MacHeist sales – what it means for Mac Indies?
So far MacHeist has sold around 43000 bundles. Suppose it sells 60000 in the end. It is 60K copies of software at 95% discount. MacHeist is one of the best marketed software sales on the internet, surely as far as bundles go.
It looks like it provides quite good value for the money, even though the customers don’t usually need all the programs. But one can often pick the bundle for just or 3 of them. I personally bought 2 of the 3 bundles.
My point is, here it is – the best marketing effort on the net and still it sells only 50-60k copies. Not that it’s bad for 10 days of sales. I’d even be happy to sell as many copies of our similarly priced ImageFramer in a much longer time frame.
But given that most Indie Mac developers (micro ISVs) are not that good with marketing as MacHeist what are our chances to sell enough copies of our software, without such deep discounts, in all of our product’s lifetime?
Am I too pessimistic?
April 5th, 2009 at 9:56 am
50K x $40 = $2M
Suppose a good ISV creates a bundle with several applications developed by it and sells it for $40 as well. Assuming it can reach 10% of MacHeist volume, and it takes it 2 years to do it.
It’s still $100K per year, and the good news that it continues to sell after these 2 years.
But doubtless, big scope & marketing is required to sell even these 10%.
The good thing with ISV is that it has a momentum – once you’re selling, you will continue to sell if you invest a some (relatively small) effort in support and new releases.