The system Apple has allowed to cultivate, coupled with dev willingness to buy in, has resulted in the comments made here about price. Though you may disagree, a significant portion of users, for any app, want this to be free with an in-app purchase because the majority of the app store works this way. The internet/web/apps enable the notion of try-before-you-buy, and any model that tries to compete will lose.
If you want this to be a niche product for a few bird watchers, then keep going down your path. If you want this to be a multi-million dollar idea, possibly acquired by shazam for its IP, open up the platform and let people see for themselves. If your app truly has value, you would have no fear and be happy to offer five trials. If you aren't confident in that, keep it free and ask for payment later. Your happiest customers will gladly pay you.
@tarungangwani We are not at that stage Tarun jesus every co goes through various stages of iteration and product development. Right now we 100% are ok with only focusing on not scaling really fast but testing out various revenue models, price elasticity and actually not going free and scaling we just launched. I mentioned above already the app will eventually be free with a diffrent revenue model but we aren't there yet.
Also bird watchers pay upfront for bird guides Tarun speak to the audience not just to a generality, bird watchers have no problem paying for an app upfront at a premium 20x average app prices if you have a problem you aren't the demo we are trying to go after initially.
Top paid and grossing reference apps in the entire us not just bird apps entire us: is this our future? NO...is this for right now? YES!
@nicholassheriff Just trying to provide perspective as to why people are giving you feedback on price is all. If you know for a fact that app #27 or #15 are selling dozens a week and you are also okay with that, then awesome!
You are also making a false comparison -- content guidebooks/apps necessarily don't have any technology, so a few screenshots can prove the value of the app (you can see what you'll get). Your app depends on a technology that is bleeding edge in the space, something people will have to see and believe.
Perhaps uploading a raw youtube video of someone recording you using the app in the wild and putting that on PH & on the iTunes store link will help you get exposure. The fact you posted it on PH suggests you are looking for a wider audience than bird watchers... else why would you think this platform would help? To further your point, this isn't the demographic of people you want... we are the "generality" so to speak.
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I'd love to try it, but the price tag is very steep and I'm worried how accurate it actually is.
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The price point is surreal, with all the "ifs" stated on the App Store description. How can I accept a $4.99 price: Geo location filtering; background noise cancellation, it can easily be done; bird profile; teaching the app the correct birds; full offline mode...
Disclaimer: I am a professional bird guide.
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Mom, meet ProductHunt (my mom is a bird watching fanatic). This seems a really sound idea. And wow, very lively discussion on this one!
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I congratulate you on this effort. I'm sure the sight impaired would GREATLY benefit by the guts of this. Imagine identifying cars (or anything that makes a sound) in the same way.
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Got to agree with much of what has been said here. Part of user development, is interviewing people, and feed back is important. Take everything back to the lab and figure out what's important and what's not. Video is an important tool to educate others and can be done cheaply. My cofounder and I have been building our startup out of our pockets so we get what that's like. Good luck!
@jansseneilert We hear you Eilert but you are missing a very serious and sad point which I keep seeing in this community unwillingness to support indie founders, especially minority founders who are having a hard time raising vc funding. I am funding all of this for the past 3 years out of pocket.
We will eventually need millions for songbird to actually scale this for the entire globe.
Bird watchers which are around over 70 million in just the us spend thousands a year they add over $50 billion to our economy they don't complain about the pricing here so you might not be the target audience for them this is a discount.
Is this our final revenue model? Of course not we are still testing and scaling, eventually at scale we want to go free with in app purchases. But that won't happen until we have funding to actually turn this into a business, either from vcs or from revenue.
Making an app free doesn't support myself or my team guys. I also do not believe in traditional advertising to spam my users inside the apps so we 100% upfront charge premiums for our shit and run it like a real business that sells value.
@nicholassheriff Hey Nicholas, just for the sakes of it – I've payed 10,99. Your application wasn't able to identify a sparrow out of 4 meters distance in my backyard. I've tried several times. Always the message that I should try again. If you want to scale this globally it should work, I guess.
@nicholassheriff I don't think that he's saying he doesn't want to support a dev. I think that he's saying he wants to test if it actually works or not
@jansseneilert Eilert was it in the middle of a song, any other birds present? How long was the recording...can you email me info@sheriffv.com
Checkmark of what our system currently struggles with ( added this to the app description ) and we will present thing to users upon launching for the onboarding soon.
If you can't identify a bird, you might have one or many of these issues that need to be addressed:
If you are too far from the bird it will not work.
If you use a recording of a bird with all sorts of quality issues from youtube it will not work.
If there are multiple birds singing it currently will probably not work but we are working on this.
If you are a little too late to a song it will probably not work, or you might have to keep trying to capture other parts of it's song again.
If the background is far too noisy it will probably not work.
We currently also only identify the top 100 common birds our goal is to make the recognition and database more comprehensive, right now and extend it to 1,000 bird species with the hope of doing 10,000 within the next 6 months.
House sparrows are in there but we might not be able to ID all of the sparrow songs. Marking it down to do additional testing.
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