We’ve invested time and of course lots of money into POOP THE WORLD. There were also some stumbling blocks along the way in terms of Apple approvals (see rejected content below),

but our app has been in the iTunes store for a month now and it turns out we’re not hanging with T-Pain wearing our flippy floppies and nautical themed afghans quite yet. We are confident that we’ll get there though.

With the thousands of apps out there and with very few sharing their sales figures, how do you know if you’re app is being well received?

Firstly, of course you’ve got your unit sales. For us, we set really modest goals out of the gates and we’ve been able to hit ours every week so far. Great news, right? Week 1 we thought that 100 downloads would be achievable and we destroyed that mark. Raise the roof! Raise the roof!…but wait….that only paid for our monthly server fees and our Line of Credit interest payment for the month.

Week 2 we kept it conservative still and bumped our goal up to 150 and again we easily hit that. Week 3 and 4 we’ve raised our targets incrementally and we’re finding that the boat seems to have steadied. At this rate we’ll be paying this bitch off until we are both 80 years old.

Time to sell the motorcycles?

Not so fast.

For starters, it’s not all gloomy. There have been some good positives in that we’ve made a quality product and our app has received almost all 5 star ratings in iTunes, our Twitter following has increased consistently and, everyday despite the fact that our app is not in any of the Top 10 / 20 / 100 lists, people are still buying our app so the number of users is growing. Albeit, little by little.

Gary Vay-ner-chuk, the self proclaimed personal branding guru, and host of the uber-popular Wine Library TV show did a fantastic piece for the Web 2.0 Expo on how to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving social media landscape. We listened in and took notes. According to Gary, Patience and Passion (and what looks to be many liters of Red Bull everyday) are the key fundamentals to success. To quote Gary, “If you love Alf, do an Alf blog. If you love Smurfs, Smurf it up.” We love childish humor and we’ve created the world’s best poop application. We’re semi-patient but we want success to happen sooner rather than later. So now what?

We turn up the hustle, and crush it.

Although a banner ad campaign or having logo’d toilet paper in the washrooms of top media mogul’s offices would help, in the words of Gary, “You’re not going to make stickers and hand out SWAG and everybody is going to give a shit about your site.”

We need to keep doing what we’re doing, do a lot more of it, and keep it compelling.

Update – here is Gary’s presentation at Web 2.0 as mentioned above

Tags: app, app review, apple, appleiphoneapps.com, application, applications, apps, best app, blog, blogger, engine digital, gary vaynerchuk, ifart, iphone, iphone app, iphone apps, ipod, ipoop, itouch, itunes, launching an iphone app, poop the world, ptw, snl, sws digital, tpain, viral, web 2.0, wine library

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 3:07 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.