The general marketing plan for Mood Board has been simple since the beginning. Build an application whose price increases as the utility of the application increases proportionally.

When Mood Board first launched it had relatively few features. Drag images in from the Finder or your web browser to collect topical collages of images for later use. The idea was that illustrators, designers and craftworkers could use the tool to build completely private collections of examples of art that they might later want to emulate. Additionally there is the possibility of using Mood Board for edge cases that I could never have anticipated and we’ve actually seen quite a bit of this from various support emails and feedback from users in the past year.

I played with pricing for the application between $5 and $10 over the first 90 days and finally settled on a “base starting price” of $5.99. This price kept a steady stream of new users buying the application with the monthly income from sales steadily paying back the cost of producing the original codebase.

In the summer of 2014 I added a bunch of new features to the application based on user feedback and feature requests from the users that had already purchased the application. Because almost all of the features I’d added were user-requested I decided to leave the price where it was. This was me basically doing a “retcon” to rebase the applications features and its price to a point that I felt was commensurate with reality; this is what I expect the product should be at its most basic configuration.

This month, after a several months-long hiatus, from the application entirely I added a huge feature to the application. I also did some refactoring to the existing code to make parsing Mood Board documents much faster than before with a far larger amount of internal metadata available. These additions justify my raising the price of Mood Board by one-dollar per unit.

It will be interesting to see if my plan works. I’ll be sure to report on my outcomes once I have a decent sample to report.

Doing visual arts on the Mac? Buy a copy of Mood Board

Check out some more information about Mood Board right here!