DonkeyCarrot Post-Mortem: The numbers, What Worked, What Flopped, and What's Next
Deep dive into the launch of my first paid app, DonkeyCarrot. The numbers, the source for the sales, the launch platforms, what went well, what didn't, and the next steps.
March 2025
In August 2024, Nakatoxx and I launched DonkeyCarrot with minimal marketing and efforts. Now let’s break it all down: the numbers, what worked, what flopped and what’s next!
Numbers
We sold 32 copies of the app! It’s amazing. Before launching, we were talking how neat it would be to get 15 sales, we doubled it!
27 of those went through Gumroad and 5 via the apple store that we added a bit later.
People from 15 different countries purchased the app, which is so cool. Globalization for the win babyyyy.
| Views | Total |
|---|---|
| 🇫🇷France | 7 |
| 🇺🇸United States | 7 |
| 🇩🇰 Denmark | 4 |
| 🇦🇺 Australia | 2 |
| 🇨🇦 Canada | 2 |
| 🇧🇾 Belarus | 1 |
| 🇧🇪 Belgium | 1 |
| 🇨🇿 Czechia | 1 |
| 🇫🇮 Finland | 1 |
| 🇭🇰 Hong Kong | 1 |
| 🇮🇳 India | 1 |
| 🇲🇾 Malaysia | 1 |
| 🇵🇱 Poland | 1 |
| 🇷🇴 Romania | 1 |
| 🇸🇪 Sweden | 1 |
The app made 110$ in revenue. Once you remove the different platform and conversion fees, we got 78,18€.
This is quite cool, it’s our first internet money. But let’s get real for a sec, this is not even worth the price of the apple license, we’re operating at a loss here!
Where did we get our sales ? analysis by vibe
I didn’t track every sale made, but got some general idea about which platforms brought what (promo code and referrer based tracking).
Youtube: 1 sale
Linkedin: 3 sales
BlackFriday deal repositories: 3 sales
Twitter: 4 sales (2 from launch tweet, and 2 by submitting it in a relevant convo)
Reddit: 7 sales (4 from launch, 3 other when one user recommended our app in another post!)
Reddit did the best with just a single post (that had very few upvotes!) whereas I spoke about the app a lot on twitter or linkedin and it really did not stick at all.
Launch platforms
All our recorded sales came from socials or BlackFriday deals, but we also submitted the app to multiple launch platforms. The two biggest being ProductHunt and Uneed. So what happened there ?
ProductHunt didn’t work at all for us. We got a few upvotes but no real traction, so little to no traffic. We probably didn’t engage enough beforehand to get people to subscribe to the page.
Uneed went better, we got product of the day! But no sales either. I don’t know if our landing page was too bad or if the Uneed audience is not relevant to our product at all (more indie hackers ?).
We also submitted to other minor sites but they led nowhere.
Finding the price
We had some trouble deciding on a price, at first we thought a silly app like ours was worth like 2€, but obviously this was a bit ridiculous, by selling 2€ app we would never get any money, and this is a really bad representation of the value of software. I mean, it is worth more than a croissant right ?
So we launched at the fabulous price of 2.99€ on gumroad with a lot of 30% code on every platform. (so yeah, 2€) That was way too low, I think even just to be taken seriously it was ridiculous
We then increased to 4.37€ and with still some promos around black friday and stuff but now at least we made some money with each sale.
On the app store, we sticked to 3.99€, because there was a bit less fees and no promo codes. The app is still probably under-priced, not that it is a life changing feature, but it’s a one time-payment!
What we did well
The launch video: Nakatoxx made a nice ~40 seconds video for the launch, and I think this helped a lot! It was a funny, showcased how our app worked and videos are great to get some views on social medias.
We launched a simple product. Didn’t lose time with plenty of features that were not needed, and we iterated once we had the first paying customers to add one or two requested things. This mean we didn’t waste a lot of time developing things not needed.
And lastly, I believe it’s a nice app.
What we did bad
We were so slooooow to act. The app was coded in 2 evenings, and it took us nearly 2 months to officially launch with the video. One more week to get on the apple store. And finally, 3 more months to do a landing page and launch on ProductHunt! Everything should have been done in 1 month top, this would have given us way more time to do some more marketing or simply decide to work on something else. Because while we were not working on DonkeyCarrot, since there still was some stuff to do, we did not work on anything else either.
Our landing page may be a miss. No way to be sure of it, but I think it’s not converting really well, the fact that it’s a demo of our app is really cool imo, but maybe we need to add some more classical landing components above and below to make the CTA clearer, link the video, maybe a quick FAQ… And keep the demo just under it.
Our marketing was too “low level”. We launched on our socials, once on reddit and hackernews. And it was just variations of “here is our app!”, no catchy headline, or deep storytelling… Maybe this is for the best, because that would not have felt like “us”. But we prolly need to find a good middle zone.
What we should do
If we want to get more out of this app. I think we should maybe do some meme-powered marketing on TikTok and instagram. 30 memes or so with our apps really would not be hard to make, and then we’d just have to post them everyday and see what happens. There is a reason we didn’t do that sooner, this is not something we enjoy, but could it be effective ?
As mentioned earlier, I’d redesign the landing page a bit, a few hours should be enough to bring it to the next level!
Final thoughts
To conclude on some happier words, launching DonkeyCarrot was super fun. We learned a lot, we did some silly things, and we created something and put it out there. We may not have had an outstanding return on that, but that was the first try, and I can’t wait to work on the next project! And we already have a few ideas ;).