Why can’t we make more use of the 80/20 rule? I’ll review what the 80/20 rule is, explain how it can be powerful, then give four reasons why we don’t take advantage of it.What is the 80/20 rule?The 80/20 rule is amazing when you first learn about it. It says that efforts and results are often very unevenly distributed. You’ll get 80% of your results from the first 20% of your efforts. For example, maybe your top 20% of customers will provide 80% of your profit. Or when you’re debugging software, often 80% of the bugs will be in 20% of the code. Once you becom...

In a new research report from Distimo, the app store analytics provider examined two different ways that allow mobile developers to get a bump in both their download numbers and revenue. One way, which is within the developers’ control, is putting the app on sale. Within the first day, iPhone developers see an average increase of 41% in revenue using this method, and see revenue increases of 22% by the sale’s end. Android apps, however, rose just 7% on day one, but closed out the sale with higher percentage gains than either iPhone or iPad.The second method Distimo looked into is...

We've been experimenting with app prices for quite some time and again and again we've noticed a funny effect:No matter what price we choose, we always make the same revenue.I attached two charts to illustrate that. I recently lowered the price of the iPad app (http://bit.ly/92xWv1) from 5 to 1 Dollars. At first the sales spike, then they even out to previous levels. Meaning: By cutting the price by factor 5, I am selling exactly 5 x more apps. Then we lowered the price of iA Writer for Mac (http://bit.ly/jfsHdZ) from 10 to 5 Dollars. And the exact same thing happened. There was a short i...