One of the updates we have been discussing is whether we would develop an iPad version of our two current apps. So far, the vote is a resounding no for myPause, but it is not such a clear issue for myShoebox. Wouldn’t it be great to show off your shoes with larger pics in an iPad sized Shoeflow? What are your thoughts? Any strong preferences? We would love your feedback, as always.

We also wanted to take a moment to remind you all in the US to shower your mother with a great gift on Mother’s Day (May 9th) – a great app screenlist (just like we suggested for the winter holidays). However, now Apple has made it just a bit easier. They must have read our Wishlist and decided to grant us at least one of our requests – it’s now possible to gift an app directly to someone else. Why not include myShoebox with a gift certificate to her favorite shoe store? Or tuck the myPause app in with a relaxing day at the spa. Go on… give your mum the apps she deserves!!

We in the UK have already had our Mothering Sunday (March 14th) and in Russia and Italy (most notably) they already enjoyed the great International Women’s Day (March 8th), so we will have to come up with another excuse to gift the women in our lives these two great apps!

People like to give personal gifts. When the idea of gifting playlists first appeared on iTunes, it was an instant hit. It was the next step in the evolution of the mixtape, a classic romantic gift (cf. film High Fidelity). With playlists, the creation process was so easy, you could gift to a broader audience. Also http://mixtape.me/

How about the idea of giving an app ‘screenlist’ to someone as a gift? Based upon the iPhone ads with 12 or 16 apps identified, you could create a screen full of apps that were chosen specifically for the recipient. You give them a copy of your mocked up iPhone ad and an iTunes gift card (unless Apple comes out with an App Store gift card before then!) for the total amount of all the apps on the screen.

What a fabulous holiday gift! It takes a lot of thought to put together a personalised set of apps and so many people with iPhones have yet to spend enough time finding just the right apps for them.

How about this screenlist for your mother, sister, friend or wife in her forties or fifties:

App Screenlist Gift

If anyone has any other mockups or ideas for Screenlists that fit certain profiles, please add in the comments below and we’ll compile all before the New Year.

We strongly believe that consumers want well-designed, easy to use, feature-rich tools that entertain, organise, inform and improve their quality of life… and that they will pay for quality. In order to create quality apps, it takes time and, of course, financial resources.

We have understood the importance of marketing and promotion from day one. We knew that this responsibility was squarely on our shoulders and were happy with this fact. The App Store is merely a distribution channel and that’s okay.

HOWEVER, there are small things that Apple could do that would make our efforts just a little easier or more effective:

1. Allow a peek into the black box of App Store

It’s very difficult to take a leap of faith when there is only anecdotal information regarding the impact of marketing efforts on sales. Many developers have created offline systems to get around this, but none provide clear tracking data that shows the unbroken path between marketing effort, click-through and sale of a specific app.

App Cubby hits it on the head: Developers need at least a little peek into the black box that is the App Store. Pinch Media is a great source of summary data (thanks, Fred Wilson), but developers need app-specific data regarding activity in the App Store. Allowing click tracking all the way through to purchase is a minimum, but additional data would be helpful (such as where shoppers are coming from: direct links, search, top lists, featured pages, etc.).

We’ve seen the trend of Apple opening the doors ever so slightly. As of this month, developers can now see more detail in the approval process – whether the app is Waiting for Review or In Review or Ready for Sale.

“It’s the coolest new feature they’ve added [for developers], in my opinion,” said Oliver Cameron, developer of the popular iPhone app Postman.

Hopefully, this is the beginning of a trend.

2. Allow demo videos in the store

This will get rid of 90% of the crap because people won’t waste the time to download crap even if it’s free! Most serious developers make demo videos for their websites anyhow, so it wouldn’t be an additional burden for most developers.

3. Allow gift cards for specific apps or at least the App Store itself as opposed to iTunes in general.

People love gifting songs and creating playlists for their friends and family. It’s a time-honored tradition, harking back to mixtapes… It’s a thoughtful and personal gift. So many people don’t have the time to dig into the App Store as deeply as they would like. There are so many apps – it’s always nice to get recommendations from friends and it would be even better if they were able to send apps to you directly.

Dan Grigsby from Mobile Orchard points out that ‘providing a “Gift This App” mechanism would open up a universe of novel marketing, bundling and promotional opportunities — all of which would drive App Store revenues, none of which would threaten Apple’s commission. Taking a page from Amazon and providing a simple API would further support this.’ So true. We aren’t asking Apple to do the marketing for us. We’re just asking for them to give us a chance to do thoughtful marketing.

Apple needs to take this issue seriously for both consumers’ and developers’ sake.

4. Give promo codes outside of US

For goodness’ sake, let us give promotion codes OUTSIDE the US. We are a global company (hey – just like you) and expect to have customers in many of the stores, if not all. We’d like to build up our customer base in Italy, Russia and Japan for example. For this, we know we need to do our legwork and talk to local journalists, niche media and bloggers. We’ve got the language skills, but it’s slightly less effective when we can’t give them a promo code.

So a short wishlist – please Apple, we’ve been awfully good this year:

1. More info on tracking click-throughs
2. Demo videos in the App Store
3. Gift This App
4. Promo codes valid outside the US

Of course, the ultimate gift would be the Holy Grail of marketing info – a list of our customers! A girl can dream, can’t she?

What other items could we put on this wishlist?

I’ve been a fan of Evernote forever (not just because they come from the land of the White Nights or because they’ve got Esther Dyson on their Board, but because their product is so truly innovative), but I can’t claim such exciting use. I’m sure this video has given many people new ideas on how they can use Evernote in their own businesses.

We want our users to use our apps in ways we might not have expected or for purposes that aren’t as obvious. We’ve already had one user tell us that he (yes, he) is going to add his scarf collection to the myShoebox database by giving them all the Style of ‘Other’. Clever!

As corny as it sounds, it’s quite thrilling to open up the App Store and see an app that your own team created right up there… with the other 90,000!

Thanks again to the entire team that made this all happen – appSolution: Jen, Jacqueline, Steve, Bert, George and our part-time Corporate Banker and Corporate Baker Gina; at Night & Day Studios: an enormous thanks to Nat, who persevered during difficult times, Nicki with her boundless energy and detailed skills, Erin with her wonderful input, Chris with a precise crunchtime juggling act and numerous others adding their skills and energy to this project including Justin Hawkwood, Scott Bates, Jason Blackheart, Abby Palmer and Carolyn Merriman.

Additional thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Poynor, a friend for decades and a colleague for months! Her insight, expertise and network were invaluable to us so that we could bring myPause to a strong level of credibility and neutrality in the maelstrom that is the discussion of menopause treatments today.

We are very proud of our two apps and are excited to start imbedding them into everyone’s lives. Both of them are addictive in different ways, hopefully because they are easy, fun and valuable!!

David from App Cubby does a fine job of discussing the softer definition of success in his blog post. He opens with a favorite Thomas Edison quote of mine – “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

Sure, she's ready for hard work!

So true. It’s never the ideas that are in short supply – it’s the perseverance and skills to execute on those ideas that make an entrepreneur. David’s post is a great story of hard work, realistic reward and thoughtful decisions.

For our family, this venture is a mixture of acting on a dream (developing an Apple product), working together, helping each other through difficult times and maybe making some extra money. Financial success is important – we want to recover our costs and fund updates, new versions and, of course, new apps. However, none of us are in this to become iPhone millionaires.

We recently came across Newsweek’s article , which shoots down the dream of ‘becoming an App Store millionaire’. We’ve been fairly realistic all along, but this article is definitely a bucket of cold water! In a strange way, though, it made us more determined.

It’s important, though, that any developer keep their rose-colored glasses on the side table for the duration of their time in the App Store. You must have other goals than simple income generation to participate in this casino! Like all good casinos, the odds are with the house. Guess who makes a buck no matter if you recoup your costs or not….? That’s okay. That’s how it should be. We all know that the steady income comes from selling the shovel, not prospecting for the gold.

We have been Apple fanatics for decades and if nothing else, this has been our chance to participate in the creation of Apple products that are helping people to be a bit more efficient, have a bit more fun and generally take control of their lives. Not bad, not bad at all.

myShoebox's ShoeFlow

myPause's Journal entries

Now we need to focus on the marketing and get all our ducks in a row. Average approval time currently is four weeks, so it looks like they may be out just in time for Christmas! We hesitated over whether we should set a release date or just let the apps go on sale as soon as they are approved. I suppose this is one of those things you learn through experience, but we’re so excited to get our apps out there that we decided to just let the dice fall where they may.

Wouldn’t that be funny if they were approved in under a week! We did submit myPause on Halloween, so anything could happen… not that I’m superstitious.

Has anyone else submitted two apps at once? Isn’t it crazy?

As many app developers point out, price is often relative to its context not necessarily perceived absolutely from its value to the user. This is especially difficult in the App Store where the context is thousands of apps at $0.99 or free. As David at App Cubby demonstrates, some of his users seem to be excessively demanding at the $10 price point because they are judging the app among a sea of much cheaper apps.

However, when you dig a little further, you discover that there are plenty of apps that are priced above $20. As Appsfire mentioned recently, ‘If your app brings something real to the table, …then price it accordingly. Don’t succumb to the temptation of the 99 cent app, it’s a lure and only serves to feed the get-rich-quick fairy tales that even kids would find hard to believe.’ This will separate the wheat from the chaff.

As developers, we all agree with the premise that out of the 100,000 or so apps in the App Store, probably 90% of them are of little value. If you then assume that there are approximately 10,000 apps of real value and more than 6,000 are priced above $5, this is uplifting. However, the trick is to get the consumer to understand this! (For all you detail-oriented people out there, I am assuming that, for argument’s sake, only a small percentage of the higher-priced apps are useless.) We are pushing water uphill, though, in the midst of mainstream media describing the App Store as a ‘digital dollar store’ (Jon Fortt of Fortune)

This chart gives you the price distribution for September for non-game apps:

Price distribution

We thought long and hard about the price point for our apps and feel strongly that we want to shift the user’s context so that our price is reasonable not only because of the enormous value it offers the user, but also because relative to similar items providing similar value, the app is actually very inexpensive.

For example, our myPause app, which empowers women by giving them a tool to track their menopause symptoms and treatments, we felt the appropriate context was taking a girlfriend out for a cup of coffee to compare experiences and knowledge. This cost would be around $10, which is our target price, though we have discounted it for the initial launch period as an extra incentive.

For myShoebox, which manages your shoe closet, we felt the appropriate context was time saved in duplicate purchases and misplacing shoes. This is a softer comparison point, but still well beyond the $2.99 we’ve set as our introductory price.

The key is to embed these comparison points into all marketing material so that it is the first comparison our user makes. All developers should take the time to create these relevant price comparisons so that we can educate the consumer and get out of the rut of competing with all the other apps at the lowest price possible.

Understandably, game apps will have a hard time shifting the context for the user’s price sensitivity. Many other apps, including App Cubby which is extremely value-add, should fight aggressively to shift their user’s context. Put this information in your App Store description in the first few lines. It will take time, but users will start to appreciate the difference between quality, feature-rich apps and impulse purchase apps.

Does anyone else feel that we will be able to shift the customers away from the $0.99 comparable and focus them on the more relevant comparatives?

When the AppStore approved its 10,000th app for sale last November, this first major milestone was celebrated not only by Apple ads, but others also created their own tributes.

Tap, tap, tap created an amazing mosaic made up of all the 10,000 app icons:

10,000 app icons by Tap, Tap, Tap

A high resolution version can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tap-tap-tap/3074199062/sizes/o/

Apple hit 1 billion downloads on April 23rd and very soon after, on September 28th, hit the 2 billion download mark! Geesh.

We’ve all seen the various iPhone ad parodies, but the best one in my opinion is the infamous iStalkHer ad. Note the excellent built-in password decoder.

What are your favorites (for any of the milestones or parodies)?

This reminds me of our first set of difficult choices we made – the initial filtering down to the two apps for the first development project. Indulge me in a flashback:

About six months ago, when we decided to get serious about developing some iPhone apps, our family had already looked at a list of 25 potential ideas. We knew we couldn’t do more than a few at a time, especially in the beginning (little did we know that even ‘a few’ was incredibly ambitious! Thank goodness we chose an experienced partner, Night & Day Studios, the creators of beautiful apps, including Peekaboo Barn and Cocktail Compass, so we set out to filter the list down to three.

Our initial list had, in fact, been the product of a tongue-in-cheek gift, so we felt that we should step back and make sure that the long list was, in fact, long enough. We brainstormed a bit more, thinking of every problem we faced in our daily lives and what type of app could address these problems. We have such a wide variety of ages, professions, geographic locations and general attitudes towards life within the family that we felt pretty confident that we were tapping into many veins of gold.

We weren’t looking to develop a technical breakthrough like AirSharing or WorkSnug. We just wanted to use the iPhone platform to make life simpler and to reduce the time people spend on those little problems in order to create more time for them to spend with family and friends. It didn’t hurt that the iPhone platform allowed you to do this so elegantly!

Our focus is on niche markets to resolve a specific challenge. The final choices, myPause and myShoebox , were premised on the writer’s missive – ‘write what you know’. Our target audience includes members of our own family and this gives us a great insight. This first in a series of difficult choices still feels right and we know that our apps will be in a unique space offering a unique service.

Enjoy!