Our app is free. We do have plans to add advertising later on - but not for several months at least.
All costs are out of my pocket (and Sandaruwan's and Parinda's)
Note that $50 is a LOT when bootstrapping from Sri Lanka - my salary as a Doctor (which is much higher than that of the general population) was only $400 / month - with most of that getting burnt up in living costs.
I'm sorry if it's a dumb question but why do you plan to wait to add advertising? You are on the TOP10 right now, you are having good review (by users AND blogs). Its seems to me like the perfect moment to add ads to your product.
Arent you afraid that you loose your momentum without made any dollar from your app? You can find clean way to do advertising on an iphone app (look at Twitterific for example)
At the moment we have no way of knowing whether our users are health care professionals or not. We are releasing a new medical case each week(or more often), so that would keep the medical professionals from removing it - but others who are just downloading to checkout the app would get rid of it (that's our guess - we are still learning, trial and error). Advertising to medical professionals is much appealing than a general crowd.
Yes, we have several clean advertising plans. i.e - sponsored cases.
You're making a mistake. Apps have a fixed life-cycle. Once everyone who wants your app has your app (happens quicker with niche products), then it will start dropping in ranks.
You do have a point there - but this is an app which appeals to almost all medical professionals.
If you look at the top 10 apps in the medical section (or the top 25 for that matter), you'll see that they have been there for months (or years) on end.
My feeling is that the medical section of the app store is fairly different from the games section (where apps have a very limited shelf life).
Two of the apps in the top 10 paid medical are mine and a further one in the top 20 is mine. I know what I'm talking about. Free apps have a much accelerated life-cycle.
It's not "really" your problem or at least you can made somebody else pay for the mistake if your users arent really health care professionals. With your app and your actual ranking you could cold call a few medical magazines and offer to them to be feature in the app for a couple thousand bucks. Advertising in medical publication is VERY VERY VERY expensive, I'm sure some big co or medias have moneys to spare on ads in your app.
If you are not confortable with that maybe you could contact them offer them that to have an idea of what they are ready to pay to be in your app. Maybe the amount will change your mind :)
I dont mean to be disrespectful with my comment but I made that mistake to wait to long before monetising my startup because I always wanted more and more data before selling ads on it. I lost a lot of time (and money) for nothing.
I'd recommend figuring out monetization earlier. It's never as easy as flipping on a switch. It takes a while to nail down your margins, pricing, ad networks, etc.
All costs are out of my pocket (and Sandaruwan's and Parinda's)
Note that $50 is a LOT when bootstrapping from Sri Lanka - my salary as a Doctor (which is much higher than that of the general population) was only $400 / month - with most of that getting burnt up in living costs.