Crafting an Income

Over the last year I’ve been working on my Craft Pricing Pro app. The app is useful and the interface is clean and easy to understand. I’ve also added many features including some basic inventory and sales tracking. I don’t know how many people will use those features, but they are there and they do work.

But, writing the app – although it can be difficult – is the easy part. The truly difficult part is the actual marketing of the app. It’s nice to have an app finished and available for sale, but it doesn’t really pay the bills until people start to purchase it. That’s the block I’m currently running into. The app works well and the little bit of feedback I’ve been given has been positive. But, the problem is that it hasn’t really been found by the many people that would find it useful.

Yeah, I know it’s ironic that I wrote an app so people can make more money with their own projects, but I’m struggling to make money with my own. The accounting math isn’t hard for me. It’s the actual selling. How to get people to first of all take a look at the app, and then how can I convince them that it will help them make money? It will, I know it will. When I was selling more crafting items, the earlier version of this app did in fact help me make more money. It’s why I wrote it and it’s why I feel strongly about marketing it.

So, with this I guess my newest effort is to avoid adding features or starting new projects. But, instead work on creating interest and sales in the projects I currently have out there. Yeah, that’s scary and difficult, but here we go.

‎Craft Pricing Pro
‎Craft Pricing Pro
Developer: Ducky Planet LLC
Price: $5.99+
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot
  • ‎Craft Pricing Pro Screenshot

A Feature For One of My Apps – Time Clock Helper.

Since I brought up the idea of marketing yesterday, I thought I would show a bit about one of my apps.

This is my Time Clock Helper app that I wrote years ago to help myself quickly calculate the hours I was working each day. It was based on the older style paper punch cards with four punches for each day.

The original version of the app made the user type in their hours in 24 hour time. This was met some backlash, so I added a way for the user to enter their punches using a scroll wheel. The scroll wheel would use whatever time representation the user already had set up in their device – for the most part 12 hour time. This seemed to fix most of those issues, and didn’t hurt the purpose of the app at all. So, in all it was a successful change.

Thousands of copies of this app have been sold and it is used by hundreds of people a day as far as I can tell from Apple’s information.

This app can also track multiple days – simply press the “Add to Total” button and it will be added to the list of saved days and included in the total number of hours worked. You can view all of the saved days, along with the date they represent. If you need to change the dates, you can easily from the list. Also, you can email the list of days along with the total hours worked to anyone that you want.

At one point I had a request for the app to handle businesses that round their hour calculations either by 6 or 15 minute intervals. It wasn’t overly tricky to add the option, so the app fully supports those systems, too.

Click to bring up the Apple App Store