[gattaca]

Hi Omnigroup,

I started taking a closer look at the Omnifocus suite of apps recently. I saw a thread where an employee said that the last sale didn't get enough customers to incentivize another any time soon.

I'm one of those who missed the sales and want to give my thoughts. It sounds like that you did a supply/demand curve and saw that the volume of new sales didn't make up for revenue at the normal price.

My take is that a powerful tool like Omnifocus that carries a premium price would not tend to attract impulse buyers, on sale or not. But rather, excitement for OF will be spread by word of mouth, organically and over time. For example if during a group project, my classmates might notice Omnifocus on my homescreen or notice how I use it to plan out my next steps, they might inquire about it and I would give them a quick rundown, planting the thought that such a tool exists and that they might have a need for it depending on the complexities of their life's projects. My point is that the ROI from your promotion might not be immediate and would still come in at a later time, in a less tangible way.

Also, the segment of customers who waited for your app to go on sale are value-seekers: they care a lot about where their money goes. When they can afford it, they will use the heck out of it to maximize its value, maybe more so than those who can easily afford it. So imagine the impact of word of mouth from those customers you gained from that promotion.

With Omnifocus 2 coming out, I hope you would consider putting the entire suite of apps on sale again. Those onboard with GTD principles know that they should end up buying the app for all their devices so Omnifocus can do its job as an accessible tool anywhere. But to many, the prices of the entire suite is a huge barrier to overcome.

So as a current Toodledo user and GTD practitioner who wants to get in on the premium product, I hope you will promote your apps at a price that you still find fair to compensate your efforts while still low enough to entice price-conscious prospective customers to take the plunge. I'm not talking about the $.99 app shoppers who chase fads, but about real people who want to use OF and will end up being valuable ambassadors for the app. Thanks for reading Omnigroup.

[Brian]

Thanks for the thoughtful post! We don't have plans for additional sales or discounts in the foreseeable future, but hopefully the following is still helpful.

In addition to the reasons mentioned before, we don't want to train the market to think that they're not getting a good deal when they purchase our apps. In our experience with the last sale and from observing what happens when other developers do it, periodic across-the-board price cuts have that effect.

That said, we're happy to do targeted marketing/discounting, of course. You mentioned being a student: we offer discounts which you qualify for on our educational store for the products we're able to sell there.

We'd love to have similar options when selling our products through Apple's stores, but we're dependent on them to make that change and it hasn't happened yet. (Apple does offer educational pricing, and we have opted our products into that program. It appears to be aimed at bulk/institutional purchasing rather than sales to individuals, though.)

At the core, we feel our apps represent a pretty fantastic value proposition at their everyday prices; we hope you will too. For $20, you can get a professional tool that will help you accomplish more and which runs on all of your iOS devices. If you want to invest in the iPad app you have that option, but it's not required.

It's also not uncommon for retailers (both on and offline) to offer discounts on iTunes gift cards; if you're looking for ways to reduce your costs further that would be another avenue you could investigate...

[whpalmer4]

Extending Brian's comment about gift cards a bit: Coinstar machines found in many grocery stores will issue iTunes gift cards at no discount (put in $5.71, get $5.71 in credit). If you've got a big jar of change sitting around somewhere gathering dust, you could repurpose that as a "free" iTunes gift card :-)