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"Back in Oct. 2011, two developers, Adam Grossman and Jack Turner, put a video on Kickstarter with an ambitious goal: help them bring their magical-looking short-term weather prediction app to the public.\nThe app is called Dark Sky [iTunes link], and it's a weather app with a very cool twist: It just offers short-term, hyperlocal forecasts. Using the app, you can find out if it will rain or snow in the next 15 minutes in your given location. Moreover, you can find out how long it is projected to rain and look at real-time radar maps.\n\nOn Kickstarter, Dark Sky raised almost $40,000 from 1,200 backers. When the app launched in April, it was immediately praised for its interface design and functionality.\nBy the time the team rolled out version 2.0 in August, the app had sold more than 35,000 copies.\nThe most amazing thing about the app? It works. Really, really well. In fact, the app works so well, the developers offer access to its API so other developers can bring in Dark Sky's short-term weather predictions in their own apps. \nThat's an interesting decision because it means that developers could conceivably build apps that compete with Dark Sky. However, because Dark Sky charges developers for API access once it reaches a certain number of calls a day, a successful app using Dark Sky's API is still a success for Dark Sky.\nSurviving a Successful Kickstarter Campaign\nA month after shipping version 1.0 of Dark Sky, the team shared some of the lessons it learned along the way.\nBecause Dark Sky is a digital product, the team faced some challenges when it came time to distribute the finished app.\nOn the Dark Sky blog, founder Jason LaPorte details the process of figuring out how to get 1,200 users copies of an app that would cost money in Apple's App Store.\nHe writes:\nThe solution we settled on was Apple's gifting mechanism: essentially, buying each of our backers their copy of the app. This isn't quite as arduous as it sounds: Everything is done right from within iTunes, and you are allowed to provide Apple a comma-separated list of email addresses to gift to, though there is a limit on the number of characters that can be submitted at once; we were able to send about fifty copies of the app in each batch. A couple hours later, each of our Kickstarter backers had an email with their copy of Dark Sky.\nOf course, the solution wasn't foolproof. The team faced challenges including:\n\nApple's 30% cut for all App Store purchases. The team hadn't expected to have to buy its own app in order to distribute enough codes and it wound up spending an additional $2,000 in order to get the codes.\nSome customers didn't receive or couldn't find their emailed promo code and as a result, the team had to buy more copies to satisfy those backers.\nHaving a hold put on the team's credit card after buying so many identical items. Fortunately this was one that was easy to clear up.\n\nIn the end, the LaPorte wrote that while the team would do the Kickstarter route again, it would budget time and money more carefully.\nPhysical Rewards\nLaPorte also discussed some of the lessons the team learned when it came time to deliver the physical rewards to its backers. Backers who pledged more than $40 got a T-shirt, while pledges of $150 or more also got an umbrella.\nShipping those items, it turns out, was more expensive than the team has anticipated.\nLaPorte writes:\nWe looked at every reputable carrier we could find, and in the end found that the United States Postal Service had the best domestic and international rates by far (via flat-rate priority mail boxes), but even then it cost us as much to ship the rewards as it did to have them made (and, in the case of international orders, up to three or four times as much).\nLaPorte recommends that Kickstarter project leaders start working on delivering physical goods as soon as the project is successfully backed. \nGetting the Name Right\nDark Sky is a great app but for the project to be a success, people need to find it. The challenge the developers faced was that searches for terms such as \"weather\" and \"forecast\" in the App Store didn't lead to its app showing up in the top 20 or even 100 results.\nIn August, Dark Sky's Adam Grossman blogged about the team's journey with App Store optimization. This is kind of like Search Engine Optimization is for Google and Bing, except it's focused on discoverability in the App Store.\nWhile the rules for App Store optimization are much more ambiguous than SEO rules and best practices for Google, making changes to the name of the app and its description and keywords can have a big impact on discoverability.\nAs Grossman wrote:\nBeing in the Top 10 Sales / Grossing lists don't matter. Topping the chart in your category doesn't matter. Being Fireballed doesn't matter. Consistently improving your app doesn't matter. What matters is adding the right words to your app's title field.\nRather than just having the title be the simple, elegant \"Dark Sky,\" the team found much more success with its current app title, \"Dark Sky \u2014 Weather Radar, Hyperlocal Forecasts and Storm Alerts.\"\nA Model For Future Developers\nDark Sky is proof that an app can find success outside of Kickstarter, both in the App Store and as a developer platform in and of itself.\nWhat we find most interesting about the team is how transparent and open it has been about its journey.\nWhat do you think of Dark Sky and its approach to app development? Let us know in the comments.\nImage courtesy of Dark Sky, Mashable composite"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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