Sales and AppLaunch.us experience for Calendar Paste

Mar 28th, 2013

I kept this one in the queue for some time for various reasons. One, I procrastinated making the sales stats public because I wanted to see whether and how I could affect them to look nicer than they turned out to look. Second, I don’t really feel comfortable giving others, namely AppLaunch, bad press.

Sales stats

After a lot of blog attention in December and January, sales of Calendar Paste declined quickly. I think Hilton is right, it’s just to be expected your sales drop—well, unless you’ve got a blockbuster like Angry Birds.

Of course I may be prone to a cognitive fallacy here: I could wish Hilton is right so I got an excuse for bad sales which takes me and my efforts out of the equation.

Anyway, here’s the graph:

In both February and March I scored about 0.5 app sales per day. Here’s the detailled breakdown:

Equals about US $400 (315 EUR). Divided by 115 hours raises my hourly wage to roughly US $3.50 (2,75 EUR). I should still go to jail for exploiting my own labor. But hey, the wages have almost tripled!

Explicitely not recommending AppLaunch

Now to the hard part.

I tried AppLaunch¹ in February, re-investing my first month of sales in the largest discounted offering at a price of US $125. The form looked slick and all, but after they started to “create my campaign” things were taken from my hands. I couldn’t edit anything anymore for days, then all of a sudden a press release for Calendar Paste was live and e-mail notifications informed me of Press Kit downloads.

Thing was, the Press Kit was faulty and still is, even after various e-mails I exchanged with the people at AppLaunch: instead of three screenshots of the app, one shot was repeated three times:

I guess this happened because my screenshots had the same filename: 4inch_retina.png. During the upload this might have caused trouble for the script which processed the form. Whatever the reason, images were never replaced, not in time and not two months after. I guess it’s way too late now to matter anymore.

Still, the experience sucked after shelling out US $125.

• Missing Feedback: After preparing the press release, the developer should be informed to double-check if everything went alright. Everyone writes a shitty file upload script sometimes. Maybe I remember poorly and indeed did upload the same file three times (which is unlikely, still)—nevertheless, this issue could have been resolved in five minutes of manual approval.
• Poor Service: I exchanged e-mails with the AppLaunch folks and got a first response to online contact form submissions, but they never replied to questions in following e-mails. Never. Sucks to be treated like that.

I wasn’t too certain whether I was going to be a victim of scammers. There was at least some evidence on Twitter that AppLaunch is no fraud, but it was poor nevertheless. Still I cannot confirm they’re scam. I’m really disappointed, of course, but there’s no reason to believe the worst.

As a matter of fact, I will and do not recommend AppLaunch to anyone.

Just ask your fellow blogger friends and take a look at the Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Getting Reviews On Top Blogs if you’re not yet feeling comfortable writing e-mails.

List of other people who think AppLaunch.us is a scam

This is a running list. These people have written AppLaunch.us reviews and think it’s not worth a cent:

• Tal Bereznitskey is disappointed
• People think they’re not even a business

(Last Update: 2013-08-10)