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Comments
guitarism PRO *
universal *
midi included *
configurable *
price and IAPs like iFretless
@SpaceDog: Yep, that could be another good configuration. Separate app with slightly more features but universal, a PRO in the name and a different price tag.
@Rhism after reading Sebastian's well-outlined reasoning, I'd have to agree that it sounds like the way to go for you. The negative reviews may come in, but this in itself is transient and will normalize at some point. Besides, as the saying goes, "You can't please all the people all the time."
So as much as I appreciate your interest in our needs, you've got to prioritize your needs as a dev and more basically a human being. In other words, I'd rather you be developing 2 versions of the same app than to have you starving on the street while I play with an abandoned universal-version of Guitarism.
As for profit and reputation, I think it's more important for you to establish yourself as a very active developer of an app that is "best-in-class". If there's anything that's going to cut into your long-term profitability, it will be another dev making an app that competes with yours in terms of functionality and quality. As of yet, I haven't found one that does. So I'd say take advantage of that now.
I'm fine with any of this. I want free but nothing is free so if you're not making a living, I'm not getting updates! That said, totally agree with @uglykidmoe re: reputation and owning the ipad market for your niche. I think that's still possible with dual paid versions but agree it is awfully important long term.
Another possibility is universal with a 'pro layout' IAP.
In addition to Loopy there is sunrizerXS, addictive micro and magellan jr come to mind as successful(?) dual version indie music apps.
"loss aversion" is a wonderful phrase. Thanks for that.
@syrupcore Thanks for pointing out the other dual apps. From the rankings, it looks like SunrizerXS and MagellanJr aren't making much money at all. I'm guessing that only the iPad versions of those apps are making decent money.
@SpaceDog Can you elaborate on "configurable" ?
@Sebastian I think you're saying that having a separate iPad version allows me to price it higher than the iPhone version (along the lines of Loopy / Sunrizer / Magellan). I was actually planning to increase the price with the universal update, to price it at iPad levels. But I can see that having the separate, cheaper iPhone app becomes a kind of a promotional thing to turn people on to the better one, even if it doesn't make money itself. That's a good argument. I'll email you about IAP sync.
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As a developer who is also a guitarism user, I'd recommend making the app universal but increasing the price at the same time.
Also, even if its a universal app iPHone and iPad should still be very independent UI designs, wherever its beneficial to do so.
I certainly would not mind buying a separate iPad version, I really love this app..
Thanks again for the extensive thoughts everyone.
Just to set the record straight, I would make this decision primarily based on profitability and future viability of Rhism. There's a general assumption on this topic that "universal = better for users, separate apps = better for developer profits." I wasn't (and still am not) convinced of that, which is why I asked the question. Either way, I'll decide based on what I think can get me the most returns. I need to make Rhism about 10x more profitable or mothball it, so I don't really have the luxury of doing costly things just for user happiness.
After discussing offline with @Sebastian, I've realized that easy IAP sync across two versions is only possible if they are "iPhone and universal", not "iPhone and iPad". Also, I think all the suggestions about increasing revenue with a separate iPad app are actually about having two differently-priced versions of the app, with the cheaper one being a loss-leader to promote the expensive one. As such, @SpaceDog's suggestion of making a 'Pro' version that is universal and includes midi etc makes a lot of sense, and then keeping the current guitarism as the cheap version to promote the Pro option makes sense too. This is an option I'm now seriously considering.
@Blue_Mangoo That's exactly what I was thinking at the start of this discussion, and still might be what I end up doing. Also agreed that UI design should always be tailored to the device it's running on. A few people will miss 2x mode for a while but soon get used to the new (better) iPad-specific layout. If guitarism had always been universal (or started on iPad and later went to iPhone) this wouldn't have been a problem.
@AkaMarko The 'Christmas morning' effect is very real - when I switch from 2x mode to my internal builds it just makes me jump for joy. And that effect is also monetizable i.e. make the app universal and throw in a few nice IAPs in the same update, happy customers will be more likely to spend without worrying about the money. But it's a 'point in time' effect, not an ongoing thing.
Make it universal, raise the price to at least $9.99, and add some optional in-app purchases. Don't waste time confusing users with 2 or more different apps. A universal app will be better because you only need to work on one app, and we can expect just one update. It really irks me when developers only update the iPhone or iPad versions of their apps and make us wait 2 months or more to receive the same features on both versions. For example, we're still waiting on the iPhone Animoog Audiobus update, and we had to wait at least a month to use Magellan as an effect on our iPads while Magellan Jr. owners enjoyed it. It'll be better for the consumers to have 1 universal app, and it'll benefit you to raise the price on the app. Guitarism is easily worth more than $10 IMO.
long live Rhism!
When iFretless Bass first released, a lot of music apps were selling for five dollars or less and many users had a mentality that more than 99 cents was expensive. Over the last year we saw most of the "professional" music apps increase price, which is necessary because the market for music apps is smaller than the market for games but the effort required to develop them is not less than the effort required for games development.
When we first started, we hoped that by underpricing our app, we could build up a user base that we would later use to promote our app by word of mouth when we increased the price. We were wrong about that idea. Our mistake was that we thought we were going to market out apps mainly via the App Store.
If your app is featured in the App Store, you can sell to the market of people who are not really looking for your app but just ran across it by accident and since its cheap, they will buy it to try it out.
If your app is not in the top ten or fifteen apps on the list you are selling to one of three other sets:
1) people who read iOS music websites like discchord, iosmusicandyou, iosmusician, apps4iDevices, and this forum. These people are willing to pay a lot more than the iOS users who just buy games because they use the apps to make music. Once they are convinced that yours is the app the need to make their music then small changes in price like changing from tier two to tier five have very little effect on their decision to buy an app.
2) people who searched your app on the App Store with key words like guitar. These people may or may not be turned off by a higher price tag.
3) word of mouth sales. Like sales in group 1, these do not decrease much if the price doubles but still stays under ten dollars or so. (This upper threshold is increasing)
Every time we increased our price we found the following:
A) no noticeable decrease in sales numbers
C) some customers complain but then they buy the app anyway
About IAP: it makes money but there's a psychological barrier for every time the user clicks buy and types his password so don't sell them in really small pieces. For example, we've been selling bass sounds as in app purchases for 99cents each. What we plan to do in the next version is group five sounds together and sell the whole group of five for $5. The cost per sound is the same but you don't buy just one because when a customer likes your app enough to IAP they would usually be just as willing to pay $5 for a package of five features as they would to pay $1 for one individual feature.
Our plan for our next app is to make it free and very fully functioning, with the intention of using the curiosity of not necessarily serious musicians to push it into the top ten, and impressing the musicians among them with the quality. But the in-app purchases will come in large groups that provide a lot of additional value at a price that can pay our bills.
Developers of guitar apps need a different strategy from developers of synth apps. Synth heads are nerdy, they like software, they expect music to come from electronic devices, they read websites about electronic music, and they understand midi. But they are a niche market.
Guitarists are a far bigger market but most of them are not reading this forum or any other iOS music websites and they don't even know that there are any guitar apps that they would actually enjoy playing.
I want to see that change - We need apps like yours to turn guitarists on to iPad music apps, to audiobus, and to introduce them to midi. It happened to piano players fourty years ago and it transformed music forever. Now it's time to do it again!
Haha @Blue_Mangoo I can't tell you how much I agree with every single word in your entire comment. I was literally laughing out loud and nodding vigorously as I read the whole thing. You and I are of one mind about all this: pricing strategy, marketing techniques, sources of sales, IAP bundling, freemium approach (at least in theory - I have yet to try it, as do you). But most of all I give you one million points on your statement about the difference between guitar apps and synth apps - this is something very few people realize when comparing music apps to each other.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that there are a thousand crappy virtual guitar apps on the app store. It makes people give up on the category.
@K_Evo1 Thanks for the vote of confidence on price. Actually I did try going up to $10 once, but it didn't go that well - very soon got two reviews complaining about price, and sales collapsed to nothing right after that. Had to do some damage control on those reviews by dropping price, now going up again more slowly to see where the sweet spot is for guitarism as it is today (no MIDI, no extra sounds).
@Rhism When we increase the price, it has always come together with a major addition to the functionality. I believe music apps are underpriced in general but we still have to look at our own apps and ask: "is the functionality I am offering similar to what other professional music apps offer at this price range?"
I suspect that the guitar market is much more sensitive to price than the synth head market because garage band is sitting there at number 1 for $5 and the big problem is that, like you said, guitarists think they have seen what iOS can do already and they are not impressed, so they are not on the lookout for apps that do it better. But until we break open the guitar market and get them excited about apps, our main customers are synth enthusiasts who also play guitar.
@Blue_Mangoo "synth enthusiasts who also play guitar" i.e. a niche within a niche. If I may ask, are you guys able to pay the bills now? Given your iPhone rankings I'd guess no, but I don't have insight into the iPad side. Of course, everyone's bills are different too
Guitarism's pre-Audiobus sweet spot for price was tier 2. Now I am hoping it is tier 3-5, especially since it's currently the only AB guitar. That exclusivity won't last long either.
@Rhism prior to the audioBus update we were not able to pay the bills without support from outside income. In the one week since the update with audiobus support, we recovered our operating expenses for a whole month and increased sales by more than 200%. I'm not sure if that will continue after the buzz on the internet dies down but so far, the internet is still buzzing and we are pleased with that. Because the cost of living is relatively low in our area, compared to other iOS app companies, it's relatively easier for us to cover our costs with app sales. We've got another app coming soon that we predict will do at least as well as iFretless Bass does.
@Blue_Mangoo This somewhat matches my experience, at least in relative terms. My revenue tripled for the 2 weeks (all the way up to 'minimum wage' in California) after AB support, then trailed down and after a month has fallen back to pre-Audiobus levels. I hope your bump lasts longer.
BTW I've also said this in the AB developer forums - I don't really consider guitarism as 'competing' with any other music apps on Audiobus right now, and believe we can accomplish a lot more via collaboration and cooperation vs trying to compete for scraps in a zero-sum game. Your upcoming iFretless Guitar app may be relatively more of a guitarism 'competitor' than others but regardless, our real opportunity is in breaking through to the guitarist audience, so collaboration still wins. Let me know if there's anything you might be interested in collaborating on for mutual gain. And also, thanks for the review!
I think that provided the next Blue Mangoo app is similar in playing concept to iFretless, these apps will not really be in competition with Guitarism. Although it is possible to play chords on iFretless, I don't think I'll be doing strumming or picking effects anytime soon, I'm not that dexterous. Likewise, I don't use Guitarism for melody or bass lines. I do think they compliment each other extremely well in my musical toolkit, and I wouldn't be without either.
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Dare I say how awesome it would be if @Rhism and @Blue_Mangoo joined forces ;-)
Maybe both of you could approach some of the amp/effects app providers as these cater to the guitarist market(ampkit/ik ect)
They are also on here!
@PaulB, @Rhism
The iFretless guitar app will focus on lead guitar. We do not intend to compete with Guitarism.
We will have a strumming interface in iFretless guitar but it will be limited to chords that you can finger with one hand without barring frets. It will be similar to the muting style of guitarism in the sense that the notes will stop ringing when you release them. It will be useful for electric rhythm guitar players who play small, short chords, avoid open strings, and invent their own fingerings on the fly. If any of our customers complain that our strumming interface is not enough like a real guitar I will recommend them to buy guitarism instead.
@Rhism there is at least one way that you and I could collaborate with great potential benefit for both us and to our customers as well. Contact me privately and i would love to talk with you: Http://www.facebook.com/BlueMangoo
@simon we marketed on Facebook and google adwords for several months. We were able to recover our marketing costs most of the time but there was no profit. Getting really good placement on google means paying more than a dollar per click in many cases. Unless every click leads to a sale it's hard to make that work when the product you sell only earns three to five dollars per unit.
This App Store market is like a gold rush: we heard stories about people getting rich by selling millions or 99 cent apps and we all jumped on the wagon. Now the market I'd flooded and the average app sale isn't enough to recover the initial investment.
But I agree with Rhism that the guitarist market is largely un-tapped potential and if we keep innovating and improving there will be something very big and very exciting coming in the future. It's hard to say what it will be but I envision that it will be like what happened to the piano players when synthesizers were invented. Our little ipad apps now seem pretty cool but just compare the synthesizers of 1980 to the workstations and soft-synths of today and you can see how far we have to go.
One of the companies that really inspires me is spectrasonics. They have taken the level of realism in PC based software instruments up to a level that blows my mind. That will come to mobile platforms soon. Imagine being able to use iFretless or Guitarism to control something like Omnisphere by midi, all on your iPad:
@Rhism:
configurable = spacing of the strings, number of rows/colums of the cords...
@PaulB Agreed that they are complementary, given @Blue_Mangoo's description they're clearly very different beasts. I do plan to someday do a bassism and lead guitarism but my approach would be very different from iFretless - I expect they would be complementary or serving different types of customers, not directly competing. Regardless, what I was trying to say was that even if we were directly competing, it'd still be better to grow the market together rather than fight over a few peanuts, because in the latter approach we'd both starve anyway.
@Simon Right now my primary marketing is via coverage on music app sites / blogs, plus the AB-compatible apps list. Google/Facebook ads didn't work for me either. How did you find out about guitarism? How do you find out about other music apps? Where do you feel that music app developers could advertise to reach people like you?
@commonstookie The effects app guys are able to target guitarists really well because they work within the guitarist's existing instrument, they don't try to replace it. Guitarists are used to having electronics for the "effects" part of the picture, but not the "instrument" part. They're hesitant about strumming / picking on glass because at the end of the day there's nothing like the feel of physical strings on your fingers - I'm sure many of you can relate to this (I can). Still, I agree that if there were a good way to advertise guitarism to users of Amplitube / JamUp / Ampkit, it'd probably get better returns than on Google / Adwords. Actually I'd love to license their effects as IAPs within guitarism, especially once I add electric.
@SpaceDog Thanks, understood.
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@Simon That sounds right. When I added AB support last month one of my users tipped off discchord who then posted about it which got me more downloads, and someone sent me email saying "I can't believe your app's been out for over 2 years and I've never heard about it on iOS music sites, how come?" He then me a list of relevant sites and I contacted each one of them with promo codes and requests for reviews / coverage. Almost all of them responded, very enthusiastically and ran very positive coverage. And that's how you found out about it. Which means my current strategy wrt coverage on these sites is the only sensible one for now - all of you are on the same few sites.
An interesting sidenote on this story is that, until this point I hadn't really gotten feedback from "music app afficionados", mostly just reviews from curious casual users. So I had no idea whether the kind of people who buy high-end serious apps like BM2, Animoog etc would like my little project or tear it apart. The positive response has been a nice aspect of the new visibility in these circles.
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300 posts, bitchez!
Most popular thread on the forum confirmed.
I'm really looking forward to the iPad version, @Rhism. Regarding the debate about universal vs separate apps, I tend to prefer universal but would be happy to pay you the extra bucks for the iPad version. I would like there to be shared IAPs between the versions, though, if you go that route - that's my main issue with separate apps.
The idea up the page about there being a "PRO" version strikes me as being the best of both worlds, though.
Maybe in order to help to promote Guitarism and other Audiobus apps, the regular forumites here should try uploading a lot more stuff to Youtube and Soundcloud, promote apps on Twitter and Facebook, etc etc. We can help a bit to get the word out, I think!
That would be very appreciated!