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.

Blipr is a brand new way to send fun sounds and messages to friends using push notifications. You can use blipr to send your girlfriend a kiss, or make your friend’s phone fart. Try waking up your brother with an air raid siren or a rooster crowing. There are more than 100 high quality sounds in your arsenal. blipr also makes a great replacement for text messaging. blipr is messaging with attitude. =)

To celebrate blipr’s release, we are issuing a challenge! If blipr makes it into the Top 10 Paid Apps (over all) on the App Store by November 30, 2009 we will make all of our other applications (including BillMinder) free for one week*.

Check out blipr on the App Store.

* Push Notifications in BillMinder will not be free.

BillMinder is our most popular application. It has been in the Top 20 Paid Finance apps since it’s release over a year ago. We recently made a lot of changes to BillMinder and got some unexpected but appreciated help from Apple, <3. We thought we’d share what we did and what it changed.

Push
In the middle of July we launched Push Notifications support in BillMinder. Early on, we could tell Push for BillMinder would be very server intensive. Unlike with other real-time apps, our push server couldn’t just forward messages it received to our users. It would have to maintain a database of (anonymized) bills on our server. This database would need to stay in sync each users installation of BillMinder. We would also have to regularly check the database to notify users of upcoming bills. Timezones suck. All of this made us realize that we couldn’t just give away push with our (regularly) $1.99 app. We had seen too many other apps do server side stuff and fail miserably in terms of reliability, plus the cost was going to be pretty high. We couldn’t afford to host the server, write and maintain the server software to run it at a loss. We decided that a yearly fee of $0.99 USD (or equal currency in your region) would cover the costs needed to maintain the server. Since it’s initial release, we’ve had to upgrade our push server twice to compensate for the additional load. We will continue to do so as needed in the future.

Since version 1.6 hit the store, about 2800 users have purchased the push add-on feature. From those users, we currently maintain a database of 115k bills. As of today, we have sent out notifications for 27k bills. Only a small percentage (about 10-15%) buy the push feature. We realize that we’re potentially losing sales for charging for the push feature, but we feel that doing so gives those who use the service the best experience possible.

Security continues to be a priority to us so BillMinder sends only the minimal required, non-identifiable data to our server for push notifications over SSL.

UI
BillMinder has always been the most feature rich bill tracking application on the AppStore. However, it hasn’t always been the prettiest. During most of it’s life, we would focus our updates on fixing bugs, and adding new (mostly user suggested) features. Neither one of us are graphic designers, so the aesthetics of the app were always weak at best. This left the door open for other apps that were pretty, but had significantly fewer features to surpass us. And they did. We then realized something very fundamental about success on the app store. Looks matter. A lot. We knew it was time for a change, so we decided that our next update would be a major one, worthy of a new major number, 2.0. It would completely redesign the interface from the ground up. Instead of submitting version 2.0 as a new app, we decided to give it to existing users as a free update even though it was the largest update, in terms of development effort and cost, to date.

The new design was a big hit with our users, and sales showed it. Soon after release of 2.0, BillMinder shot up to #1 in Finance for the first time ever!

What’s Hot
Even though BillMinder was consistently in the top of its category, it has never really garnered any big attention from anyone, including Apple. That is, until we reached #1 in finance. After a few days sitting in the top spot, Apple (<3) featured our app in its ‘What’s Hot’ section. Sales went up dramatically.

BillMinder sold an average of 100 copies a day. New releases and market fluctuations would vary that number slightly, but it never reached much higher than 200 sales on it’s best days. Then 2.0 was released. Our sales quickly increased to near 400/day (our highest yet) before falling back near 200. We assumed that sales would probably settle around that point (assuming we could hold #1) and we were very happy with this as it was nearly double our average. Then we magically appeared under ‘What’s Hot’ and, well, the graph says the rest. Thanks, Apple.

BillMinder Sales Over the Past Month

BillMinder has been our most popular application and, as such, as received the vast majority of our development time. Our SVN repository currently sits at 729 revisions and continues to grow daily. It easily includes literally hundreds of engineering hours and significant investment in design. We’ve released 13 updates and are working on update 14 now, as well as much more coming in the near future (including a companion app). We hope you like BillMinder as much as we do!

This month marks the one year anniversary of BillMinder’s first appearance on the AppStore.  It has changed quite drastically since it’s initial version.  Over the past year, it has evolved from a rather simple application to the most feature-rich bill tracker on the AppStore.  Version 2.1 (currently in review) marks the 13th update BillMinder has received.  We take great pride in offering our customers continuing, quality updates, and will continue to do so.

The screenshots below show the immense change between the current BillMinder and it’s first incarnation.  They grow up so fast, .

We were going to do a minor bug fix release (2.0.1) but we decided to whip something else up at the last second: THEMES! Yep, 2.1 brings:

• 4 New Themes (5 total: green, blue, yellow, red, gray)
• Add “Variable Amount Due” switch on the recurring picker for recurring bills that change amount each month
• Fix Export
• Fix settings being lost (rare bug)
• Other minor bug fixes

EDIT: BillMinder 2.1 has been submitted to Apple!

We’ve been hard at work for a month and a half on version 2.0. It’s our biggest update yet and we decided to make it free for existing users. It’s on the store!

Changes in 2.0:

• BEAUTIFUL AND EASIER TO USE NEW INTERFACE!
• BEAUTIFUL New Icon!
• Status icons
• Account icons
• 1-tap to mark bills paid
• Improved calendar
• Email a backup
• More informative errors on restoring a backup (e.g. wrong file type)
• Ask to change future bills or just current one
• Collectors are now Accounts
• Improved performance
• Ability to set negative bill amount has been restored (by popular demand!)
• Alert count is now shown on the Bills tab
• Bug fixes

We just submitted BillMinder 2.0 to the Apple. This is our most amazing update yet! Did we mention it’s a free update for existing users?

BillMinder 1.6.1 was just approved by Apple (Thanks!). It should hit your phones soon and bring the fixes/features mentioned here. We’re already hard at work on version 2.0, which will bring an entirely rewritten interface that’s easier to use and easier on the eyes.

Yea, we’re already working on it..and yea, it’s gonna be pretty. Oh, and it’s a free upgrade for BillMinder 1.x users.

Here’s a teaser..

We just sent BillMinder 1.6.1 to the folks at Apple. It includes the following changes:

- You can now choose the hour at which your Push Notifications are sent to your phone. E.g. 3PM. BillMinder automatically compensates for your time zone.

- A small number of users experienced trouble upgrading from version 1.5.1 (especially if you hit the home button and interrupted the upgrade process). This update should resolve that problem, but please do use the backup functionality in BillMinder regularly. This problem did not affect new users.

- Fixed  a bug that sometimes caused duplicate recurring bills to appear when Push Notifications were enabled

- Fixed a bug that prevented deletion of recurring bills in the future on the server when deleting the first bill in a chain (when Push Notifications were enabled)

- Fixed a bug that prevented the Collector picker from being properly updated in some cases

- Fixed a bug that prevented users from changing the color of the “Uncategorized” category

The Apple iPhone Approval Team has been extremely busy as of late so we do not know when they will get a chance to review BillMinder. We hope the update will be available shortly.

Apple just approved BillMinder 1.6. Go grab it from the store!

BillMinder Push Notifications are almost here!  In preparation for it’s release, we’ve added a Push Notifications FAQ to our forums.  Please check it out and let is know if you guys have any other questions.

So we’ve been working on BillMinder 1.6 and push notifications. We’re almost finished. There’s still a little more server stuff to do on our end but it’s basically working. Drew threw in a nifty calendar view (you guys asked and here it is!) on top of that. Be on the lookout for it soon. We’re also planning something nifty in the future for BillMinder so stay tuned in the long run.

We submitted PlaceTagger 1.1 to our friends at Apple. It takes advantage of a few new iPhone 3.0 features (Google maps, in app email + attachments for better reliability, etc.). We also submitted a new version of ClockIn to Apple. It fixes a few bugs and adds in app email ala iPhone 3.0 as well. We also updated the integrated webserver to the more robust version found in PlaceTagger.

BillMinder 1.6 is almost ready!  The new features include In-App Email, Calendar View, and Push Notifications Support.  Here are some screens to wet your appetite (keep in mind these are non-final preview screens):

So we’re going to take advantage of iPhone 3.0’s new features and add the following:

• Improved mapping using Google Maps
• GPX Support so Windows users can tag with existing apps
• Built in email with attachment support instead of sending through our servers to your inbox

So BillMinder 1.5.1 is out with a bunch of fixes and general goodness. We also just pushed BillMinder Lite 1.5, which is basically BillMinder 1.5.1. This is cool because users of BillMinder Lite can now upgrade to BillMinder and take their data with them via our spiffy backup feature. Hawt. Oh yea, we also just finished a silly little free app called Randy. More on that later.

Hooray! It’ll be available tomorrow for 20% off the normal price!

We’re nearing release of BillMinder 1.5.  This release brings the most new features ever added in a BillMinder update.  Here are a few screens to wet your appetite:

So Apple just rejected PlaceTagger for the 3rd time. This go around, the reviewer kindly sent this useless message:


Your application, PlaceTagger, cannot be posted to the App Store at this time because it does not adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.5.

When the device is not connected to a network, PlaceTagger does not display a network alert. This behavior might lead to user confusion. It would be appropriate to display either a notification or an alert stating that internet connectivity is required.


That’s fine and dandy but PlaceTagger does not require a network connection to function. It just requires location services. If a network connection is available, it is used to display the optional map. We’ve submitted the app for the 4th time (edit: with an additional label on the screen). digg this and save a unicorn.

Update: It took a little while but Apple did finally approve PlaceTagger and we appreciate it.