New to this series? Checkout the first report for background info on Postcard Panda.
tl;dr – September 2016 continued the downward spiral. I’m not quite certain as to the cause, although the end of summer vacation season is at least a contributing factor (over 80% of customer survey respondents cite vacations as the reason they send cards). I’m still getting hammered in the ASO department. The one bright spot was that I finally managed to get that logo printed onto the back of all postcards sent!
Overall Stats
| August 2016 | September 2016 | % Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $588.49 | $420.71 | -28.51% |
| Total Expenses | $-527.49 | $394.68 | -25.20% |
| Profit | $61.00 | $26.03 | -57.21% |
Expenses Breakdown
| August 2016 | September 2016 | % Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kite.ly | $368.75 | $261.25 | -29.15% |
| Hosting (Heroku) | $7.00 | $14.00 | 100% |
| Advertising | $33.00 | $33.00 | 100% |
| Stripe | $106.23 | $75.34 | -29.08% |
| S3 + Cloudfront | $4.72 | $5.12 | 8.47% |
| Refunds | $7.96 | $5.97 | -25.00% |
USA App Store Stats
| August 2016 | September 2016 | % Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guest Orders | 19 | 22 | 15.79% |
| Logged In Orders | 273 | 177 | -35.16% |
| Total Orders | 292 | 199 | -31.85% |
| Signups who placed an order | 34 | 23 | -32.35% |
| Downloads | 192 | 85 | -55.73% |
| Reviews | 15 | 1 | -93.33% |
The slump continues. At the very least, revenue didn’t crash the way downloads did due to my existing customers.
UK App Store Stats
| August 2016 | September 2016 | % Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guest Orders | 0 | 0 | N/A |
| Logged In Orders | 3 | 10 | 233.33% |
| Total Orders | 3 | 10 | 233.33% |
| Signups who placed an order | 2 | 2 | 0% |
| Downloads | 4 | 5 | 25.00% |
| Reviews | 0 | 0 | N/A |
Retention
What Went Right
- I finally managed to generate back images myself for Postcard Panda (with a slight push from Mandy)! It feels good to get this one done; it was the last feature that I felt should be made before I considered Postcard Panda ‘done’. At this point, I don’t expect to make any technical changes to the app except for bug fixes.
- As part of the above feature, I got to nerd out with ImageMagick and Redis. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but it’s nice to add some more skills to the engineering quiver.
What Went Wrong
- The revenue numbers did not increase in September. In fact numbers were pretty bad across the board.
- iOS 10 took me unawares. I had two crashing bugs in the App Store version of the app due to privacy restrictions. Those two bugs are now taken care of.
- ASO continues to be one of the most frustrating issues with indie app development. Earlier this month, Apple announced new rules about keyword spamming and app titles. Specifically, keywords in the title are no longer allowed, so I dropped the name of the app back to ‘Postcard Panda’. Naturally, this also dropped my keyword ranking for several phrases, which is par for the course when you play fair. As someone with very limited budget, I need to start being more creative about how to get downloads. ASO is not the magic pill I had hoped for.
Next Month’s Goals
The top priority for next month is to come up with a marketing plan, and I don’t anticipate to be engineering at all on Postcard Panda.
Thanks for reading, and check back next month!
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