Acquiring & Improving Breaks For Eyes - [Apple Turnover #6]

Hi readers! It’s been few weeks since the last issue, and that’s because I’ve been quite busy. These issues are a blast to write, but they take quite some time.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy, and feel free email or tweet at me if you have any questions!

As someone who spends a lot of time in front of a screen, I’m very concious of the effects it has on my health. One of the biggest consequences is to my eyes. While in front of a screen, I blink less frequently, and my eyes dry out faster.

For a long time, I’ve known about the 20-20-20 Rule, which is a tip many eye doctors recommend to patients. Every 20 minutes you spend in front of a screen, look away for 20 seconds, at something 20 feet away. It gets your eyes to refocus, exercises their muscles, and breaks your stare.

Actually following that advice is not easy. Given the amount of time we spend in front of screens, keeping track of 20 minute intervals can become very tedious. Which makes it easy for many people to acknowledge the advice, but not follow it.

In January, I saw a tweet from Alex, co-founder of Gikken, which mentioned they were shutting down two of their apps in order to focus their efforts on a flagship product. As a small company, this is often a practical and smart decision. One of the apps was Breaks For Eyes, a Mac menu bar app that reminds you to take a break and look away, every 20 minutes.

I was intrigued.

When he posted the tweet, Alex mentioned his hopes for a new developer to take over the project. I’d been looking for an app to acquire for some time, but my criteria yielded few opportunities. This met all of them.

I reached out to Alex, one of the co-founders of Gikken. I had never made an offer on app before, but I did a couple of things that I think helped everything go smoothly.

Ultimately, I purchased Breaks For Eyes for $3000 USD.

I’ve had questions from readers of the newsletter about what the actual transaction process looks like. For this one, it was extremely simple and true to my word.

We agreed on a price and contents to be transferred: the app, the domain and website contents, the Medium blog ownership, the GitHub repo.

We agreed to use Escrow.com. I had used them once before when I sold some apps in high school, and remembered a pain free experience. This time around, it was slow. I kept pinging Escrow to get updates, and after 5-6 days, when they finally were ready to finish processing the transaction, they were unwilling to deposit the funds in the way Alex wanted.

At this point it was clear that both parties trusted each other. I ended up convincing Escrow to reverse the transaction (which they claim they won’t do) and I just transferred the funds over PayPal. At this point, Alex had already transferred almost everything over to me. It was a pretty casual transaction, and I think that’s the way to do it for small apps. If I were to spend too much time on the due diligence and the transaction for a very small deal, I don’t think it’d be worth it, and for a seller whose motivations are to prioritize their time, it definitely wouldn’t be worth it. If I didn’t trust the person enough to do it this way, I probably just wouldn’t do it.

Ok so now I have the app, my bank account is lesser by a $3k, and I’m a happy camper. What do I do now?

Now that I owned the domain name breaksforeyes.app, the first thing I did was make sure that it was up and running with my host. There are several backlinks across the web that lead to it, and there’s no way I was going to waste them. I spent half a day updating it and making it a bit more compelling for someone interested. At this point I was unsure if I would rename the app or do a more extensive website redesign, but in hindsight this minor design update was still time well spent, because I plan on keeping breaksforeyes.app running separately from tryintermission.com.

The second thing I did was set up a Twitter account. There was no social presence for BFE, and since I run multiple Twitter accounts already, creating one for BFE was low hanging fruit. I snagged @BreaksForEyes, though it’s now @TryIntermission.

The third thing I did was start a list on my phone. Every time I had an idea, or receieved a suggestion from a customer, I wrote it down. This was everything from feature ideas to name ideas to possible updated App Store keywords. It was not ranked or prioritized, just a dumping ground.

I was constantly thinking about where to go from there:

Ok. Clearly I’m comfortable being the idea guy, but what did I actually do?

I decided to start working on an iOS app. The Mac app was stable and not in dire need of improvement. Plus, I’ve been really enjoying building things with SwiftUI. Every day for about a week and half, I’d wake up early and spend the first half of my day on it. I called it Breaks. And then I cut myself off. I returned my full focus to another project, and BFE went back on the shelf.

Several weeks later, I returned to the project. I designed a new landing page in Figma. I decided on the name Intermission, designed an icon, and updated the iOS app to match the personality of the name. Again, I cut myself off.

The week of March 25th, I made the decision to work on an update to the Mac app. I realized that handling an update of the Mac app and a brand new iOS app for the same product at the same time wasn’t going to be the right approach. It would be smarter to first do the thing that had the potential to have the bigger impact on sales. That was the Mac app. There was another reason too: I came across an exact clone of BFE, and it really motivated me to start differentiating.

I spent 3-4 days jumping into the Breaks For Eyes code for the first time and trimming it down a bit. It was very well documented, but I no longer needed any code for licensing/payments handled outside of the App Store. I made the decision to simplify everything and only use the App Store for distribution. I went through my big list of ideas and picked out the ones that would improve everyone’s experience, and would demonstrate the added value of Intermission over a competitor. I worked on those. I tested it out for a few days, and gave it to my girlfriend to help me test as well.

I honestly thought at this point I would be ready to submit it. I even tweeted about it:

Haha, I was not done yet. Last week I bought the domain tryintermission.com and turned the landing page design into HTML+CSS. I figured, for spending one or two more days on the Mac app, I could add some more standout improvements. It knew was going to be worth my time, and it was.

As of yesterday, Intermission is live on the Mac App Store. That was a bit of ramble, so let me share what I improved:

… with new icons, screenshots, and copy. The existing icon was polished but somewhat intimidating, and the app store screenshots were bright and attractive, but the copy didn’t differentiate the app as well as it could have.

In a competitive landscape, branding is important, so I took the opportunity to insert the Intermission theme where I could without taking away from the core experience. The sounds are called “chimes” and the icon is a theater curtain. The headline on the landing page is “Take Direction Over Your Screen Time”. It’s not much, but the goal is to make it feel more than just an app, and give it some personality.

The biggest advantage competitors had over Breaks For Eyes is customization. Time Out, the only direct competitor that sees more downloads, is extremely customizable to the point that I think it’s overwhelming for most people. A lot of the negative reviews for BFE, though few in number, strike at the point that BFE did not allow you to stray from the 20-20-20 rule. I wanted to add features that add to the value without unnecesarrily complicating the user experience, so I added the following:

BFE was already localized to 5 different languages. I decided to add another: Hindi. India was the region with the largest number of downloads that the app had not yet been localized for. If there’s anywhere I messed up in this process, it was localization. I had never done it before, and it’s the only thing I would do differently if I had the chance. I ended up re-translating all of the copy across the entire app, for all localizations. I expect future updates will be addressing improvements here, but since a huge majority of customers are using the English version, I decided to release as is rather than spending more time perfecting the translations.

The new landing page describes Intermission as more than just an app, which I think will help if in the future I pitch it to doctors and business owners. The old landing page will continue to draw in existing traffic from backlinks.

I made some updates to the App Store keywords, and I hope they’ll yield some more traffic.

It’s not really an improvement for the customer, but I want to test a higher price and gauge the reaction. It’s been at $4.99 but I have it set to change to $7.99 shortly.

Here’s what I spent time on that is not released:

I had fun working on this and I’m glad I purchased the app. When I did, I thought it was a good deal, and in hindsight it was a great deal. At the time of the sale, I was concerned about recent sales being unsustainable due to a holiday bump, but they’ve held up and even grown. In February, proceeds were $325, and in March they were $433. April looked to be on track with February, but fingers crossed the update and pricing change work in my favor.

Barring any breaking issues that appear, I’m going to let it sit for a bit. In a month or two, I’ll have some perspective on how existing customers responded to the improvements I’ve made, and I can evaluate how the App Store profile changes I made affect downloads and sales.

Other than that, I’ll let the response to my improvements dictate how much more time I put into Intermission. I will say that I’m excited to have this acquisition & improvement completed so I have the bandwidth to take on another of a similar size. I’m always on the lookout…