Glasshouse shares results of App Store experiment

Having an application in the App Store can be adventure. The application creation process and App Store submission process are filled with long nights, lots of coffee and many highs and lows. When the app finally gets approved by Apple, the next stage of sales tracking gives you a whole new realm to explore and experiment.

Glasshouse Apps, the developers behind Gift Plan, decided to do some experimenting with the pricing of their app to see what happened to their sales numbers. They dropped the regular price of their app from US$1.99 to $0.99 and slashed the price to free for 24 hours as a temporary promotion. Glasshouse tweeted this price drop, and the limited time sale was retweeted by 60 other Twitter members and mentioned by several blogs.

Much to their surprise, this single tweet and the resulting free advertising from Twitter and blogs resulted in a jump in sales from 15 per day for the paid app to an amazing 55,290 when it was free. Most of the purchases were through the French App Store where Gift Plan, for a short time, topped Angry Birds on the top free app list. The take home messages for Glasshouse Apps are many, but at the top of its list is the realization that standing out from the crowd of iOS applications is difficult, but when you do, the results can be impressive. Unfortunately, the developers have not released sales numbers now that the application is available for 99 cents.