Will your app idea even make money? Spy on competitors with this shortcut

Readwise Summary: Before building an app, check if people will pay for it by spying on competitors’ revenue and downloads. Use keyword research and review counts to gauge demand, but also consider if your target users can afford to pay. This helps avoid wasted time on apps that won’t make money.

You’ve come up with an app idea and you’ve done your keyword research. You’ve done your keyword research, right? But before you spend months building it, let me ask you, is anyone even prepared to pay for this app? Keyword research is a great way for spotting demand, but if no one’s paying, is it even worth building? You can do what I did and waste years of your life testing random app ideas and hoping one hits, or you can do the smart thing and work out what ones will actually be profitable. In this video, I’ll show you

how to spy on your competitors. See exactly how much their apps are making, how many people are downloading them, and if their target demographic is even prepared to pay. Anyway, I’m going to break this video down into three sections. spying on your competition, assessing app store volume, and analyzing target demographic to work out if they’re broke. Let’s get stuck into it. First, we’re going to be a bit sneaky, and we’re going to look at the

competitor’s app to see how much revenue they’re actually generating. Check out this shortcut. It shows you how much revenue your competitor generated last month, and it’s handy for assessing how much money an app in this niche can make. It will report on apps generating over $5,000 in the last month. Simply do a search for the keywords you’re targeting and have a look at the top ranking apps. Have a look to see how much revenue those apps are generating. And if all the apps are generating under

$5,000, then it’s a good indication that the niche is probably not the money spinner that you’re hoping for. Jake Moore, the CEO of Superw Wall, shared this shortcut last year, and it’s become my go-to tool to quickly discover the number of downloads and revenue of any app in the App Store. Open the link in Safari and tap add shortcut, and it creates an app stats shortcut to your share sheet. Then it connects to the Sensor Tower API and returns the number

of downloads and the total revenue generated in the past month. But how accurate is it? This tool reports my app, iMike Bluetooth speaker, as generating under 5,000 downloads in the last month. The actual number, 6,830. And this app that generated over $47,000 last month is reported as only generating 20,000. Close enough, I guess. I mean, it’s pretty accurate. Not spoton, but pretty good. It seems to be off by around about 30 to 50%. It’s good

for a ballpark figure, but I wouldn’t be using the tool in any sort of due diligence capacity. In that case, just go straight to the source and get accurate figures. Don’t just rely on keyword research alone. The stats can be wrong at times. The tool I use for keyword research is Astro. No, it’s not a sponsor of my channel, and I don’t get a kickback for mentioning it so often. It’s just a really good product built by an indie developer, and it gets the job

done. You’ve seen my previous videos, so you know how I look for keywords with a high popularity, more than 40, and low competition under 60. But it doesn’t stop there. Then I check the apps already ranking for that keyword and analyze how many are an exact match keyword. Then I pay close attention to the top ranking exact match keywords and look at the number of reviews. Here’s a keyword I’m targeting, learn piano. The

top ranked result has over 700,000 reviews and the next 57,000 reviews. This tells me the keyword is very popular indeed. But it’s worth noting the number of reviews isn’t necessarily a direct correlation to the number of downloads. There’s just a bunch of other factors that are going into here. Like does the app prompt the user for a review? Oh, look, there’s mine ranking 24 and growing. But the reviews themselves don’t tell the full story.

For all we know, the downloads are coming from external sources like Tik Tok and not from organic keywords from the app store. But it’s a good guide to gauge how many people are actually interacting with the app. Next, we want to ask the tough question. Is the target demographic for this app too broke to pay for a subscription? You’ve done the keyword research. You’ve checked the volume of the reviews and all the metrics are showing that this app will get downloads. People will use it, but

then you release it and nobody’s converting from that trial to a paid subscription. What’s going on? Maybe your target demographic is broke. I learned this lesson pretty early on when I was broke. One of the techniques I used to pay down my debts was called the debt snowball method. You list your debts and you sort them by smallest to largest. Then you start aggressively paying down the smaller debts first, making your way to the bigger debts later. It gave me momentum and also

reduced the number of debt collectors me pretty quickly. And I wanted to turn that idea and that process into an app. And the keyword looks promising. Debt Snowball has a popularity of 16 and a difficulty of 50. But I’m pretty sure the difficulty was much less a few years ago when I was looking at it. But I realized the reason why I wanted to build this app in the first place is because I didn’t have the cash to pay for one that already existed. So I was just going to make my own. Yeah. Okay.

So that’s kind of reflective of the headsp space of the demographic. So I abandoned it. And it highlights the importance to just critically assess your target market. Are they students? Are they children who need their parents to make a purchase? Are they in debt? Do they actually have the expendable cash to pay for a weekly subscription? And if they don’t, you get a bunch of one-star reviews complaining that they have to actually pay for the app. So, to recap, research your competitors, see how much

revenue they are actually generating. Look at the search volumes, not just the popularity of the keyword, but also paying close attention to the number of reviews. And finally, ask yourself the tough question, does my target demographic have any money anyway? If there’s any other steps I’ve missed, let me know in the comments below and let me know what has worked well for you.