After what seemed like an endless parade of media stories highlighting the early “lottery winners” in the App Store, the inevitable backlash is now in motion. People are now starting to see the App Store as more of a game of craps than a gold rush.

While craps is probably closer to the truth, you can significantly swing your chances with some smart plays based on knowledge of the system, and a dollop of brute force.

My first gig as a new partner at tap tap tap was to work with the team to ensure our new app, Voices, would be a success. Part of it was working with John, Scott, David and Oliver at Taptivate to polish up the design and add some new effects. But more important, in terms of guaranteeing a blockbuster App Store launch, was what ended up being a fairly simple launch strategy for the app. (Simple as opposed to complex, but not easy.)

Releasing Voices held some special significance for us —this was the first app launch following a tap tap tap partnership restructuring. We also partnered with the Potion Factory to offer a freebie of its voice morphing app for Mac, Voice Candy. With that in place, we were ready to introduce the iPhone app and a Mac freebie for tweeting to a fanbase now numbering close to 600,000 MacHeist members. This TweetBlast and email announcement would almost cover the entirety of our launch marketing for Voices.

Launching an app in this way, without any teasing, ads or a press release, and with one (to be fair, giant) mailing would be experimental. But I had launched an app successfully before with a much smaller audience of 6,000 email sign-ups gathered through a week of previews and teasing. In our initial charting, we peaked at No. 12 in the overall charts. 

We were confident that Voices’ comparatively rocket-powered launch would drive us high enough into the charts where we could glide slowly down for a huge opening month or even longer. We also expected this would affect the US and international charts because of our wide-reaching MacHeist member base.

So the plan in short? Get our app charting as highly as possible from an email announcement. Then let it snowball.

You may question the logic of sustaining an epic charting run fueled by a single email announcement and TweetBlast that was read and played out over just a few days. I don’t think it would normally make sense either, save for an interesting feature of the App Store’s chart placement that is far from common knowledge.

The Missing Piece to Charting

As it turns out, your charting position in the App Store is based on a rolling-day average of units sold, which we suspect to be based on a window of around 3 days. (As opposed to placing you based on live sales, or sales over the past hour or day.) On the surface this doesn’t seem to change much, beyond smoothing over activity in the charts, as opposed to apps jumping all over the charts if they were updated live.

But the situation changes a fair amount when your app is new, for two big reasons:

1. You start with trailing ’0 sales days’ that can dampen but also lengthen your charting momentum, which is based on a rolling average of several days’ sales. Trailing days with 0 sales mean you have some degree of guaranteed momentum for the first few days, as you replace them (presumably) with days with actual sales.

This means no matter the size of your email announcement, its effect would be automatically spread out over the first few days, and result in smooth charting momentum. In other words, as opposed to live charting, you won’t face a huge charting position dropoff immediately after your email announcement (an artificially inflated and very temporary sales spike).

2. Your app is brand new and fresh. Freshness translates into maximizing sales from your charting exposure. As it rises in the App Store’s most prominent shelf space, it will ‘pop out’ to all the App Store browsing regulars who have seen everything else in the charts before.

So the bigger the initial spike, the closer it’ll rubber band the app to its peak charting position (or send it even higher than its ‘natural’ charting) and translate into higher amounts of sustaining, exposure-driven sales. (This effect strengthens the higher you go, and as the sales gap between charting positions near the top widens.)

With these points in mind, we quietly sent in Voices for approval. The app was scheduled for release close to Black Friday; once its release date came around, we not-so-quietly announced it to an audience of nearly 600,000 via the HTML email below.

Boom

Hundreds of thousands of people checked the app out. Tens of thousands of people tweeted and collected their free copy of Voice Candy. (Enough to get multiple related terms trending on Twitter, though sadly we never topped New Moon:)

And, in the end, thousands and thousands of people thought ‘why not?’ or ‘cool!’ at 99¢, and checked it out.

Voices’ climb in the charts was fast. A little too fast perhaps. A strange glitch in the App Store temporarily split Voices into two placements in the top 100 list and probably ended up further compounding our momentum. We speculate that our rapid climb might have caused something to do with going out of sync on Apple’s end but have no real clue what happened. A few days later, the “shadow Voices” mysteriously disappeared. 

But long before that, and just a few short days after we had officially launched the app, Voices claimed the No. 1 spot in the overall “paid app charts” in the US, becoming the most popular selling application in the entire store.

It then continued to hold the spot over Thanksgiving in the US while also rapidly breaking into the top 100 overall charts in pretty much every possible market (first column after the country is position in the overall paid charts):

That is, except for Japan (those weirdos), where Voices began charting a week or so later. But I figure you guys are all waiting for the sales chart, right? The results speak for themselves, in graph form with added hot air balloon and rocket metaphors for fun:

Long Distance Hot Air Ballooning in the App Store (with a Rocket Attached)

I know, a hot air balloon with a rocket attached. Cheesy, right? But the thing is, riding the charts in the App Store is very much like long distance hot-air-ballooning. And like that esteemed sport and lifestyle, the higher off you start, the further you’re likely to float with a steady wind, no matter how light your craft is weighted by price, or by its aerodynamic design. (There is no cookie cutter guide for determining the mysterious “legs” factor for an App Store application.) It’s just that in this case, the distance you cover times your average height = revenue, and it starts scaling exponentially up as you inch higher and higher towards the peak of the charts, and your charting and revenue ceiling. 

Unless you somehow manage to hit every minor updraft of a press review or feature, gravity will inexorably pull you down. Intuition tells me the best way to balloon far and smoothly is to find the highest starting point (remembering that you start out of the gate with your app’s release at ground level). Clearly strapping on a metaphorical rocket is the most direct, if not best solution.

For purposes of full disclosure, I have no personal experience in the sport or lifestyle of long distance hot-air-ballooning, but I hear it’s a rush.

In short, Voices achieved a peak sales day of 18,000 sales, and powered through its first 30 days, finishing with an incredible 302,337 copies in customers hands, and over $205,000 in revenue, at an average rate of over 10,000 copies sold a day.

But was your success repeatable?

It’s worth noting that the three-day rolling average can also work to your benefit if you’re switching your app from paid to free, though again only if tied with a large focused blast of promotion to go along with it. (And of course if you’re planning a temporary switch, the same goes for switching back to paid which is a tough move to pull off, and a situational move best suited for apps with DLC.)

The guys at the Iconfactory recently trumpeted a temporary free-switch of Ramp Champ to a large portion of our MacHeist members who had picked up a free copy of Twitterrific for Mac in an earlier promotion. The app skyrocketed to #8 in the free charts, jockeying for position with the Facebook app, and picked up hundreds of thousands of new fans in a short couple weeks, who in turn purchased in-app bonus levels in droves for 99¢ a pop. Counterintuitively, a free switch ended up breathing a second life of revenue into the game and fueled an unexpected, huge second run for it in the free charts this time, where it was once again fresh.

Where can I find myself one of these “Rocket” thingies? Preferably the extra powerful kind?

In this scenario we happened to have a very, very large rocket we could strap Voices onto for launch. Its propulsion allowed Voices to hold its own against huge pushes by larger companies like EA and Gameloft slashing their prices over Black Friday (though to be fair, they still remained at higher prices), and from past experience, was even more effective than exposure in Apple’s huge TV ad campaigns. But as I said, it was a really large rocket that we’ve been working on for several years that our hot air balloon was strapped to.

Realistically, the average indie developer isn’t going to have nearly as powerful of a force to attach an app’s launch to, but as I also mentioned before with Classics, the rules still apply at a smaller scale. If you’re launching your app to a very targeted audience of several thousand with an email announcement in one concentrated blast, it will almost assuredly result in a strong launch for your app that will snowball for some time to a degree of sustained success, and decent chances at cracking the overall charts. The best part about it? It’s in your control… Instead of praying on launch day for a fortuitous string of high-profile media coverage, App Store featuring, epic word of mouth spread and dumb luck, you can take your time planning for your scheduled release, growing your list of fans to contact on release. And if your app is the super rare app that’ll float on its own once enough people see it, it’ll go on floating quickly right up to the top where it belongs.

Or, in the end, there’s always the option of hitting us up with a video pitch of your amazing app. Like our recent partnership with Taptivate on Voices, we’re interested in collaborating with the right developers to make sure their sexy app reaches its full audience.

In Summary, The Cookie Cutter Build* to App Store Success

*As a gamer who shouldn’t be spending much time gaming, and one who has far more interest in pwning than natural twitch reflex skills, I tend to gravitate towards ‘”cookie cutter builds” and strategies in online competitive games. These are the proven, easy-to-use character builds and tactics that often take advantage of some of the system’s more unbalanced mechanics, the best being a combination of powerful and easy to use. Until they are hit with a nerfstick, which could totally happen in this case. (Live charting updates? Less emphasis on the charts with better browsing, searching and recommendations? Further alternative revenue options? Who knows.)

Prerequisites

• Targeted mailing announcement list for your app, the more the merrier.
• An app with legs. (It has to be good, and/or have nascent demand for it in the charts.)
• A fresh app, or a fresh chart to chart in.
• Price conservatively, and by conservatively I mean low. If you want to chart as high as you can, you want to notch the price slider more towards volume rather than revenue. Only the industry really watches the top revenue charts. Keep your balloon lightweight.

Launch build

1. Whip your app into satisfactory 1.0 shape.
2. Submit it, and schedule it for a later release so you can prepare for a planned launch instead of haphazardly reacting to its random release.
3. Set a timer for the release date and spend your time gathering interest and anxious fans through an email signup. Think of it like a buzz capacitor.
4. The morning after your app release, announce it to your fans and release all of that stored energy.
5. Enjoy your launch, obsess over the charts, and hope your hot air balloon is a graceful and sleek airship, and not a brick falling with style.*

*But remember, even a brick can fly with a big enough rocket strapped onto it. It just won’t fly for long.