our latest product launches in the next few days on the iOS appStore…
Reflections and musings of folks @ 955 Dreams Inc.
our latest product launches in the next few days on the iOS appStore…
UPDATE: Here’s a new version of this image, was too awesome not to post. Happy election day everyone!
Just a few more days until the election everybody! Our fabulous designer Brad Talbott made this incredible image, get out and vote!!!
Speaking of the mixtape (see my post from yesterday), we’ve unfortunately discovered a bug in the mixtape. If you try to access the mixtape shortly after downloading/updating, the app will crash. We’ve been working double time looking for the cause and looks like we’ve fixed it, so we should have a fix up in the app store as soon as possible!
Thanks for your patience, and if you guys ever find any other bugs we may have missed we’ll love you forever if you get in touch and let us know. You can always email me: [email protected], use the feedback feature in Band of the Day , or hit us up on Get Satisfaction https://getsatisfaction.com/955dreams.
I hope you’ve all had a chance to check out the new version of Band of the Day, we’re super excited to get it out into the world! As you may notice, the mixtape has changed drastically. Instead of a static list of songs, it’s now a much more fluid thing that draws from the highest rated tracks in the app, creating a listening experience on the fly that lasts for hours. We think it’s better for a lot of reasons, most notably the fact that’s it’s now much longer and changes every time you open the app, rather than when we got a chance to update it, which wasn’t nearly as often as it should have been.
However, we do recognize that some things were lost in this new format, particularly the bonus songs, and would like to apologize to our users who are upset that the songs they earned through sharing have dissappeared. Bonus songs were a feature we had on day 1 of the app’s launch and are proud of, but with all the craziness of maintaining BoD’s editorial schedule and working to improve the app, we only updated the supply of bonus songs once since launch over a year ago. It’s a feature that deserves more love than that. We want to bring it back in future versions, and do it right, and unfortunately we weren’t able to do that in this first release.
There’s a ton of opportunity and cool stuff to implement with this new version of the mixtape from bonus songs to thematic groupings to more direct user input, so thanks for your patience, and look forward to the mixtape getting even more awesome with future updates!
It’s hard to believe it was just over a year ago that we were in the office until seven in the morning, trying to get in all of our last-minute bug fixes to officially submit Band of the Day to the App Store. We were delirious from lack of sleep and too much caffeine (seriously, watching stupid cat videos on YouTube became the funniest thing ever), yet utterly excited to finally show off our baby to the world. We’re a small team of dreamers, and to be honest, we didn’t know what to expect once Band of the Day hit the App Store. Would people pay for it (Band of the Day, now free, originally started as a subscription service at $0.99/month)? And if so, what if they didn’t like the music we featured? How were we going to find bands for every single day of the week, month, year, and beyond?
Over the past year, we’ve learned a lot from our users:
1. No, people didn’t want to pay for it. Well, some people did (thanks!) but not enough to warrant continuing on as a paid service. Like it or not, we’re in an era where paying for music/music services isn’t acceptable to the majority of consumers. In the end, we felt like the right decision was to open up Band of the Day to everyone, which resulted in our user base growing exponentially (in just over a year, we’ve grown to 3 million+ worldwide users).
2. There is an extraordinary amount of value in making it easier for people to discover new music. With Band of the Day, we strive to feature unique bands from all over the world, across every genre you can think of. We know not every band will resonate with every single user every single day. But overwhelmingly, we’ve had users around the world, young and old, get in touch telling us that they’ve fallen in love with a new band that they just wouldn’t have come across if it wasn’t for our app. Our featured bands have even written in to us, telling us how they’ve gathered new fans around the world that would’ve otherwise never heard of them.
Band of the Day: The Update
Today, our latest iteration of Band of the Day went live in the App Store.
For some of our users, who’ve been longtime fans of the app, this might seem like a dramatic change, especially in terms of UI. For instance, you might have noticed that our menu navigation is now a robot icon. Why the robot? What does that have to do with new music? Well, we just wanted to be prepared for the inevitable robots-as-our-overlords scenario…or, y’know, because we just thought it would be a fun and quirky new way to navigate throughout the app! We actually toyed around with the idea of a robot character called Tuno, and having him (or her?) become the official mascot for Band of the Day (Band of the Day is quite a mouthful to say, so we nicknamed it “tuno” at our HQ). What do you think? Yay or nay?
We’ve also added the music player into the calendar view section, to make it easier to enjoy new music right when the app launches, as well as a brand-new mix tape section that plays a continuous stream of the top-rated songs in the app. Just pick a song, sit back, and enjoy the uninterrupted stream of music! Though we’ve removed the bonus songs feature, we now have way more (nearly 60!) songs in the mix tape than before.
We’ve also implemented a similar bands feature. Now, once all of the featured songs finish playing for any band in the app, the music player will automatically start playing a similar band from the app. Mmm…delicious, nearly-endless streams of free music! The update might seem a bit drastic, but we’re doing our best to try and make the app easier to use in the long run, to add new features, and to help you discover even more new music! So what do you think of the new update? You can share your thoughts with us here, or at [email protected]
www.bandofthedayapp.com has a new avatar and we’re really happy with the way version 2.0 turned out. There’s a lot more to browse and listen to here. With the new and web-only Radio feature we’ve taken an exploratory plunge into what BoD might look like on the web.
We remain completely and wholly committed to new artists/music discovery and we’ll use the best of all technologies available to provide a great stage for these artists to shine.
Give the site a whirl and share it with your friends. It’s completely free and we hope you have fun listening to hours of music while on your computer screens.
One of the biggest mistakes I see people making as they enter the appStore is a lack of understanding of how the appStore ecosystem behaves. Most developers assume that it is only a hit-based eco-system - that a couple of Angry Birds and Flipboards define the worlds largest software product marketplace. For most developers entering the appStore with visions that your product will become the next Angry Birds or generate engagement like any of the Zynga games on iOS is an exercise in tagging yourself “stupid”.
I was chatting with Enrique Allen and an applicant at 500Startups the other day and we were discussing the enterpreneur’s vision for mass market adoption on the iPad for his app/product. A major hurdle in his (the enterpreneur’s) understanding of the appStore was that customer adoption would be “easy” given the scale of the appStore and the product-market fit given the demographic of users that make up the iPad today. Assume for a moment that the app has a great launch - what next? What about 2 months after launch or 3 or 6? You do not need to have all the answers ready, but, in my opinion you need to ask yourself some of these questions today.
As a Product Manager I care about the lifecycle of the product and not just the launch mania. I have learnt from the launch of many apps into the appStore and I see a pattern in all of them - it is that of a left-heavy bell-curve (see image below). The height of the bell-curve will vary depending on how good your app is but the way it settles is a truth you cannot escape. It will settle, and you need to plan for the way the apps settle.
In explaining the appStore product cycle to anyone I have begun to use the terms: “settling fat” vs. “settling thin”.
Settling Thin: After the initial euphoria of your app having been released and you getting some decent coverage in the press and through bloggers you will see a steady decline in the number of downloads per day. This is normal. Be sure to measure downloads and updates using services like AppAnnie or appFigures. I personally recommend appFigures - they have great pricing and good customer support for their paid plans.
Settling Fat: This is the baseline of what I want of all our apps at 955 Dreams. We wouldn’t begin to consider expending energy on any app unless we knew it could settle fat. After the initial round of coverage from press and hopefully good coverage through the appStore the daily app sales will start to slow. Sales settle at a predictable and healthy pace daily. This is what you want. Any additional marketing or ad-spend results in measurable improvements in daily sales volume.
Fat and Thin is relative: To figure out what these curves mean for your startup/business, invest some time prior to launch to set some projected daily downloads for your apps. Think long and hard about projected downloads the first month of launch and then use the fat vs. thin curves to figure out what you could be looking at in terms of downloads 3 months into launch. This might seem like mind-numbing number crunching today but believe me it serves as a great tool to figure out the validity of your business or app/s. If your apps settle very thin - you need to rethink your product from the ground up. Spending good money on ads when apps settle thin is a bad idea (more on this in a follow-up post).
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