I firmly agree with both of your points, pclark and mfish. Marketing is the missing piece for a lot of developers, but having tried a fair amount of marketing ourself (news interviews, print/newspaper, blogs, etc.) — there are some inherent problems and particularly for indie/bootstrappers.
The pricing pressure to .99 distorts consumer's perception of value, therefore your marketing margins are often wiped out if you give in. A lot of people think $.99 is what every app should cost, they really do.
It's impossible to get quality metrics on your advertising initiatives. There's no way to really track an accurate conversation so you don't really know what works and what doesn't. You can loosely connect a few stats you setup yourself, but it's pretty weak and time consuming of a process - certainly a step backwards.
The inability to offer a demo of your product is a secondary issue with conversation. And, the inability to have a two-way conversation with user reviews, especially the ones that leave arm-chair feedback about your product and have no idea what they are talking about.
It's easy to say "marketing is a quick fix" for everyones problems. It's not, believe me, but that's not to say we're quitting anytime soon. The beauty of our company structure is that we're so low cost to operate that we essentially have an infinite number of iterations. We can pickup the mic after the fat lady has sung.
We can pickup the mic after the fat lady has sung.
Yeah, that's the problem here -- you may need to be very patient.
For six months the iPhone platform looked like a gold mine for indie developers. Then the gold mine tapped out. Now we still don't know what the long-term prospects for indie developers are, because the data we have to date was tainted by the presence of the gold rush. The platform was too successful too soon:
If the market really is non-viable for indie developers, it will take time to figure it out and take steps. Apple won't fix something if it doesn't seem to be broken.
In the meantime, the iPhone app market may be dominated by major players with deep pockets, the way software marketing used to be before the Web. You might want to band together with some peers. Read up on the early history of personal computer software -- in which new companies like Broderbund, Sierra On-Line, and Electronic Arts recruited teams of formerly independent developers who wanted more marketing and sales clout than they could get from placing classified ads in the backs of computer-hobbyist magazines.
The pricing pressure to .99 distorts consumer's perception of value, therefore your marketing margins are often wiped out if you give in. A lot of people think $.99 is what every app should cost, they really do.
It's impossible to get quality metrics on your advertising initiatives. There's no way to really track an accurate conversation so you don't really know what works and what doesn't. You can loosely connect a few stats you setup yourself, but it's pretty weak and time consuming of a process - certainly a step backwards.
The inability to offer a demo of your product is a secondary issue with conversation. And, the inability to have a two-way conversation with user reviews, especially the ones that leave arm-chair feedback about your product and have no idea what they are talking about.
It's easy to say "marketing is a quick fix" for everyones problems. It's not, believe me, but that's not to say we're quitting anytime soon. The beauty of our company structure is that we're so low cost to operate that we essentially have an infinite number of iterations. We can pickup the mic after the fat lady has sung.