I’m making my iOS app Marca a 10 for free on the App Store. Grab it here

Context

About a year ago, I made an app that solves a very small problem: Mexican federal authorities in telecommunications would start requiring any dialed number to be 10 digits by sometime 2020.

There were 3 cases where a number in your contacts needed to be updated, doing this manually could represent a fair amount of time, and could be error prone. Companies played a pre-recorded disclaimer every time you dialed a non-10 digit number before linking your call, this was annoying.

This was an opportunity to make a small utility app which will update your contacts. There were apps already in the App Store that did this. But that just gave me a sense of pre-validation: people was ok to pay $1.00 USD for this, so I started developing “Marca A 10” (Dial at 10 in Spanish, not a very original name, but I thought it would help discoverability in the App Store).

Development

Spent around 2 weeks developing it during my free time, the main challenge was to add an extra feature so the app had a competitive factor among the others: To add local prefix codes for numbers that didn’t have it. I decided to release a 1.0 version without the prefix feature, and planned to work on it in a future release. After finding an official database for prefixes, clean-up the data, and figuring out a safe mechanism to implement this feature. I updated the app to its current 1.1 version after one week of its first release.

Figures and quick learnings

It was priced at $1.00 USD, but sells were disappointing: a whole year barely added $80 USD to my account. Although I spent about the same money in ads, the market is not that big, and the offer was and is still relatively high (even Today I’m getting +5 similar apps listed when I look for mine, but I am sure there are more).

So I think the opportunity to make any profit of this is gone now, but I still see a how people can make use of this utility. That’s why I am making it free.

And talking about free stuff, I’m planning to open source the app’s source code soon, but that’s for another day.

P.S. Yeah I have a new site + blog, 👋🏼hello world!