Of the thousands of apps for the Apple iPhone, BigOven 160,000+ Recipe Search has now risen to #28 #17 #15 #13 #9 #8 on the list of Free Apps (overall), and is currently beating out Google for the iPhone, NY Times for the iPhone and even the always-popular UrbanSpoon for the iPhone. Of course, that's probably because most users already have those apps, but still, it's pretty astonishing to see the takeup on this app. I haven't spent any money marketing it at all yet.
It is currently the third second most popular app (of 300) out of all the "Lifestyle" apps as of October 29th.
The app becomes more useful if you've got a BigOven.com account, because you can create Favorites and Try Soon Lists of recipes. And you can post your own family favorites from any web browser, then access them on your iPhone.
Now that the app lets you register with Bigoven.com without visiting your desktop computer, site signups for the last two days have tripled the previous highwater marks in daily site registrations.
In the first 5 days of launch, we've crossed more than 100,000 downloads of the app. We hit some server performance issues as a result of the increased demand on the servers... a problem I guess it's good to have, but one we're not quite through yet.
If you have iTunes installed on your PC or Mac, you can download it by clicking here.
Thanks to John Cook and Seattle's cool new TechFlash Seattle Tech News site for his mention today.
From the beating-a-dead-horse department...
About ten minutes ago, I released the ability for iPhone users to create a free BigOven.com account from their iPhone. (Previously, iPhone users simply got a message saying to visit their desktop web browser to create a free account.)
Immediately after shipping the code to the live servers, in the minute or so that it took me to create a simple SQL query to count the number of users (about 2 minutes), 36 people around the world had signed up.
When I refreshed the query, another 2 more, and another 5 more... etc. Last night, people were signing up at the rate of a new user every 1.2 seconds.
Absoltely unbelievable. Yesterday's download count was about 30,000. It's now the 8th most popular iPhone application overall, and #1 in the Lifestyle category. It's sure not to last, but this level of exposure is pretty gratifying. I believe that for a consumer device, recipe lookup, shopping list management, meal planning and nutrition analysis are killer apps for many "Chief Household Officers". Wait till some fun new mobility services get out there!
As my good friend David Risher said, Apple's incredible success here with the iPhone is a testament to great design. So many software and cellular companies have had years to figure out the Internet, but once again, it took Apple to really break through at the consumer level. The uptake on the free app is really remarkable, and setting records across the board here at BigOven.com.
Posted by: Steve Murch | October 28, 2008 at 03:42 PM