In early 2011 I came up with an idea for an app for girls that were crazy about horses. In the app you would be able to choose your favorite horse, use brushes and such to groom it, select different pieces of tack for your horse to wear, and then share pictures of your dressed up horse with your friends.
I decided to “do it right” and teamed up with an artist so I’d have a great looking app.
There were some problems getting Horse Crazy! published (written about elsewhere on this site) and about a month before it had to be uploaded the scope changed — no longer was just dressing the horse up enough, we wanted to model it after Tap Zoo and similar games. So you’d start with a couple horses and then buy or breed more, buy stables and corrals, build up to barns and then rent out the horses for trail rides, etc.
But we were running up against a deadline where we’d lose the name if we didn’t get something uploaded, so we decided to do a multi-phase approach and Phase 1 was just the “dress up your horse” part.
We uploaded Horse Crazy! but didn’t send out press releases, didn’t mention it on Twitter, didn’t post about it in the forums, etc. Nothing was said. Because we wanted NOBODY to download the first version. The plan was to get Phase 2 done as quickly as possible and after that was up to start promoting it. (Phase 3 was going to be the whole “build your own ranch” thing.)
However, the first week more than 4,000 people discovered HC! and that’s when things started going poorly. The 1-star ratings quickly outpaced all the others combined. People hated it because there wasn’t enough to do. They thought it was stupid, worst app ever, etc.
It was harsh.
I mean *is* harsh. Because it’s been a month and almost 20,000 people have downloaded the (free) app and out of the 65 ratings 35 of them are 1-star, for an average of 2.5 stars.
Phase 2 was just released yesterday — it allows you to choose from brown (the original), pink, purple, blue, or green tack. It also adds a heart-shaped decal (brand) you can add to the horse. Just the addition of the different colors makes it much nicer, but it’s too soon to tell whether that will reverse the 1-star rating trend.
It may not, because while it does give you a lot more options for dressing up your horse, there still isn’t anymore more you can *do* with your horse.
So when will Phase 3 be uploaded?
That’s a good question and I don’t have an answer for you right now. While I do think Phase 3 is the one that people will flip over, and the one where we’d actually be able to make money (via in-app purchases), both the artist and I are working on projects that are paying the bills and don’t have time to complete Phase 3 right now.
I can see a future where the Phase 3 version of Horse Crazy! makes enough money for myself and the artist to live off of (and more) — but I’m not sure how to get to that point. How can you “get rich” when you’re too busy making a living?
If you have an answer to that question feel free to send it to me. That would be cool. 🙂
What’s the moral of this story?
The biggest one is do NOT reserve your app name before you’re almost ready to ship. Otherwise you either lose the name or you make compromises that can come back to bite you in the butt. If your game isn’t ready there ARE disadvantages to getting it out there. You can’t stop people from downloading and you can’t stop them from rating it low.
And I’m not sure yet whether you can overcome that beginning deficit and end up with a winning app. I guess we’ll see…
Hi!
My opinion :
Priority should have gone to polishing your game instead of the app name. At worst, you might have to find a new name but your game would be finished.
Getting money from IAP needs a confortable user base. Statistics say 2-7% of users buy $5-15 worth of IAP.
From your 20 000 users, how much are still using the app?
Are you using statistics tracking (flurry…) : it’s the most useful tool to know what your audience like and dislike.
Maybe your phase 3 should be adding more contents (free and paid) to the existing game instead of doing a different one. Downsiding the scope will spare you development time and you will please your current happy users.
They are the ones you want to monetize in the first place.
If you please your current users, they will bring more onboard.
Don’t pay attention to those who hate your game. You can’t please everyone.
Interesting account and thank you for sharing this as I’ve been thinking a lot the last couple weeks about when to ship and with what features in v1.
One way to still reserve the name and release early would be to, instead of having the app be free, charge more than usual for it, abnormally high, maybe $10. App is in the store and you have your name, but there is very low likelihood that very many people will buy it, or at least not very many. 🙂 That or even like $3 and a not very enticing description. 🙂
Another advantage of making the app expensive initially is that when you’re ready to go you can make a big play of the ‘price drop’ and people will buy because they think they’re getting a real bargain! 🙂
As always Jay, there’s a lot of good advice here but hang on…20000 people downloaded HC even though it was getting bad reviews? Maybe you should factor that in when you’re trying to draw conclusions here? 🙂
Hello Jay. You could have uploaded a binary to iTunesConnect and reject it shortly afterwards. Then the name will reserved for you until you upload the final version. The app will be in the status “Rejected by developer”. Apple only tries to prevent name squatting. If they see you are seriously working on a project they are happy.
I think that the iterative development approach used for web apps should not be applied for iPhone apps. The process should be more like: program – polish – polish – polish – publish.
And remember: You already belong to the 5% of the richest people on the planet 😉
Thanks for all your work you do for us Corona developers.
Once again, I am inspired, even from your “failure” here, The un-intended downloads inspires me to hurry up and get mine done. Thanks as well for all you do for us Dev’s.
We did the same thing with our current project. November 22 was the D-day and we uploaded something functional but set the release date to January so it got approved but it’s not actually in the app store. Hopefully we can release the update as the “first” version available in the store.
It seems so obvious now, I have *NO* idea why I didn’t do that! I knew you could set a release date in the future, but at the time, pffft!, that knowledge was nowhere to be seen.
Jay