Safe from the Losing Fight

As some of the more astute readers might have noticed, the sidebar and about page of this blog have changed to remove references to Order N and their products and services. You might be wondering what that’s all about. I’ve decided to answer your potential questions in FAQ format, in order to sound more pretentious.

So what’s the deal with Order N?

They’re still around, successful, and offering custom development services for the Mac and iOS platforms. However, I sold my shares in the company back in October and I’m no longer part of Order N.

What do you do now?

Mainly sit around in my underwear, playing solitaire.

…uh, anything else?

Sometimes I pet my cats, Luna and Pasha.

Alright, I guess we’re done here.

Wait, before you go, let me tell you about my new company.

You could’ve mentioned that earlier.

And miss out on all the interesting tidbits about Mac indie life?

Anyway, so you have a new company?

Yep, still shiny and everything.

…

…

…anything you want to say about it?

Yeah, it’s going to be awesome, sweet, sick, and possibly jivetastic, if that’s still a word.

I’m not sure that was ever a word. What’s the company going to do?

Be awesome. Gonna have our own tree fort and everything. See:

It’s like Panic’s Founder’s Room, only cooler. I’m also working on the official company super secret handshake, but I can’t think of anything after “patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man.”

Wow, there’s so many things wrong with that, I don’t know where to begin. But I see the company name appears to “Fortunate Bear.” Where does the name come from?

Insomnia induced delirium, and possibly the sheer jivetasticness of myself.

Really?

No, I just randomly matched up adjectives and nouns until I found one I liked the sound of, and my wife wouldn’t divorce me over.

Is Fortunate Bear going to be a software company or what?

Oh, right, software. Yes, software will be involved in the process. I’m not much for playing solitaire with real cards. It’s the reason why the iPad is so magical.

Is the whole FAQ going to be this way? Because there’s a netiquette FAQ I could be hosting.

Alright, fine. Fortunate Bear is a software company focused on creating Mac and iOS apps to sell under the Fortunate Bear brand. I am the sole owner.

What about contracting/freelancing?

I might have to do some in the early years of Fortunate Bear, but it will be kept a bear minimum (see what I did there?) and phased out as soon as possible. I am not currently available for contracting. I’m focusing on building my own products.

What can you tell me about the products you’re working on?

I’m working on a Mac app for window management. It’s like Exposé except it doesn’t suck. I’ll be announcing a beta for it soon.

What about Hearts Attack?

I bought the source and rights for Hearts Attack from Order N. I’m renaming it, adding a few features, and changing the way it will generate money. I’m hoping to release it soon, but not until I get my Mac app out.

How can I get more information about Fortunate Bear and its products?

This blog will continue to be the main place I write and make announcements. However, I have a placeholder site for Fortunate Bear. You can sign up for the company newsletter to get announcements about products as well as tips and tricks after the products are released. There’s also an official Fortunate Bear Twitter account you can follow.

Anything else you want to add?

It’s gonna be jivetastic.

Please shut up.

The first week of sales for Hearts Attack finished up earlier this week. It was a typical first week for an iPhone app; that is, a large spike of sales followed by a rapid crash to nothing. Here’s a graphic illustrating this:

Oops, sorry, wrong graphic. I meant this one:

Hmmm… not much difference really. As you can see I actually sold nothing on Sunday. Apparently everyone was interpreting “day of rest” as “don’t buy any iPhone apps today.”

This article is kind of a postmortem for the launch of Hearts Attack. I attempted a few different things in order to drum up sales. Some were more successful than others.

• One of the things I did before the launch was some search engine optimization on the Hearts Attack product page. Dan Wood of Karelia has some good resources on how to do SEO.

  I was fairly pleased with the results. The product page ended up on the first results page for a few of the keywords I was targeting. It could be better, but not bad for a PageRank amateur such as myself.

• On the day of launch, I issued a press release through prMac. I opted for their “extended press release” which sends the press release the same day and to more people. It’s only $20 so it’s low risk.

  I did see a couple of obvious benefits from this. The first benefit is “link juice” to the Hearts Attack product page and our company website in general. I had done some SEO earlier and discovered the biggest thing we were in need of was links. This helped immensely with that.

  Secondly, I mentioned in the press release that promotional codes were available upon request. Only three people ever asked for them, but I happily gave them away. I have not seen any reviews as a result, but hopefully at least I garnered some good will among reviewers.

  Speaking of reviewers, one thing I did not have ready at launch, that I should have, was a press kit. I kept mine simple in that it just contains screenshots and images of the app icon. I should have linked to it in the press release and product page, because it was something the reviewers immediately asked for.

  It terms of how many sales were made because of the press release, I don’t know. It did noticeably increase traffic to our site, but I didn’t have LinkShare hooked up at the time, so I don’t know how many of those visitors became customers.

• I wrote about Hearts Attack here and tweeted about it. I both published my own press release and then followed up with the story about Hearts Attack came about.

  This drove a decent amount of traffic to our website, and resulted in a few sales from my friends and other people who follow me on Twitter. Like the press release, it also helped with the “link juice” of our website.

• I asked my wife, Elaine, to write about it on Facebook since she has approximately 30 bazillion friends on there and I have none. Some say this is because I haven’t even created an account, but I think Facebook is just being stuck up.

  Anywho, this didn’t create much traffic, but it did create a couple of sales from friends who follow Elaine on Facebook, but not me on Twitter.

Of course the biggest driver of sales is being listed at the top in the App Store, which by default is sorted by the release date. Unfortunately being at the top is fated to be temporary, and I could easily tell when I fell down the list by looking at my sales.

In summary, I learned: I should have had LinkShare up and running to begin with so I could properly track conversions and know what approach is the most successful as far as sales. Second, I should have a press kit ready at launch and linked to it from the press release.

I’ve already posted the press release for Hearts Attack, but I thought I’d share a little about how Hearts Attack came about.

Way back in 2008 the original iPhone SDK came out, and I, like a lot of people, was excited about developing apps for the iPhone. My company is primarily a software development services company so I was mainly interested in learning the SDK so we could pick up iPhone contracts in addition to Mac ones. It also happens to be the case that my favorite card game is hearts, so I decided a good way to learn the iPhone SDK was to write my own hearts game.

After a couple of weeks I had the basic functionality implemented, and noticed I was playing it a lot. I realized then that I could probably make this into a product. Furthermore, releasing an iPhone app through the App Store seemed like a good way for us as a company to begin making the transition from a services based company to a product based one.

If I was going to release Hearts Attack as a published app, I knew the UI and presentation had to be greatly improved. I went through a lot of mockups for the main playing view, including one where everyone’s cards — all 52 of them — were always visible somewhere on the table (a truly horrible idea). Unfortunately I don’t seem to have most of the mockups around anymore, but I found a couple which you can see below. (See the product page for the end result.)

The biggest challenge I had was fitting everything on the screen and it still being legible and usable. By trial and error I figured out how small I could make the cards and still make them tappable, as well as their optimal position to make them accessible with one hand.

I began thinking about what would make Hearts Attack unique or different from its competitors. Back then there were literally just two iPhone hearts games in the App Store, and I felt pretty confident that what I had was already better than them, but I wanted to be sure. I decided on: oddball talking computer opponents, a tutorial that gave not only card suggestions but the rationale behind the choice (a pet peeve of mine), and multiple undo support for mis-taps and tactical errors.

The last step was to get professionals to do the sound and graphics. I ended up hiring a sound designer, a graphics designer, and a character illustrator. The sound design went smoothly, but getting the graphics done was a lot more involved than I anticipated, which is another story for another day. Jordan of OneToad Design created the app icon, playing backgrounds, and the special card backgrounds for the queen of spades and jack of diamonds. Lara Kehler did the character illustrations, which turned out great.

Unfortunately, Hearts Attack went on hiatus in early 2009. I was working full time on an iPhone contract, and simply didn’t have a lot of time to put into Hearts. Secondly, I had lost all desire in finishing it. It was becoming increasingly apparent that iPhone users didn’t want to pay more than $0.99 for anything, despite all the whining I did about it. I convinced myself it wasn’t worth releasing Hearts because it would never make back the money it cost us to make. Hearts stayed dormant for an entire year.

A couple of months ago, I decided to pick Hearts Attack back up again. I had the time and, as someone pointed out to me, it would never make money if I didn’t release it. I was tempted to update the app to the latest SDK (I started Hearts back before you could even use nibs on the iPhone) and add some features. I decided against this, because I really just wanted to ship it. I did have to update it to the 2.2.1 SDK because the current Xcode tools no longer ship with the 2.0 SDK.

Instead I focused on fixing the bugs and adding polish. Fortunately for me my wife happens to be a professional software tester with iPhone experience, so I got lots of good bugs to fix. I also prepared a press release, created a website, and otherwise got ready for the release. After I felt the app was stable enough, I submitted it to Apple on Friday. It was approved on Monday.

At this point, I’m still not convinced I’ll ever make back the money we spent on sound and graphic designers. A hearts card game simply is never going to be a big seller, and price point isn’t high enough to make up for that. Right now, I’m tending to think pessimistically about sales, but I’m going to do what I can to drum up sales and see how things go.

It’s a “wait and see” situation as to if we develop any more iPhone applications to sell ourselves. Of course, regardless of how well Hearts Attack does, we’d be happy to develop your iPhone app for you.