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My new years eve plans and how I managed to boost my apps downloads

It's new years eve and this is perhaps the last day I am offering My Day To-Do for free on the app store. I started offering My Day To-Do for free as a holiday offer from 24th of Dec, 2016 to 1st of January 2017.

Since then I have seen a significant spike in downloads with a majority of the downloads coming from China. This is awesome, as unlike it's free sibling My Day To-Do Lite, My Day To-Do pro version hasn't seen that many downloads, so this is a great way to get it to a wider audience.

Why did I offer my app for free?

App Analytics in iTunesConnect told me that there were a number of "product page views" for My Day To-Do on the App Store, so I realised that one of the obstacles for people from downloading the app could be the $4.49aud price tag. Hence I decided to remove that obstacle for some time and in doing so I was hoping to get some user feedback or to get people to leave a review on the App Store.

What do I think contributed to the download spike?

Well anyone can release a free app but that doesn't mean that there would be a spike in downloads, so what I tried to get the app notice was.
  • Since App Analytics already told me that people were viewing app's App Store page, I figured it would help if I wrote "FREE FOR A LIMITED TIME" in the App Store description. So the first thing you read on the App Store or in the Google search results for the app is the fact that it's Free and that too for a limited time.
  • I created an offer for My Day To-Do on it's Facebook page and boosted that post i.e. I spent some money and used (using) Facebook advertising.
  • The next step were a number of my attempts at sharing the app being free on various social media outlet i.e. Twitter etc.

What do I learn from this?

This free offer endeavour to boost downloads gives me a number of things to think about. Should I,
  1. Offer My Day To-Do pro version for free and add In-app Purchases?
  2. Only have one version of it, instead of 4 different versions?
  3. Lower the price of My Day To-Do? The price was lower before but there weren't many downloads, so this option cannot be feasible.
  4. Figure out a way to promote to the Chinese market. By, either learning how to use Chinese social media?
  5. Does the Chinese audience like free apps or reading "FREE FOR A LIMITED TIME"?
Now these are some of the questions going through my mind and thinking about this is what I am doing for new years eve. I had a couple of friends ask me to join them for a certain event but I choose to stay home and think about all this.

Conclusion

If you haven't already then give My Day To-Do a try, right now it's free. So that's all for 2016, a Happy New Year to you all and I hope to continue to build on this momentum of My Day To-Do and also release a new app with a significant AI component in 2017. Oh and as always I aim to continue blogging and write about what I learn or how I solve certain interesting problems in hopes to save the next programmer/entrepreneur some time.
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