Here at 2OV, we have seen plenty of apps come and go.

If you’re designing an app exclusively for South Africa, you should know that you’re fighting an uphill battle. The market remains relatively small, and unless you’re thinking out of the box, someone has probably beaten you to it.

But sure, go ahead and give it a bash, we don’t want to squash your dreams.

One app that does seem to be ticking along nicely is Thought Train, which we featured on the site back in May. At its most basic, it’s a tasks management app that’s designed for the Mac OS menu bar.

That’s not what we’re focusing on here, because Thought Train’s creator, Capetonian Marc Perel, has written a piece for Medium focusing on how he settled on a pricing structure that works.

Titled “How I unlocked $750/month of revenue from my app with a single decision”, here’s some of what he had to say:

When I launched Thought Train, it was wildly successful (in the context of Indie apps), earning Product Hunt Product of the Day, a feature in Lifehackerand $3,000 in its first weeks out in the wild. Most of this was based on the unique price point: $0+ or Pay what you want,

What I found, however, is that in the long tail stages of its career (after all the hype of being Product Hunt App of the Day), the earning graph varied wildly from day to day, some days making up to $40 but most days making a meagre $4.

When it comes to maintaining an app or any digital product, what you need above the high peaks is a consistent stream of income, this helps you plan your development cycles, especially when you’re not the primary developer.

Add to this, when your app does not generate MRR, every customer you acquire is brand new, in essence every day starts at $0.

So, how did Marc deal with those wild fluctuations, and a price structure going forward?

I didn’t want to shoot myself in the foot here, as I said I knew that changing the price from $0 to a set price had the potential to get some backlash.

I had hard data on this via the order history of 10k users though, which is helpful right? So let’s look at the numbers:

1. 10% of all site visitors downloaded the app.
2. 12% of all downloads paid for the app
3. Users paid an average of $2,90 for the app, with the 2nd most common number being around the $5 range (I had some people pay up to $25!)

Now it’s all about figuring out the sweet spot:

I figured I’d start in the middle and work my way up and down the spectrum. I started with $2,99 for the first day, and…

Lo-and-behold I made two sales!

This was interesting, so I played a bit more over the next few days, and these were my results:

$4,99 only got 2 sales / day
$1,99 got ~2 sales / day
$2,99 got 6 sales / day
$3,79 got 4 sales / day
$3,99 got 6 sales / day

I settled on $3,99, but I decided to add some extra options for those users who feel extra generous, this keeps with the spirit of “pay what you want” just that there’s no free option.

Some users still pay more for the app than the base price.

And, in conclusion, what does it all mean for Thought Train’s bottom line?

It means that sales have stabilised to ~$20/day which doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you add it together it means I’ve unlocked $750 of revenue per month from the exact same product I’ve had live for 5 months but with no real extra effort.

I’m super happy about this, it really just means that I can spend more on advertising and development. With an awesome new design and some incredible feature requests on their way, the app has a bright future. My aim is to unlock another 100% revenue and get the app to $2,000/mo by December.

Never hurts to have a little passive earner ticking over nicely in the background. You might say Marc’s on his way to living the holiday.

If you’re an app designer, or are considering how to make the most money out of an existing app, you can probably learn a few things from him.

Cool little update – Marc reached out to us with some good news. 2OV readers will get the app for just $0,99 if they use the coupon code: 2oceansvibe

You can find out more about Thought Train here.

[source:medium]