From Paid App to Free: Not a Pivot, but a Split
Echobatix develops assistive technology for people who are blind, visually impaired, or who have other print disabilities such as dyslexia. We have a subscription app in the App Store.
As other assistive tech businesses have discovered, and as I’ll explain below, it can be tough to make revenue selling directly to end users. As you try different marketing strategies to reach those end users, you may be missing out on feedback from users who rarely if ever pay for apps. And in the meantime the competitive landscape is shifting.
Although we’ll continue to develop and support the existing subscription app for iPhone, we now offer a free app as well. Rather than pivot, we’ve split our work into two separate apps.
The free app will gain users at a faster pace than the subscription app, right? That seems reasonable to me, but it’s an assumption that needs to be tested.
If the free app doesn’t gain more users and/or generate significantly more feedback, then that would suggest that the core features aren’t attractive enough.
If the core features available in the free Echobatix Lite app gain favor, then we may entice more readers to try the subscription app for at least a month.
Development Iteration can Stall without Feedback
It’s hard enough to make money selling an app. Not only do you have to dream up what you expect people need or want, but then you have to code up that idea, put it in front of people, and then react to their feedback.
It’s good to follow the advice from The Lean Startup and iterate quickly through product cycles. But what if you don’t get feedback fast enough? If you don’t get enough feedback, you don’t learn. If you don’t learn quickly enough, you may end up guessing what changes users want.
This seems more likely when you’re working in a niche market.
Niche Markets can be Tough
When you address a niche market, and especially when your intended audience is scattered geographically, the “cost to acquire” (CTA) a new user can be greater than the “lifetime value” (LTV) of that user. That is, you could lose money on each sale. You need to find a workaround.
Assistive technology is a niche market, and assistive tech products can be tough to sell for several reasons:
- People with disabilities have historically had high rates of unemployment, and less discretionary income.
- Although 1 in 6 people worldwide have a disability, the percentage of people with any particular disability can be low. There are hundreds of millions of people with visual impairments, but they make up a small percentage of the people in any city or town.
- Advertising and social media channels can have accessibility issues, making it harder to reach people with disabilities.
- For some people with disabilities, traveling for a product test session can be difficult even if you offer to pay for travel time. If you travel to visit multiple individual people, then the time and cost add up quickly.
- Whether inside schools and government centers, news about new assistive technology may rely on word of mouth from peer to peer, from teacher to student, or from an agency to a client. Reliance on word of mouth means adoption may be slow.
One can even argue that for some assistive tech there isn’t a market in the traditional sense. There aren’t physical or virtual places where people who buy assistive technology will congregate regularly to discuss products and compare prices. Yes, there are discussions in some forums and in a few subreddits, but sales may be forbidden in some of these places. (I’m one of the moderators of a disability-related subreddit.)
There are very few assistive tech stores, and certainly no assistive tech shopping malls. The last I knew, there was no assistive tech category on Amazon. In the App Store you can search for assistive tech and accessibility apps for iOS, but these apps are typically categorized as “utilities.” Your app description has to make clear that your app is designed specifically for accessibility.
What all has meant to me is that reaching users has been difficult. Since a small fraction of users will ever provide feedback or post reviews, the feedback necessary to drive development forward has been a trickle of information rather than the flood I’d hoped for.
Even if you don’t work in assistive tech, your niche market may remain a niche market for reasons similar to those I’ve listed above.
One way to increase the volume of feedback is to attract users to a free app. This isn’t a new idea, but I certainly came to accept a free app as an alternate means to reach new users only after marketing a subscription app first.
Can You Explain a Free App in Less than One Minute?
If the purpose of offering an app for free is to get more feedback, then consider making your app description and/or your app release videos shorter, too.
The original release video for Echobatix Lite is 3 minutes 41 seconds long. That’s hardly epic cinema, but still a bit long. Do I really need to introduce every feature in the app in the same video?
Less than a week after the app was released, I decided to create a 46-second “quick intro” cut. Does it still get the idea across? YouTube analytics and Bitly link analytics should give me an answer to that question.
If I were to rewrite the video script from scratch, shoot new video, and record new audio, I could probably cut it down to 30 seconds, but at the cost of one or two days of additional work. And in those one or two days I can be writing emails and posts instead.
