Hi r/Entrepreneur,

My name is Kevin and I’ve spent over two years designing, developing, and marketing an app that makes light shows using connected “smart” household lighting. I’ve seen a few posts on r/Entrepreneur about free, ad-sponsored apps, but today I’d like to share my experience developing and marketing paid apps.

A little bit about me: I’m a software engineer with about 10 years of experience developing in-flight entertainment systems. Although I value my experience in the corporate world I always wanted to break out on my own and kept my eyes open for opportunities. One such opportunity came via a Kickstarter for LIFX, a Wi-Fi enabled color LED light bulb. I backed the project and hoped that some day someone would make a really cool light show app. A few did come out, but none that had the level of control that I wanted to have over my lights. So I decided to try my hand at developing a mobile app. In June 2014 I bought a MacBook Pro and started learning Swift.

When I began developing apps my intent was to build lots of simple apps, with each aimed at generating a small amount of passive income. This was the model a lot of other app developers were using and it seemed to be a reasonable approach to start out with.

I spent 2 months making by first app, HouseParty, which let you create very basic patterns. Want your lights to go Red->Green->Red->Green and keep looping? That’s what you could do. After I finished, I sat down with the app and tried to use it while listening to music. I realized that while the app did a certain thing well, it was just not that fun to use; people weren’t going to want to come back and keep using the app. I ended up earning back my $99 developer fee and not much more, but I knew that the potential was there so I kept on building.

I built 4 more non-light apps over the next few months, two for iPhone and two for OSX. I released all of the apps into the App Store and quickly realized that trying to capture an audience through App Store searches alone with paid apps was a losing battle. Between all 4 of those apps, I generated only about $200 over the course of a year. One app only sold 2 copies at $0.99 each. The only app that had somewhat consistent downloads was HouseParty because I was able to tap into people searching for Philips Hue apps, but it was still lost in the sea of a hundred other apps. I wasn’t going to be able to make a living on 2-3 downloads per day without a significant marketing push.

So I decided to try a different approach and focus on making a single, high-quality app. The standard advice is that marketing an app costs at least $5-10k, so if I can focus on one app then I can keep marketing costs down by not having to reach out to multiple markets. It also means that I can focus on adding value to my product and building a solid customer base.

As I have a passion for light shows and HouseParty seemed to show promise I continued developing that app. I changed the name to Light DJ and starting adding new features and controllers. While my first few apps were using the “pay-up-front” model, I decided to try using In-App Purchases so that customers could download and try the app for free before committing to purchase. This significantly increased the amount of downloads because users didn’t have to worry about paying for an app that didn’t do what they expected. I still maintain a pay-up-front version because some users that prefer that method, and it also allows me to provide promo codes to reviewers (something that can’t be done with IAPs).

When dealing with 3rd-party hardware it’s inevitable that people will have issues getting the hardware to connect. Initially all of this frustration was being expressed in the App Store reviews, so I updated the app with a direct link to my email. Not only does this allow me to field support requests before they hit the reviews, but it turned out to be a great vehicle for interacting with my users. Everyone wants to share their ideas for how they want the app to work with their lights, so I listen to their feedback and often I implement it into the app. I’d say about 80-90% of user feature requests have made it into the app. I’ve added some requests within a week. Posting my email address also added accountability on my part - I'm no longer a developer hiding in the shadows, I’m a business owner with a product.

Today I market through a few different vehicles, though Instagram has been the most successful. This network is particularly active with the EDM/raver crowd. I post videos of my lights in action, and that brings in a lot of traffic because as users scroll down on their feed the videos automatically play and the flashing lights draw their attention. Reddit Ads have also been an affordable way to target potential customers, especially in more specialty areas that are harder/more expensive to reach via Google Ads.

One of the biggest challenges with marketing my app is the fact that users need to buy expensive hardware in order to use the app. This was a lot harder 2 years ago when the bulbs were $100 each vs. today at around $45. It’s always been my expectation that the hardware costs will get lower over time, so even if a user can’t afford it today, they might be able to tomorrow. Ultimately my “long bet” is that connected lighting will be as commonplace as Wi-Fi routers in perhaps 5-10 years time, and I wanted my app to be well-established by that point.

So after two years of development 7 days a weeks including countless late nights and weekends, my app is finally in a state where I can live solely off the income. My app currently sits at about 86,000 downloads with about 11,000 units purchased. I just released my newest version last month, a major UI and feature update that increased sales by over 70%. I attribute this to listening to my users and finding out what they want their lights to do and making it easy for them to do it.

My advice for future paid app entrepreneurs is to start small and keep building. Anything truly valuable to users isn’t going to be built in a day, so take the time to design a quality app. When you release your app, don’t expect it to be a hit right away, but don’t get discouraged. I remember waking up many mornings hoping to just have a sale. Then $1 mornings slowly turned into $10 mornings, which slowly turned into $100 mornings. Keep adding new features that will increase the app's value to your users. Don’t be afraid to throw out ideas that aren’t working. Expect failures, and use them as an excuse to learn.

I hope my experience can help those of you considering similar paths. If you have any questions about my journey, it’d be my pleasure to answer them.

Cheers, Kevin