Eleven Dollars Short

I set three goals for May. Get 100 downloads, make $200, and ship 2 apps.

I got 312 downloads. I shipped three apps and a handful of sticker packs. And I made $188.76.

Two out of three, and the one I missed I missed by eleven dollars and change. One more sale of almost anything I sell would have done it. That is the kind of miss that stings more than a blowout would.

So I sat with it for a minute instead of moving on.

The first thing that jumps out is how little the download number means. 312 sounds great until you look at where it came from. NetUtil alone was 70 of them, and NetUtil is free. It has been free its whole life and it is still the most downloaded thing I make, entirely because a couple of blog posts rank well in Google. That is a real win for discovery. It is not a single dollar of revenue.

The money came from somewhere else entirely. Three paid Mac apps I sell directly off my own site, Soundshine, Ejecta, and TypeSnap, made $159.82 of the total between them. My sixteen App Store apps, all of them combined, made about $29. The store moves units. It does not move money, at least not at my scale and not yet.

That is the lesson I keep relearning. Downloads are the easy number to chase because they go up when I write content and they feel like progress. Revenue only moves when someone pays for something they actually wanted, and almost everyone who paid me this month bought a focused paid Mac tool, not a free app with an unlock buried inside it.

I could have hit $200. I could have run a small sale, or nudged the number, or counted some currency conversion generously. I did not, because the entire point of doing this in the open is that the number has to be real or it is worthless. $188.76 is $188.76.

June gets the same revenue goal. I would rather clear the bar I missed than move it somewhere easier and pretend last month did not happen.