By Sophia Perl (Founder & Developer, Eventabulous)
AppNation 2011 was fun. I got a free pass, a demo pedestal, and a chance to pitch on stage. My 3 minutes of fame on stage was up so fast, but I loved the opportunity. What more can a girl ask for?
Also, my Eventabulous iPhone app got more downloads. Thanks to Women 2.0 for hooking me up!
Here are my notes from AppNation:
- App users are more likely than pc users to pay for apps
- Almost every app category has a dominate app – social fb, weather weather.com, etc
- Word of mouth is a big influence for app discovery
- You might have 1000 play your game, 50 of them pay, and 1 of them give you half your revenue
- Mistake of not putting ads on the homepage, did one day and made an extra 1k a day
- Not testing out other ad networks, started with admob and didn’t change it
- Signout startup- celebs leave voicemails for all fans to get text and dial in and listen to, hard to convert to ticket sales bc most didn’t have credit cards/money to pay even though they call 1-10 times a day
- Apple users have the most wallet and are willing to pay 1-3 dollars for apps
- You can start pricing high then lower and it’s out longer
- Free apps and inapp purchases have been very powerful going forward
- Removal of ads has not been a good reason to upgrade
- Freemium works very well for games
- Passed location to ad networks and saw more effective ad rev, but users were pissed as to why location was needed to search recipes
- Logo and icon are very important
- Ipad users willing to pay 5-10 per app
- Urbanspoon traffic doubled year to year, 7 figure a year revenue, 3 ppl built the company
- Zynga poker model- money going in and no money going out, reduces liability
- 75k apps on ipad, price of ipad apps going up
- A lot of women are spending more time on mobile, looking for restaurants, where to shop
- Directtv went to urbanspoon to help ppl to find sports bars with premium sports channels
- 80-90% are free apps in app stores
- Old navy told shoppers to use shazam to figure out what songs were being played in the stores
- Urbanspoon closed the loop by now having a reservation system for restaurants
Some people whom I met:
- Android game developers
- prior Startup Weekend attendees
- Mobile payment company
- Ringtone company
- Mobile incubator lab
- Sales from a major tech blog
- Startup bank
- Software strategist
- Big book retailer
- Mobile ad network
- Online store coupons
This post was originally published on SophiaPerl.com.
About the guest blogger: Sophia is a Product Manager at a large software company in Silicon Valley. She has over nine years of software industry experience in the areas of development, research, and management. She has worked in technical areas such as enterprise content management, relational databases, and data warehouses. Sophia holds a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Southern California (Go Trojans!) and an MBA from University of California at Davis with emphasis on Technology Management and Marketing. Her interests are in technology and startups.
