Being Category #1 in Regional AppStore

So this happened. On 14th of Septemeber, twenty days after its launch Transit made it to the number one in the Travel category in Austrian AppStore.

After staying there for three days, we want to say something in the vein of Joel Rosenberg (the author of Blocked): “don’t quit your day job to earn your living on the AppStore income”.

Regional AppStores have inherent property of being limited by targeting the relatively small market, but what are the sales figures for the AppStore categry-topping application in the rich Alpine state exactly? Not overwhelming.

We have entered the Travel’s Top 25 on day one, immediately after all of our friends bought Transit. The application then routinely made its way up, showing some tens of sales a day in the region. Being on the top just stabilized this picture. We learned that some markets are interconnected: being on top, we got a significant increase in sales in Germany, but haven’t topped there (go, Germany, go!) — yet.

Transit by its nature is not a pure regional application like, for example Benzin. It topped the Austrian category by just being exposed better in this country. Transit expands its geography with every release, now covering ten cities across the world. Berliners, Parisians, Londoners, New Yorkers, Torontonians, Singaporeans, Praguers, Barcelonians, Viennese, and Romans, as well as their guests could rely on Transit daily. Some of those cities do have a competing application (we’re looking at you, Tube Deluxe), some have not (like Prague), some represent the big market (like New York), some are not, but every new release up to now has increased the global sales. The experience with Austrian AppStore holds us in the confidence that global reach is essential feature for the success of the application.

Sneak Peek at Behind the Scenes

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software has once again gave utterance to one widely spread idea in his recent colum in Inc. The idea is that for startup there’s a safe way of getting more sales: releasing a better product. It’s better than advertisement, it’s better than anything else a small company could focus its efforts on.

This idea is simple and obvious; few people will argue with that. Needless to say, here at Critical Point we strongly believe in this approach. Up to date we’ve released two versions of our Transit application and it definitely sucks less with every release.

For the transport application like Transit there are two vectors of potential improvement:

• deliver the better user experience and more features, and
• cover more cities.

While first is very well defined in terms of software engineering, the second turns into a huge task when non-streamlined. Our Ruby-fu master, Esad, was able to tackle this process very effeciently with a tool of his own called Matilda. Here is a sneak peek at behind the scenes at Critical Point.

Read the rest of this entry »

Important Update

Customers who purchased Transit in the course of the last 48 hours may notice the inconsistency between the application description and the real functionality they got. Description mentions maps for ten cities, application delivers only five; certain functionality is not in place.

This may seem like lying and for us giving this wrong impression to the customers is a Big Deal. This is what actually happened: our team has submitted an application update yesterday and the description for this update sneaked onto the application’s iTunes page right away, whereas the update was not approved by Apple yet. So those of you looking for Prague metro maps (Prague maps are featured in the submitted update) would not find them in the current version. The incorrect description is rolled back now and the right one should become available in the iTunes shortly: AppStore updates need some time to propagate.

We all at Critical Point sincerely apologize for the caused inconvenience. We want to assure our customers — all of you, real and potential, new and returning — that the declared functionality will be delivered free of charge as soon as Apple approves the version 1.1 update.

Up and Running

Greetings, time traveler.

You probably came from the future, where Critical Point emerged into a global transcontinental corporation; we are glad to see you here! From today, September 2nd, 2009, everything looks less pompous: it’s the first day of our web presence. Our energy could be compared to what lies behind Hoover Dam, so we are expecting to see you here again — when we all will be in the future.

And welcome!