fatigue is here, but at the same time, There are people that want to just support developers, that like the product that don't mind throwing a developer, a, a few bucks here and there, or even 50 cents a month. Like I'm, I'm asking for your pocket change. Okay. If you even have pocket change anymore. [00:14:32] Frank: Sorry totally off. It's not off topic, but old, old, old person here. I really hated subscriptions in the beginning, but I've come to realize like the old model that I liked was, you know, you go to the store every couple years and you buy the new version of the software every couple of years and you get a box and you install it on your computer. That's how I grew up. That's how software worked. I'm starting to realize maybe that's not the greatest model. this, um, Version numbers are kind of stupid buying a new version of the app. Now, if the app developer wants to radically change the UI, I think that's a good time to create a different version of the app, but otherwise it should be kind of continuous updates, but there's no great financial incentive to do continuous updates. So, uh, subscription, I think is, I mean, it's kind of crazy that I've been able to make a living off of this without doing subscriptions. So, uh, all I could think is the world is actually a little bit better from the developer's point of view and perhaps the consumers, cause they're not hitting these weird, big marketing version numbers that they have to upgrade to from time to time. [00:15:42] James: Yeah. I, I agree with that. Yeah. It's, it's one of those things where, um, that's definitely the case in general. Um, anyway, Subs subs. Well, I think Q2 is a fascinating quarter. Um, cause I'm just kind of looking at the numbers here and see where things align and where they update in general. And we can do this for a few. Well, let's do it for a few quarters and let's see where things average out. So Q2, let's start with my stream timer. This is, this is the money one that Frank thinks. Yeah, we'll see. Okay. So my stream timer. 1,460 downloads. Mm-hmm . Okay. Now we're gonna do a, a dollar amount per unit. That's what you want, correct. [00:16:32] Frank: Uh, we'll see, how, how, how are you gonna track the two different subscription [00:16:36] James: levels? Doesn't matter. Okay. Doesn't matter. It's just more numbers let's keep doing. Okay. So dollar amount, are you ready for this dollar amount? I'm scared. 30 $36. [00:16:52] Frank: I don't know if this is a representative data set. [00:16:57] James: Got it. All right. My cadence. Okay. 976 downloads [00:17:04] Frank: 976, [00:17:06] James: 200 $30. So this is the, this is the money making app. That there's a difference. Okay. Yep. Okay. Okay. [00:17:16] Frank: Okay. See, I, I like the other app, you know, I guess I have terrible taste in, what's gonna make money and what's, [00:17:24] James: but, but let's get to, so, so that's one now I want to, I wanna compare Q2 to Q4 because Q4 is really fascinating because this is holiday time. Okay. And this is core. This is peak money. Opportunist time for everybody. Okay. Fair enough. So we can com we let's just do a dollar cost average between these two. Okay. Now Q4, my stream timers 966 downloads. Mm. Yeah. Okay. A dollar amount. Mm-hmm are you ready for this? I'm so I'm so excited. Okay. $250, [00:18:03] Frank: two 50. Mm-hmm . Okay. What [00:18:06] James: changed? Now my cadence, 1080 downloads, [00:18:14] Frank: 1080 [00:18:17] James: mm-hmm and that is $218. So relatively consistent, [00:18:21] Frank: $218. Now these are both with subs. Is that what you're [00:18:27] James: saying? These are no subs. This is pre subs, no sub this is pre subs, baby pre subs. Okay. [00:18:32] Frank: Pre subs. We did two quarters. Of pre sub your best, your best quarter, best app is my stream timer. Christmas time, Christmas time. Interesting. Okay. [00:18:47] James: Yeah. So that's pretty fascinating. I would say in general. Okay. So what are, what are my, you got the math up and running. How much money am I making a, my stream timer per unit? Because that's really what we're thinking about here at the end of the. [00:19:05] Frank: Per person who downloads it, I guess. Yeah. Is what you want. Let's do your best quarter. Quick, little quick position here. Have you ever, um, gotten a Mac and to use your keyboard cables? It was really awkward, sir. You are making one American quarter per [00:19:32] James: download. Wow. That's not bad. [00:19:36] Frank: Don't spend it all in one place. Yeah. Um, a quarter per download. Yeah, you gotta, you gotta do some marketing. Get that download number up. [00:19:46] James: No, that's on my stream timer. That's my stream timer. You want the, what about my cadence? Let's do that calculation. It's pretty much like the same. I think it's like 20 cents, right? [00:19:55] Frank: Uh it's it's gonna be rough, right? Um, sorry. [00:20:02] James: spreadsheets, everyone ISN. It just dividing two numbers, Frank. Correct. [00:20:06] Frank: But it's in a very organized way with units who, so I lied before you were making 26 cents per download. On my stream timer. Yep. For my cadence, 24 cents per [00:20:19] James: download. perfect. Okay. This is great. So this is really good because these are two different audiences, two different applications and all in all really, really solid numbers. I'm pretty happy here. Okay. Now I introduced. I introduce, I don't have a Q4 cuz Q4 is not done yet obviously. And I can't even do Q3 cuz Q3 be July, August and September. Not fair, but [00:20:43] Frank: uh, okay. Fine. Q2, Q2, Q2, your, your [00:20:46] James: worst quarter um, yeah, I guess. Okay, so Q2 mm-hmm my stream timer. 720 downloads. Ooh. [00:20:57] Frank: Okay. So your numbers are down. [00:21:00] James: My numbers are down mm-hmm okay. Dollar amount. Mm-hmm if you're ready for this, I was born [00:21:11] Frank: for this. What do you got? [00:21:12] James: Okay. My stream timer, which is gonna be a combination now of, in, at purchases one time. Cause it still exist. And in, at purchases, which can be, uh, six month or one year or one month, which nobody did one month by the way is going to be two or sorry, 100. And $60. [00:21:38] Frank: That is a much better division number. Mm-hmm mm-hmm . We gotta [00:21:43] James: take that [00:21:44] Frank: number divided by that number. It's. Oh, or the other way around Frank one over five ish. darn not [00:21:57] James: that great, James. Fine. Not that. Great. Well, look at my cadence. Okay. 22 [00:22:03] Frank: cents for the record, everyone. 22 [00:22:06] James: cents. Okay. Now, if we take a look now at my cadence, so 795 units, [00:22:12] Frank: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We have to be thorough. We never, we didn't do it for Q2 last. We did, um, Q4, [00:22:20] James: we did Q2 and Q4. Yes. Correct. So [00:22:23] Frank: just for the record, um, you were at 25 cents last Q2, previous to subscriptions. [00:22:33] James: Oh, perfect. Okay. No I'm oh my gosh. Frank, it's literally basic mathematics. [00:22:39] Frank: James talking and reading math are hard, you know, sometimes, you know, you work at a big bank and you get the million dollars confused with the billion dollars. You know, it's all just dollars in the end. Doesn't really matter whether the decimal point is, well, it does matter. You had a 10 X improvement buddy. Oh, okay. You went from uh, 2 cents per download to 22 cents [00:23:08] James: per download. Oh, that seems drastically different. Frank. That [00:23:12] Frank: is huge. That's why I needed to go back and correct myself. it's very important. [00:23:18] James: yes. [00:23:19] Frank: So that was good. So subscriptions, I would say [00:23:22] James: worked. Yeah. Now, if you look at my cadence, this is really fascinating. My cadence for the Q2 of this year was 795 downloads, but it brought in substantially a different amount of money. Yeah. Um, this one brought in $330. [00:23:45] Frank: Over 7 95. You said [00:23:47] James: over 7 95. That's a really good ratio. [00:23:50] Frank: You have gone from 24 cents per download. Yep. To 42 cents per download Bravo. Double. Yeah. So you 10 Xed your, my stream timer. And you doubled your cadence. Bravo. [00:24:07] James: Good job right now. Here's the interesting part of all this at the end of the day. So I do believe that when I introduced subscriptions into my applications, I fundamentally made more money every single month. I think the numbers agree here because when I look at this my quarter over quarter, I am. In fact, honestly, going up every single quarter, year of month, a quarter over a quarter, I've almost doubled the amount of money that I've made this year compared to last year, all up. [00:24:48] Frank: Excuse me, James. I have to go add subscriptions to all my apps. [00:24:52] James: I'll be right back. And here's where I think this really comes about is when I introduce subscriptions, Frank, I also modified. My pricing of my in-app single app purchases, cuz I wanted to encourage folks to go down the subscription route while still being fair to my prices. So what I did is inside of my application for, um, my stream timer, I believe on the Mac. I only left the pro full-time upgrade, which. I think it's, uh, $25 or $20 or something like that. One tea, I believe. Yep. And. I got rid of the cheaper options. I used to have a $10 and a $5 option to pay what you want type of option on, on the map. Mm-hmm what crazy. I know. I know it doesn't make any sense. [00:25:49] Frank: We talked about this before and I, I believe the formula you used was two years. You're saying pay ahead two years and whatever, I won't nag you anymore. Exactly. Roughly the calculation you [00:25:59] James: did, right? Correct. Yeah. What I ended up with a discount with the discount. Yeah. What I ended up finding here was that with my cadence, I also adjusted from a 2 99 or 3 99 to a 7 99, nearly doubled my price. So am I making more money? Yes. But I'm also selling more units at the end of the day to [00:26:23] Frank: I'm sorry. I lost track of what you were saying there. I, for which app now did you do this? [00:26:29] James: Both of them. when, when I introduced in-app purchases, I fundamentally adjusted how I was looking at my applications. And I said, I want more in-app subscriptions. Mm-hmm and I would like less full-time purchases. Now, if that has the side effect. That I have to raise my one time purchase price higher and double it to sort of be like, Hey, try the, try the little 49 cents thing. Right. Cause if I get a hundred of those, I'm gonna get that every single month compared to one time purchase. That was my idea. Okay. Now what this has after two years, after two years, correct. After two years. But additionally, in my mind, I believe more people would be willing to throw 50 cents even for a month or six months to give it a go back and forth. Yes. Yeah. And I can look here at my numbers now, Frank here's, what's very, very fascinating about all this is that I believe. That, when I look at my numbers and I diagnose my numbers, now that we know that, Hey, I actually have improved. Even if I proved a sense or 2 cents, or even if I kept the same by introducing them, I didn't go down. I didn't reduce the amount of money I'm making. In fact, like we said, and we've looked at, we I'm increasing the amount of money in sales. I'm making every single quarter now, am I rich by these apps? No, but like I put time and effort in my weekends to do it. Mm-hmm but the subscriptions are really, really fascinating because. Between the two applications. I only have 26 active paid subscriptions, which is not a lot. Oh, [00:28:09] Frank: interesting. Okay. You, you. That's the total accumulated [00:28:16] James: accumulated total of all of them is 26 active paid subscriptions. Oh, scary. [00:28:21] Frank: Mm-hmm sorry. [00:28:24] James: which means that, uh, no, [00:28:25] Frank: it's not scary. That's a good, healthy number. Given the numbers you've posted here. So in, in three months, roughly a thousand people download your apps. And at this snapshot in time, roughly 30 of them are paying interesting, interesting numbers, not the worst ratio. [00:28:45] James: Now, if I look month over month, I am a member. It's only been six months. I am adding about five to six active subscribers every single month. [00:29:01] Frank: Yeah. That [00:29:02] James: helps a lot. That are keepings because [00:29:05] Frank: remember that's magic accumulation. Yep. [00:29:07] James: The accumulation. Now I like this apple chart a lot because it also shows you retention of your users. So what can we do to retain? So what I've seen since January, I only have a few months of data for retention, but my average retention rate for my application subscribers is I'm gonna meta on it. My average retention rate is 70%. Oh, [00:29:37] Frank: they do a percent. Yes. Okay. So it doesn't tell you if they did. Oh, you said no one does the one month. [00:29:45] James: No one does that. Uh, they do that in the, my stream timer. Sorry in the, my cadence application, they do that, correct. [00:29:55] Frank: Okay. But let's say for the other one, there's a bias towards six months and that means every six months, 70% are continuing on. That's a good number, dude. 70%. [00:30:09] James: 70%. I'd be happy with 70%. And that number has bopped around. I had a one bad month. That was 50% then 71 77, uh, 60 this month or your low numbers. [00:30:22] Frank: Sorry. It's it's statistics are cropping up here. Uh, you have a small sample size, so the numbers gonna bounce all over the [00:30:28] James: place. Exactly. Yeah. But at the very bottom, there is HR, which is active subscribers. Month over month. Yeah. And I see 2, 7, 14, 22 bad month, 19, and then 26. Now we're going into the holiday season. The lull remember is the summer season. I expect drop off because my applications, there's more people outside, more people doing stuff, less people streaming less people riding their indoor stationary bicycle, at least in this hemisphere at the end of the day. So if we look at it here, I have, this is very fascinating. I'll break it down top subscriptions. My cadence, 11 active subscribers. Okay. My stream timer one month. Ooh, actually, no, this is actually really fascinating. My stream timer one month 11, and then my stream timer six month three. So I thought there was a one year, but actually it is the, the one month is most common one on my stream timer as. [00:31:31] Frank: Okay, so people are doing that. Yep. And then, um, 70% retention rate. So you would say that's the heaviest bias. [00:31:39] James: One month, one month. Okay. Yep. Okay. So it seems to be the buy-in overall. I mean, it's cool that I offered the six month because obviously people decided to do it in, in there. And we'll see if they are retained over that six month in general, but there's all other things that I'm, I'm not using offer codes. I'm not using promotional often offers or things like that, that I can break down. But I can see renewals come in and I'm getting renewals, you know, through the month. And that's the thing that I look at, right. Okay. 26 here. Can I build that up to a hundred? Can I just be bringing in a hundred dollars every single month? Mm-hmm over two years, can I be bringing in 200, $300 every month? That's substantial money at the end of the day to buy tacos and low carb options for me. [00:32:25] Frank: I would say a $36 quarter is not feeling good. I don't feel like you're getting a return on your time and it's not like one 60 is like, you're not gonna retire from Microsoft with one 60, but one 60 that's like, Coffee every other day. That's pretty good stuff there. Yeah. That's that's money. That's real money . [00:32:48] James: Yeah. When I look at it, you know, when I think about the, when I put in, when I put in these different things and I look at, okay, how are the sales doing over X, Y, Z months? You know, I'm, didn't put it in to become rich, cuz I would be a full-time app developer and I'd be pouring my heart and soul and I'd be doing all the upsells and I'd be doing all this other stuff and I'd have a bunch of apps and I'd really involved applications. But what this means is that at a very small level, I think it's done two things. And this is why I think it's a success that yes, you said it right. I'm making 26, 20 bucks a month. It's I'm I'm not, I'm not. You know, calling home, you know, here and there, but what it's done to my other in-app purchases has driven the price of those up. I've seen continued demand. It's actually validated in my mind charging more from my in-app purchases. When I only had the in-app purchases, I thought that I had to lower the price to get more sales. Yeah. Where the inverse is true. You should charge what you believe it's worth and you can charge more. You know, for those items. And I feel better about charging a little bit more because I'm giving people a really, really cheap option. Right. I'm giving people. 50 cents a month option to get all the pro features of my application. And 11 people have taken me up on it or a dollar. Right. And that's, that's a cool option for an application that isn't, it's not like it's Photoshop. You know what I mean? , I'm not, I'm not charging for Photoshop over here, but what I'm doing is. I'm giving some options to be like, Hey, do you wanna support this app? Do you want these other features? If this is for you, you know, throw me 50 cents. Throw me a dollar. I feel good about it because the year over year sales, the dollar amount has dramatically gone up. And it'll be fun to see what this looks like two years from now when, when it's been out there for a while. Yeah. [00:34:39] Frank: I wanna compare more quarters because your dramatic, my stream timer, 10 X improvement. That's dramatic, you know, um, If you can get a 30% increase by a trick, that's usually good, but you managed to get two X in one place and 10 X in another place. So I would say experiment successful. You also did manage to lower your number of downloads, which. Everyone. If you're not an app developer, please don't take this poorly, but that's great. having fewer customers is great. you can, you can service your customers better. If you have a million customers and you're making a hundred hours a month, you're just not gonna be able to keep up, but you actually lowered your number of customers and increased your profits. That's that's a good business thing. [00:35:29] James: I've also found, I've also found this, um, And I've also found this other fascinating thing by offering pro or even the subscriptions is when people email me, they announce, they announce and they're like, Hey, I'm a pro user. Yo. Exactly. Yeah. Yep. [00:35:50] Frank: It's pride. Of course. It's pride. Yeah. Do you re I, I was listening to an interview with John Carmack of doom fame, and he was talking about the early models. The early shareware model, the early shareware model was give away the software. And if people like it from the goodness of the heart, they write a check and send you a check in the. It's kind of what you were doing within that purchase there. And John Carmack said, well, it was, it was a neat idea, but he ran into some people that said it just doesn't work. You just can't run a company that way. Yeah. So what they found was an alternative to it. The alternative was you still do the shareware thing and you make that a complete bit of software, but it. It is limited compared to another version of the software that they can give you more money for to get that kind of stuff. And it never occurred to me because I realized I had always confused shareware with that model of here's doom. Episode one contains like 10 ish levels. Go play these that is a complete game. You get through those 10 levels. You feel good, but then it pops up a thing. Hey, send us a check for $60 and you can have, oh, look at all these other levels. I just think it's kind of funny that we're repeating that in history and we're going down that road again, and I gotta stop living in the past and get some gosh darn subscriptions in my apps. [00:37:22] James: yeah. I, I think, I think it's worth an experiment at the end of the day. That's what I found. I didn't pull numbers from, from Android and, you know, there's, those things are, are coming in on occasion, but, you know, I. [00:37:35] Frank: Yeah, sorry. Sorry. The, the hard one for me is making the app free. Yeah. But what I like about the pro version is I don't have to, I can still charge for the app. I could even lower that price then, and then have additional money in the app. Yeah. And I think it's the, do I ever make ice circuit free? I think I could. I think I. Could do the finances. I don't know if my heart can handle it. I, I would just have a heart attack and I just couldn't mentally do it. Um, yeah, but from all the experiments, I think it's possible, but I would probably do a more hybrid model, still an upfront cost, but then a [00:38:08] James: promo, something like that. Yeah. I think that, I think that there's a lot of, a lot of good experimentation here and again, as like the numbers. Progress year over year, we'll look back at it. And of course I have to keep up the application. Right. You know, it's the other thing that kind of drives me is if I have a one app per one, one purchase, and then, you know, years upon years from now, I'm like, well, you know, whatever, it's kind of, can't really add more features. It kind of drives me to add more features and listen to feedback that's coming in from my users. And. I like that people are reaching out and they're like, Hey, I'm a pro user. I did this. And like, they're, they're giving me feedback there. And that's been, that's been really helpful in general. Makes me feel good about building apps. And that's why I build applications now. Um, they're there. So now I just gotta keep 'em up and convert 'em all to down Maui. So that'll be the next part. So [00:38:56] Frank: you haven't finished? Yeah, I haven't finished either and I can do pretty much all my apps except for one. So I need [00:39:04] James: to get to. I've uh, still the summertime. I could totally do them. I just don't. I'm just outside enjoying it, dude. There's nothing wrong. I got until 20, 24 baby. So we're good. Um, well [00:39:15] Frank: anyways, I'm just trying to get a release out. I've been trying to get a release out for six months, so I'm just get the release out then. We'll do do net [00:39:22] James: six. . There you go. There you go. Uh, anyways, I hope this was interesting. I know hopefully people didn't didn't mind the clicking of the keyboard, you know, Frank and I. Don't necessarily always plan any of this. And if you wanna see more unplanned things, you can become a Patreon subscriber. You, there are ways on a monthly what a segue revision. You can, you can create, you can give us me and Frank money every single month. You don't even need our applications. The money at patreon.com/emerg conflict FM, or just go to merge conflict. Dom it's there that goes to both Frank and me, and it helps pay the fees. For the podcast. So we pay every month, the hosting fees, we gotta buy new equipment. We gotta go fancy. We gotta buy Zen cast or something. Descripts stuff. It costs money, but what's cool is that we've started to do, um, I don't know, 6, 7, 8 months ago. We started releasing a year ago, bonus episodes every single week. Just about not always, but pretty much. And we also started to do. Video ones too, which is kind of cool. So use Zencaster and it can knick some stuff up there. So you wanna actually see our faces. You can become a Patreon, you can, you get access to all the back histories. You can binge in there as well. And we also put out the episodes early, but yeah, you can, you can give us the money and that helps, uh, helps out the pod and Frank. It [00:40:36] Frank: certainly does. And I can't wait for the winter where I won't be sweating on one of the Patreon web episodes. [00:40:43] James: It's real hot. It got it. Got real hot again. I, I was, I was like, oh, the weekend was cooling down and it was like, ah, it's hot again. So that's it Frank, the time of the year. [00:40:51] Frank: I'm excited. I'm I'm Bravo. You're rich. And we are gonna continue on with the show. I'm glad you didn't quit the [00:40:57] James: show. Perfect. All right. Well, thanks everyone for tuning in. Let me know if you integrated in-app subscriptions, you know, my app. You know, they're out there. I don't know if the subscription models are right for them, but it seems to work. Okay. And I feel okay about it. And I learned a lot doing the process of it. Let me know how it's working for your applications. And maybe if you're rich off of subscriptions. And if Frank should really, really do it, go to merge conflict, ATM, write us a note, email tweeted us, do all the things. Let's go do it for this week's merge conflict. So until next time I'm James Bonta mag. [00:41:25] Frank: And I'm Frank Kruger. Thanks for listening. Nice.