I didn’t post my app statistics since way back when I released Sha Cat. As you may have read I changed my approach after that game and went for a lot smaller apps. Throwing 3-4 Apps out a month for the last 3 Months.
Using iAds and maybe 1 simple in-app purchase to monetize.

The first one was Bumpy Ball which already performed much better than all my apps before. And I took my learnings but couldn’t really re-apply them for a several apps after.

I teamed up with Sabba Keynejad a very talented technology/trend designer.
And we created the one app which is by far the most successful app I released.

The App had around 5000 Downloads within the first two days, all natural, there was no Marketing except the regular posts through my social media channels. ( Google+, Twitter, Tumblr, Linkedin, Facebook, Deviantart, Pinterest)

It even managed to get into the iTunes roleplaying top 10 in Estonia, and went into the top 100 in 32 other countries. Unfortunately the iAd failed to appear on time so we did not create any money within this time.
I couldn’t take that and switched it to paid. Which immediately kicked us out of all reached positions and decreased the downloads dramatically (-90%). It basically killed all natural growth.

A half week later the ads where there.. So I switched it back to free. It did came back up from 10-20 daily downloads (paid time) to 200-300 Downloads a day.

But it obviously had lost it’s magical boost. Since the last two week it remained like this but we patched it and the changes went live the last week. We basically created a pop up to rate the app and give the player in-game points for doing so. This small change had a dramatic effect. We received around 110 fresh user rating in the last 5 days, most of them beeing 5 of 5 possible stars.  We are right now trending back up, which is really exciting.

The loop of getting more players through the nice ratings and turning them into active game raters through the pop up seem to run incredible effective.

I know for sure I will never switch an app to paid again, no one pays now a days and it kills all growth.
I’m right now really happy that we got this second chance.
Let’s see what the week brings us!