Finally some results

Recently I abandoned some of my pricing experiments and just decided that a single paid day every few days was the pattern I was going to set for all of my apps.  My paid days are Monday and Thursday.

I chose Monday because I want my users to tell their friends about the app over the weekend and possibly get a sale on Monday.  Thursdays were simply because I know the download spike ends after 3 days so being paid on Thursday will give me a spike just before the weekend.

I've actually been doing this now for two months and this is what my download chart looks like each month:
Yes you are reading that correctly, I was able to generate paid downloads by cycling my pricing.

This is the corresponding sales chart from the app store:
Notice how the spikes match the dips in the previous chart.

So I think I have now proven that you need to cycle your pricing in the store.  Also, notice in the original chart how I have 13k downloads in May.  When I started tracking all of this data, GhostTalk had 500 downloads.  Currently GhostTalk has over 93k downloads.

When I launched my second ghost app, Ghost SLS, I used Push Notifications to notify all of my current GhostTalk users and after two and a half months in the store Ghost SLS has a total of 15.9k downloads.  That's a nice kickstart!

The shocking thing to me is that this generated paid downloads.  I still can't really believe it, but you can clearly see that it works.  Even my less popular apps benefit from this and have seen some slow growth.

So the key takeaway this week is that you need to cycle your pricing.  Schedule it at the end of each month for the upcoming month.  It's a simple thing to do and it's a 'fire and forget' type of process.