“What We Can Learn From MacHeist”
…I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why software products and services succeed or fail, though, and I’ve started to feel that, whatever you think of them, we indie developers can learn a lot from MacHeist.
Great point of view on MacHeist, which has recently been getting lots of attention.
People need to simply think of it as advertising. Sure, the developers are taking a very huge percentage cut in the apps they are selling, but what’s the ROI on word-of-mouth? This is advertising for them. Not everyone buying the bundle uses every app, nor will they have ever heard of it.
Almost 20,000 people have purchased the bundle in just two days time. Can Kinemac, normally a $300 application really say that it would ever even dream about being able to sell 20,000 products in two days, which would net them $6,000,000? Absolutely not. But what they did just walk away with is $200,000 (they are averaging around $10 per bundle sale). They would have to sell 667 copies of Kinemac in two days to earn that same amount. I have no data to base this one, but I am guessing that number is pretty high for them. MacHeist gets them a ton of exposure, and maybe even gets some new users and a decent fan base. We aren’t talking about getting Photoshop for $10 here. These are the little guys - doing what they can to get their product out there.
