Mobile App WakeUp Call: Spend $!!!

Okay, you’ve most likely heard tons of stories about how some app developers on either the iOS or Android or even the RIM platform have made tons of money, bought the Maserati and retired to the beach on Nevis….and you’re figuring that this may just be the biz model to clone and follow.

Not so fast….as a recent study and survey by a firm named AppPromo has just been published, almost 60% of all app developers wont make a SINGLE PENNY off their app. The full survey is here too…

Let that sink in for a second…not a single penny. All that hard work, Red Bull, pizzas at 3 am have been wasted as the app sits all alone in the app store….and the developer gains nada.

Not so good a biz model is it? I’d have to agree, and as you may know, as I’ve an app that’s out there right now, the survey itself was very much “spot-on” and gave our team some real reading and inflections on our own marketing strategy.

The study indicates that the top earners, those who did earn above $50,000 US with their most successful app, were only 12% of the participants – and to acheive that success, they spent at a minimum $30,000 US on their marketing efforts and invested 14% of their daily hours on that effort. Look at those numbers….spend $30k to make $50k…not too bad an ROI, eh!

But what about those who spent nothing, $0.00 on their marketing campaigns, how did they fare? Well, that 52% of the survey respondents reported that they not only spent nothing, but only put aside 5% of their daily hours on their apps marketing efforts. No money and almost no time…sounds like karma, eh!

The fact that there are at this point, at least a million apps out there and that developers are finding it more and more difficult to cut through the marketing chatter/social media chatter just to get their app discovered seems to be the real message, and we should know!

As our own marketing campaign for Snappay grows, and as we push ahead with strategic partnership talks and discussions….what we’ve learned is mirrored in this survey. Surprising?

Not really…but the simple fact that so many, those 52% of app developers put NOTHING into marketing, time or money-wise, is the real surprise….we’d expect then for them to end up exactly where they are success wise, which is no where….a sad marketing reality, eh!