The original idea for Blipr came out of an evening hanging out at the Drew’s place. My initial thought went along the lines of “what stupid simple app can we build that suits the App Store masses?” Yep, the very masses that consumed things like iFart and The Moron Test. We had already done an end to end push implementation for BillMinder so I pitched canned sound messaging to Drew. He immediately countered with the idea of adding textual messages. It wasn’t much extra work and it even added some utility to the app. How could it possibly not make it to the Top 10? And so we started planning.
We went with an initial feature set and started working on a rudimentary server and UI. Since this was meant to be a simple, asynchronous service we went with http/rails on the back end instead of XMPP or inventing a proprietary messaging protocol. Blipr was never meant to replace AIM. Fast forward a couple of days and I sent my artist friend Tyrus an email. He agreed to help us out and sent a design my way a few days later. This was especially kind because his baby was literally set to arrive in three days. Thanks Tyrus.
We immediately cut up the PSD and went to work getting Blipr together. Drew tackled most of the client and I worked on the server. We had Blipr basically working in a week but it took about a month to flush it out and vet it with a large group of testers.
Blipr had costs. Our virtualized box at Linode was great, but it was already under heavy load from BillMinder and we didn’t want to pull a MobileChat, so we opted to get an additional, dedicated, machine from ASmallOrange. We still use the Linode for source control because it’s full of awesome. ASmallOrange literally ordered and provisioned a machine for us within days. It’s a beast and gives us plenty of room to grow into our longer term plans, which are spinning up now. This was the third major cost associated with Blipr, after design and licensing of over 100 sounds. It was also a nontrivial investment for a tiny company who had not yet hit a “home run” on the App Store.
After about two weeks of “in review” status, Apple dropped a (welcomed) bomb on us. Free apps could now contain in app purchases. Around the same time Ping messenger had gained attention and others were entering the messaging game. We decided against pulling the app as we were afraid to lose our place in a very long approval line because we wanted to get to market more quickly. This was a major miscalculation. We should have pulled the binary, given away 10 or 20 sounds as part of a free app, and turned the rest of the sounds into in app purchases. Although Blipr garnered a bit of attention, it never became profitable.
Blipr has more than 13k users and has transmitted nearly 200k “blips.” Its users are very active. We attempted to monetize the app by adding sound packs as in app purchases, however they have not generated significant revenue. We believe this is because Blipr comes with many high quality sounds out of the box, leaving users little incentive to purchase sound packs. To date, Blipr has brought in just over $500 of revenue. My best guess is we spent around $5k creating the app. This includes modest estimates for Drew and my time (think 10 bucks an hour).
Despite being a catastrophic failure in terms of profit, Blipr has been an invaluable lesson in business and risk assessment for us. It was also pretty fun to create.