I plan on being as transparent as possible about the development and growth of Locavore, as I think we’re all sort of interested in knowing the behind-the-scenes stuff. And I’ve got nothing to hide, so I might as well share.

I installed a component developed by Pinch Media that allows me to get pseudo real-time stats on usage of the app. I don’t get any information that’s sensitive, but it’s more like having web stats in the app and being able to get general data about how many people are using the app each day.

Here’s what it is telling me about New Users per day (the last line is yesterday, or Monday March 23rd):

So, it looks like I’ve already sold more than 1,000 apps, which is a lot more than I was expecting to sell the first week.

The growth is attributable to the fact that the app got covered in a couple big tech and food blogs near the end of last week. The most significant ones, in order of their publication, are:

1. Cook Local: Locavore for the iPhone – Mar 16th (First review!)
2. The Stranger Slog: Local Food App for Your Phone – Mar 19th
3. Serious Eats: Find Local, in Season, Food on Your iPhone – Mar 19th
4. MobileCrunch: Review: Locavore for the iPhone – Mar 20th
5. Gizmodo: The Week in iPhone Apps – Mar 20th
6. The Food Section: Local Food Shopping for the iPhone – Mar 20th
7. Lifehacker: Locavore Lists the In-Season Food Near You – Mar 23rd
8. TreeHugger: In-Season Food App for Locavores’ iPhones – Mar 24th

So that has been very exciting to watch.  People seem excited.  I’m excited.  Everyone wins.

I’m not sure if this amount of momentum will continue though, so I will continue to seek ways to get the word out about the app, which will include developing more features that make the app more useful.

The surprise: Twitter!

I did not anticipate just how much Twitter would play in to the promotion of this application.  The ability to track any mention of “locavore” on Twitter using their real-time search has made it possible for me to follow mentions of the app (along with everything the Obamas are doing with their Whitehouse garden) and in several cases has led to conversations about the app, about features, about new ideas.  Twitter is pretty much designed to spread information as quickly as possible, and I’m only now beginning to realize the full scope of what that means.  I don’t want to take advantage of it or anything, but I was simply surprised to find that it was as effective of a tool as it has turned out to be.

Week 1 was pretty eventful.  I suspect week 2 might not be as eventful, but if it is, I’ll post about it.  In the meantime, I’ve got to get back to work.

How to get it

If you want to learn more about Locavore, click here. To visit the detail page in iTunes, click here.

This entry was posted by Buster on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 6:27 pm. It is filed under Locavore. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.