On Tuesday, I participated in Two Dollar Tuesday.
Mike Dattolo from LittleFin emailed me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to participate. He plans to run Two Dollar Tuesday as a regular weekly promotion. One of his own apps, Compartments would be participating in the bundle as well along with Socialite. The idea was that Dropzone and these two apps would be discounted to $2 for one day only. The individual developers would simply reduce the prices of their apps to $2 in the Mac App Store for Tuesday only and we would keep all the proceeds.
I was totally unsure whether to participate. Dropzone normally sells for $14 and I was uncertain whether offering such a large discount was a good idea. I worried about a few things: That it would reduce the perceived value of my app, that it would upset other customers who missed the discount and that the support burden would be too high.
In the end I flipped a coin and decided to go for it. The results of the promotion have blown me away. So much so that I’ve decided to share the actual sales numbers with you all, but first lets take a look at what happened to my ranking in the App Store. Before the feature, my ranking in the Productivity category (U.S store) was averaging around 170 and I was not showing at all in the top paid apps category of the store. On the day of the sale I was propelled into the top 3, not just in the productivity category, but in the top paid apps overall:
People tell me that Dropzone was even beating pages and was second only to Lion for a short while. Unfortunately I did not get a screenshot of this. In Germany I even beat Lion and was the #1 selling app overall.
I have shown sales for the 19th, 20th and 21st to give you a rough idea of how many I was selling at the normal price of $14. There was a little bit of overlap with the 21st (maybe a few hours) as Mike had us set our prices well in advance so that from the start of the 22nd all three apps would be selling for $2. That is why the 21st is quite a bit higher.
As you can see, I sold over 6700 copies as a result of the sale. I have never before sold any amount close to this much before. When Apple featured me on the front page of the App Store I sold around 300 copies (that was at the old price of $14).
Lets see what this works works out to in terms of actual revenue:
So I made over $8000 US after Apples 30% cut has been subtracted. This is beyond my wildest dreams of what I expected to make.
A lot of this was due to the efforts of Mike Dattolo who did a fantastic job contacting bloggers and marketing the special. It was promoted on The Verge, Lifehacker and a number of other sites. You should check out his Compartments app, and I highly recommend participating in his promotion if you’re asked.
Thank you all for the amazing support and validation of my work.