November 2021 Updates

Posted on 15 December, 2021

We’re nearly at the end of the year, and it’s certainly been an interesting one.

My goal for 2021 was to get Dropped Bits to break even, after losing money for years, and I’ve done that. I launched a new app, Thought Detox, for the first time in six years. While it hasn’t been a runaway success, it has brought in enough money to cover base expenses. I sunsetted my first app, HoneyJar. And now, I’m working on a redesign of Per.

Of course, we’re nowhere near the point where this business can support me. And that’s okay. I get to make stuff that I use and enjoy, I get to build it my own way, and I get to do it on my own schedule. And as of this year, I’m not pouring money into the business to keep it afloat.

Achievement unlocked. ✅

November In Review

Last month, I dropped the price of Thought Detox from USD$2.99 to USD$1.99 and sales doubled (though, interestingly, there were no sales between US Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, with sale pricing to USD$0.99).

Per: 4 downloads (last month: 3)
Thought Detox: 6 downloads (last month: 3)

Revenues and proceeds on sales are estimates based on the information I get from Apple, in US dollars.

App Sales (what customers paid Apple): USD$8.99
App Proceeds (what Apple pays me): USD$7.63

As you’d expect, dropping the price means less revenue per unit, but more units sold overall, and so the net effect was approximately the same gross revenue.

App Updates

Thought Detox

As I mentioned above, I dropped the price at the beginning of November. I don’t think there are enough units being sold to really make these changes show any significant correlation, but for now, with its given feature set, this feels like the right price for the app. Will it change later? I’m not sure.

I am sure that there will be Holiday Sale pricing, so keep an eye on the App Store! I also have one or two little bug fixes that I’m going to address before the end of the year.

Per

I’m stepping back a little bit from the redesign of Per. It’s coming along, but I think I want to make some small and incremental changes to the current App Store version (1.2 at the time of this writing) before that. Version 1.3 will get things working a little better on modern iPhones, and will probably bump the minimum version up to iOS 15.

It’s a significant amount of work just to get the old app building and running again — it was written with a very old version of Swift, so just opening the app in Xcode means hundreds of build errors. That’s software development for you! 😅

One More Thing

The next update, in January, won’t just be for December 2021, but will include a bit of a “year in review” thing. More than that, January 1^st, 2022, marks the ten-year anniversary of Dropped Bits’ incorporation, and I’m going to dive a little bit into what that journey has been like.

Until then, have a safe and happy holiday season, friends!