Show HN: A side project possibly worth showing - Wordaholic on the android

[achinb]

Just to get experienced with the android platform, my friend and I came up with a game called Wordaholic. Our aim was simple - create a game that would help us learn the platform, that would pay off our initial investment of $25 for the android market, that would help us see how we can market the app (that's not going too well), and create a rewarding side project separate from the day job. A major reason we did get motivated to do this is after reading all the posts in HN telling us to get off our butts and do something - anything (sorry, long time lurker, first time poster here).

I am happy to say that after almost a month on the market most of the goals were met! I post this today as we cross the $25 revenue generated via ads. I still don't have a sense of marketing, but we do have approximately 1900 active users of the game, and is growing daily! Any marketing ideas are greatly appreciated.

Some shameless self promotion - our game is on the android market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.smallsteps . We also have a write up on my website: http://www.achinbatra.com/firstapp . Any suggestions, comments are welcome. Thanks!

[EricR23]

Oh! Random idea. How about having multiple levels of difficulty?

"Every 5 words you gain an additional 15 seconds. "

Easy would be, say, every 5 words gives you 20 more seconds. Medium would be 15 seconds, and hard would be 10 seconds. Something like that!

[achinb]

Yeah, that actually makes more sense right. Right now the normal, lightning, and chaos modes have very little to differentiate each other from. Essentially, the normal mode is 4 times as long as the chaos mode, with really no other difference. At least varying the seconds would make the difficulty more palpable.

[achinb]

Just to add, what are your ideas to promote such apps? We are looking forward to create a lot more.

[cstrouse]

If you could include a tournament ladder that requires a paid version of the app it might work.

[achinb]

We do have an online leaderboard. Is that what you are referring to ? For the paid version, we were thinking to remove all the ads - price it around $1.99 ? I think one thing we do have to improve is the speed of the submission of a word. Seems like its quite slow on older gen phones.

[EricR23]

Cool! Nice job, looks great for a first app :)