As I mentioned in a previous post, NoteMaster 1.0 launched back in November 2008.  This past November, almost one year later, NoteMaster was featured by Apple in the “New and Noteworthy” section of the iTunes store.  Then, a couple weeks ago, it was featured again as one of the “Staff Picks”.  Getting featured in this way has given NoteMaster a huge boost in sales, so I thought I’d share a little bit about this experience.

“New and Noteworthy”

On the front page of the iTunes app store is a section called “New and Noteworthy”, which features about 32 apps at a time.  ”New and Noteworthy” apps are displayed in both the iTunes desktop application and the “App Store” app on the iPhone.  It appears that Apple updates this section every Tuesday, adding about 10 new apps to the list.  This means that once featured, your app will stay featured for about 3 weeks, starting at the “front” of the list (displayed more prominently), and getting pushed farther back in the list every week.

Sales Boost Ahoy!

So how does getting featured affect sales?  For NoteMaster, it caused a significant boost in sales.  How much of a boost?  The first week featured, NoteMaster had a 10x increase in sales, and shot up to #8 ranking in the Productivity category.  For week 2, sales dropped to about 3x original sales, and then down to 2x in week 3.  Here a chart to show what it looked like:

“Staff Picks”

After the third week, NoteMaster dropped off the “New and Noteworthy” list, and sales went down, although they still remained higher than they originally were.  Whether this is due to the lingering after-effects of being featured, or due to the new updates we released is hard to say.  Once of the reasons we haven’t been able to fully analyze the results is that a couple weeks later, NoteMaster got featured again…this time in the “Staff Picks” section!

In some ways “Staff Picks” sounds like a more impressive placement, right?  Well, unfortunately, it’s not quite as useful in terms of being seen by prospective customers, due to the fact that this section only exists in the desktop iTunes version of the app store, not in the “App Store” app.  And as it turns out, a lot more people use the “App Store” app to browse and buy apps than the desktop iTunes application.  So the sales boost wasn’t quite as big as previously (it “only” doubled our sales), but it was quite helpful nonetheless:

How to Get Featured?

So, seeing how getting featured in the app store produces such a great boost in sales, the question you might be asking is “how does one get featured”?  The answer, I’m afraid is I have no idea. NoteMaster had been in the app store almost a year before it got featured…and then all of a sudden it got featured twice in a row!  We certainly have no special contacts at Apple, nor have we had any special coverage by the press.  The only conclusion I can come up with is that someone at Apple simply likes NoteMaster, and we’re very happy for it.

Of course, getting featured, while it does produce a temporary sales boost, the boost is just that…temporary.  It’s no substitute for writing a great app, continuing to add awesome features to it, and marketing the heck out of it.  Which is exactly what we plan on continuing to do.