2 Stroke Mix
Mix and manage your fuel. Keep your motors running right.
Checking in again after many years largely on autopilot, this app and website has been far more successful that I expected, hardly life changing but a solid first effort.
Brief totals of it's performance over the past 5 years:
App Store
36.6K Units
$762 USD Sales
Google AdSense
$20k+ USD
My SEO efforts started generating some serious traffic that wasn't converting to app installs. I decided to try out adding google ads to the site as an experiment... this proved to be the right strategy as it brings in 20x more revenue that the app.
Interestingly the App is slowly gaining more and more sales and the website is slowly trailing off. Over the past few months with the AI changes to Google search the traffic pattern has changed but is holding steady for now.
It's a low priority project but next step is to replace the WordPress site with a faster Next.js version to resolve some performance issues and give me a platform to freshen up some of the content.
I've been massaging my SEO with Moz, slowly building site traffic, also using the marketing techniques I've used on the web site on the App Store page.
Starting from ground zero, with zero profile and no existing customer base, I said form the start I'll celebrate each order of 10 downloads... 1000 installs would be an overall success in my mind... 10,000 a big success.
Averaging one in-app purchase per 200-300 downloads, I won't ever make any serious money. It was only ever designed to solve a small problem and to learn the ropes in a not so competitive market.
I've learnt so much through the exercise I'm very happy with where it's at.
I received an email last week from one of the very few paying customers saying he was having trouble with the in-app purchase.
Presumably he had a network issue as the payment was being processed and my app didn’t open up the functionality correctly. As it turns out my restore purchases button wasn’t working correctly.
After a couple of hours I had the subscription to the restore purchases event fixed and worked out a way of testing it... which I should have done in the first place.
Lesson learnt: test everything!
It took about 2 months to write version 1.0 in my spare time, this involved learning swift and swiftUI which was a fun challenge.
The data sync via iCloud and in app purchases were the trickiest components to implement and test, particularly across both the phone and watch versions.
In parallel to this I have built out the landing page using elementor on wordpress and started reading about marketing and SEO.
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