[cribasoft]

You make a valid point. My post does not talk about the product design, which seems to be mostly what your comment here is reflecting on. Some quick responses off-the-top-of-my-head:

* >70% of all time entries saved in HoursTracker are made via the timer. Having the timer is probably very important.

* QuickBooks integration would no doubt be a useful feature, but in 6 six years I've had maybe 10 emails asking for it. It's been on "the list" for almost the entire time, continually bumped.

* Once I started seeing some organic downloads/revenue, I found myself forced to address marketing.

My story is more about how I've had to adapt to the App Store changes over the years, primarily the rush to Freemium. That focus is mostly a response to the plentiful stories out there about how free apps are ruining it for everyone.

I could write about adapting to app store search changes, iOS 6 card results, ranking changes, etc. In fact, some longer drafts went into some of those things. But, I ended up trimming it to the most still-relevant things, for brevity and out of respect for the reader's time.

[timtas]

Thanks for the reply and original post. To be clear, my real objection is not with your post but with our (my) expectation that it's possible to gain decisive wisdom from post-hoc success stories. I knew better than to fall into this expectation and be disappointed, but I did anyway! It doesn't mean that accounts like yours aren't interesting and worthwhile.

I guess I knew that focussing on Quickbooks and lacking a timer would narrow my market from the start. But we're often told, narrow your focus, don't try to be all-things-to-all-people, do fewer things well, etc. Probably I needed to actively market from the start.

My guess is that time-to-market explains your initial lift, then a strong quality version 1.0 created a tail wind with good reviews, then you jumped on it and did all the right things. Kudos!