October App portfolio report 📱

Published 5 months ago

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Hey {{ subscriber.first_name | strip | default: "there" }},

Welcome to month 4 of my app portfolio journey. I’m sharing everything - the wins, the experiments, and the lessons learned as I build towards 10 profitable apps.

This month was “un poco loco” for me, but happy with the direction of where things are moving.

TL;DR

This is our progress in numbers:

$136 MRR
$283 revenue (+119%)
923 downloads (+79%)
+2 new apps launched

New apps

During October, we managed to launch 2 new apps.

Contraction timer

The first one is a Contraction Timer built by Lukas. An app for pregnant women to track contractions.

The idea came from doing ASO research and finding some good keywords. This is also our second app in this niche, wich will allow us to cross promote them in future.

The launch was nothing too big. Apple Boost, wich usually happens in the first 3 days, was not meaningful, bringing just 25 downloads. But, even with just 27 downloads, we had 5 trials and 2 conversions to payed customers.

Couple Questions Game

The app that I worked on was a questions game for couples. Another idea that came from ASO research.

It’s a super simple app at the moment: 7 decks with ~50 questions each. The questions help you start meaningful conversations with your partner. Give it a try, it’s kinda addictive.

The initial goal is to validate the idea and the keywords.

The App Store boost was way better compared to the other app. It got around 100 downloads, 8 trials, and 2 paying customers.

Improvements on old apps

As the portfolio grows and it already includes 8 apps, I am finding it more challenging to prioritise between launching new apps or working on improving the existing ones.

So far, my strategy is:

Launch at least 1 app a month
With the rest of the time, improve the old apps that show some signs of success

I am looking for low hanging fruits - something that wouldn’t take me a lot of time wich has a potentially to double the revenue of an app.

This could be either by:

increasing conversion rate from impressions to downloads
improving ASO to rank higher
increasing the trail conversions
decreasing churn

This month, I decided to work on the AI Tattoo app and improve the impressions - getting it seen by more people. It has okeish conversion rate, but very little impressions. And I have an idea why.

When I launched this app, I rushed it out, and skipped 2 important steps:

The in app store review prompt
Monetisation

Because I was not asking users to rate the app - it got 0 ratings.

And even though it was ranking ok for some target keywords, I know I could improve that by getting people rate the app.

More ratings → Higher rank in search results → More impressions.

I also decided to add monetisation so I can validate if people are willing to pay for this. Actually, now that I am writing this, I remember that the first ever mobile app I payed for was a Tattoo app. I just wanted to visualise how it will look on my arm.

I just checked the dashboard, and I can see that in the last 4 days it got 4 trials, and still no sales.

Goals for November

My strategy is to win by 1000 small improvements. 1 new app here, +50% conversion improvement there, -10% churn. And it all adds up. Hopefully 😀

In November, my goal is to

launch 4 existing apps to Play Store. I want to test it as well, even though it has given me a lot of head ache. Will talk more about this during the next update.
Improve the monetisation of AI Girlfriend. Last month it had 700 downloads and only $57 revenue. This is very low, and I could probably easily double or triple this.
Launch a new app???

Incubator wins

I am coaching 7 founders in our Incubator program. We are currently in week 5 out of 10 and most founders are days away from launching their apps. Thomas already did 🥳

This month, I also invited Adam Lyttle to mentor our Incubator Founders. Everyone loved it, and went away with lots of lessons and motivation.