A month ago Guardian published an article about Windows Phone development experiences of 5 companies. Four of them didn’t provide any specifics about their performance in the marketplace issuing boring “positive” statements like:
“The release has been well received and we have been pleasantly surprised by the number of installs the app has had since its launch”
And only one of them, our friends at Team Distinction (see a case study of their use of AdDuplex) gave out actual hard numbers:
“We’ve had more than 25,000 downloads, and a high percentage of them are paid downloads”
Now, that’s not a particularly huge number even in Windows Phone terms, but it’s a solid one and it’s the highlight of that article. It’s what people remember and would happily share with their friends, followers, etc. That’s what quite a few of the news sites (1, 2) “promoted” to the title of the post covering that Guardian story.
If you take our developer interview series, the most viewed and referred posts are the ones were developers disclosed some specific numbers. And that is not surprising at all.
You may say that you don’t have numbers like these to share and I’d say that if you think hard enough you can find inspiring numbers or stats for bold statements even in the moderate success cases. Maybe you had 1,000 downloads on your first day [and then it dropped to 50], or you were a Top 10 game in some specific [not very competitive sub] category, or as our Startup Sauna friends from MNE creations put it “for a [very short period in time] Panarchy Fling was ranked higher than Angry Birds Rio”. No one cares and no one remembers about the parts in parenthesis. You can even omit them. But you will get the attention and that’s what you are after, right?
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