Hi, 👋 PB community.
Things are a bit slow around here (unfortunately), but maybe it’s a good thing.
The developers are busy with a few things at the moment:
- Fixing payment bugs for users who want to go premium, but after payment, they are not recognised as premium users. 😅
- The opposite is also true for free users who still receive all the premium benefits after they cancel a subscription.
- The new subscription pricing and system.
- Adding the NIV for international users. Unfortunately not the USA users (yet). A friend even phoned the VP of Zondervan (and he is very convincing) and they still said no. They are worried PB will interfere with a product they are launching — whatever that may be. For the Spanish and Portuguese users, we will possibly add an NIV in these native languages.
- Lots of little changes and bug fixes.
Why so slow though? Well, my developers have been on leave (American summer holidays) for a few weeks so that contributed in some part to it. As mentioned it’s a good thing though, because it allows PB to save some capital. 👇
I’m saving some capital to appoint another agency that, in a way specialises in making the type of product I envision PB to become. They should be able to make the drawing experience world-class like many other drawing apps including Apple Notes. They are very expensive though. 4.5 times the price of my current agency. 😮That’s why I’m glad we could put a few $’s away.
The product is starting to grow at an accelerating rate — which has me nervous and excited at the same time. Want to see some stats?
- 1350 Subscribers
- 58000-lifetime downloads, but only 7000 users per month
- 2330 ESV downloads
- 127 CSB downloads
- 94 TPT downloads
- 300+ Gigabytes of data stored on Google Firebase and growing 1.4% per day.
Marketing
You will remember in our previous newsletter I was looking for an “influencer marketing type” intern. I got about 5 interested parties, but no one even finished the Type Form I made.
So via a friend, I got connected with a local South African company to do marketing for Pencil Bible. I already learned a ton from them and look forward to seeing what they can do with paid ads. The first ads are already live on FB and Instagram. You may have seen them on Instagram and FB:
Marketing Examples
We started with a small budget of $250 till we found the right ad placement and market niche. I never realised we could target for example all pastors above 24 years of age, who like action movies and use an iPad Air. That’s crazy to me — how much does FB know about us? 🙈🤠
I’m very curious and excited to see what the impact of marketing will be.
The New Subscription Model
For simplicity's sake, I widdled down the subscription model to every simple premise.
Everything is free, except for annotations. Free users can only annotate a maximum of 10 pages before they need to subscribe to annotate without limits. That’s it.
Also, a lifetime membership is only $99 now.
We added a popup for users who purchased a translation before they subscribed as well. Just so that there are no surprises.
I’m not sure everyone will welcome the new features as there are several users who use the app for free. So we decided to give them a 90-day grace period to decide.
It’s August here in Upington. That means warm winds from the Northern deserts blowing sand to the south. Seasons are changing. And everything is dusty. 🤠
For those in the Northern Hemisphere, I hope you had an amazing summer. Ours is starting soon. 🥵
As always — please send feedback, ideas or anything else you would like to share. 😀
Erin
P.S. Please leave a review on the Apple App Store. A good review helps with rankings => more downloads => more revenue => faster development!
P.S.S. And if you are on socials please share your notes or drawings on Instagram or Facebook #pencilbible