Mentioned on Digg - Sweet!

Three products from App Shop were in an article that made it to the digg.com front page today.  I find it very cool since I am a closet Digg.com fanboy.  The article lists 18 different iPhone apps relating to drinking.  So Beer Pad, Wine Pad and Pad Lite were all mentioned. 

You can digg/read this story here:

Digg story

http://digg.com/apple/18_iPhone_Drinking_Apps_to_Get_the_Party_Started

Putting my Time In + Positive Reports

So, this week in my business I have finally gotten some encouraging information.  Essentially, Apple has started to release daily sales reports.  From what I can tell, Wine Pad and Beer Pad are both selling very well (more than enough to make up for my lost day job income).  As you can imagine I am pretty excited about this.

There is still tons left to do before I can leave the iPhone apps alone for while.  My customers are clamoring for new types of products (even more expensive desktop style apps).  Its pretty amazing, but people will do your marketing for you if you listen to them.

The other thing I have been doing is participating in Internet Business Academy.

This is a subscription based website that basically helps you in everything you need to know about internet business.  It is well worth the cost and I attribute a lot of what I have accomplished so far to the influence of the owners of the site (and their book recommendations).

A good start...

New Product Just Launched

This week I had a major success along with a major setback.  First, the success: App Shop released another product similar to Wine Pad called "Beer Pad".  Beer Pad already had at least one sale with reviewer who gave it five stars.  When I designed Beer Pad I took all the feedback I got from Wine Pad and put it in there.  Also, the idea of Beer Pad came right from the community.  In the web 2.0 world, your customers are partners and they let you know what they want.

The setback this week is that I cannot get an update published to my Wine Pad product.  This is very frustrating since I worked on that thing day and night.  Also, if the preliminary numbers are at all correct many people have bought the app and are affected by its shortcomings.  I do not want to lose this audience, however if I really cannot get that fixed I need to consider re-publishing Wine Pad so I can get the right features in.

This is the problem when working with a huge partner like Apple.  On one hand, my website already has over 700 unique visitors with no promotion at all on my part.  And I am making sales with no advertising budget.  On the other hand, I have little control over my product.  I can't take it off iTunes and I can't update it.  Things go wrong with iTunes and I can't do anything about it while my customers suffer and my reputation suffers.

So, something to consider.  For the time being, I have the iPhone programming bug and if this can maintain some cash flow I will stick with it.  Eventually, I will have to expand this business though...