An app making its first bucks

The small win

I check the Apple Developer Connect website at least once a day. Especially the trends page to see how my apps are performing.

The stats usually behave the same way. Some daily downloads, mostly from my main three apps. A few spikes every now and then. And a few downloads from the less popular ones.

It gives me a vision of how things are going and it's helped me identify metadata improvements for the underperformers. I've noticed something interesting: downloads tend to be exponential. The apps that get the most downloads usually stay consistent in their numbers until they consistently get more downloads per day.

Then one day, something happened that had never happened before.

The Sales stats had two bars. Both a day apart.

It took me a second to process what I was seeing. Downloads I expected. But sales? That was far from expected. My mind immediately raced: which app was it?

To my surprise, it was Merame.

Why Merame

Merame is a photo and video app designed for people who want to create cinematic match-cut transitions and animated sequences. You know the type of video you see with 100K likes, where a ball or an object stays in the same position across many different photos.

The app does one thing and does it well. That's the whole purpose: create those cool videos with match-cut transitions.

I built it because I love those kinds of videos. But mostly because I couldn't find a simple app to create them. Every time I read comments on those videos asking how to do it, the answers were scattered across different languages and never quite straightforward.

I saw the opportunity. I knew the idea. So I developed a solution.

Since it was an MVP, I couldn't spend weeks or months on it. I gave myself one week maximum, then planned to improve it once it was on the market.

Five days later, the app was in the store and getting downloads. Two months later, it had its first paid users.

What this means

Two months might not sound fast or life-changing. But for an app that took five days to build with zero marketing, it was a huge win.

It put me in a different perspective about which apps to prioritize and how to market them. The apps I had more hope for and spent more time marketing have only gotten one-third of Merame's downloads.

People are finding it. Using it. Willing to pay for it.

That rush of encouragement pushed me to spend two days improving aspects I believed would make the app even better. And to my surprise, new sales came in.

What was more encouraging was the conversion: even though Merame doesn't have as many downloads as my more popular app, it has a 3% sales ratio and a 3.28% Day 1 Download to Paid ratio.

Why I'm sharing this

This post won't go into details or deeper analysis yet. It's still too early to draw real conclusions. But since I'm committed to documenting and building in public, I thought my duty was to report this small win.

Because small wins matter. They're momentum. They're proof that the work has value to someone.

That's worth celebrating.

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Check it out:
Merame on the App Store